Carmen Lomas Garza

2010
Author:

Constance Cortez

Explores the art of the celebrated Chicana artist who depicts her childhood in the Mexican American community of South Texas

Widely known for works celebrating the traditions of her family and community, Carmen Lomas Garza has been a painter, printmaker, muralist, and children’s book illustrator since the 1970s. In this volume of the pathbreaking A Ver series, Constance Cortez explores Garza’s artwork in the context of the Chicano/a art movement, family and regional traditions, and Garza’s own political and social activism.

I saw the need to create images that would elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican Americans, both adults and children, while at the same time serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture.

Carmen Lomas Garza

Widely known for works that celebrate the traditions of her family and her South Texas Latino community, Carmen Lomas Garza has been active as a painter, printmaker, muralist, and children’s book illustrator since the 1970s. Born in Kingsville, Texas, she experienced institutionalized racism in a segregated school system that punished Mexican American students for speaking Spanish. Through her art, which draws on her childhood memories and depicts the relationship between family and community, Garza challenges the legacy of repression while establishing the folk art idiom, as employed by nonwhite and immigrant artists, as a vital element of American modernism.

Garza’s art illustrates how, despite racial inequities, cultural conflict, and urban pressures, the Mexican American community has sustained a rich and vital cultural identity. In this volume of the pathbreaking A Ver series, Constance Cortez explores Garza’s artwork in the context of the Chicano/a art movement, family and regional traditions, and Garza’s own political and social activism.

Constance Cortez is associate professor in Chicano/a art history and post-Contact art of Mexico at Texas Tech University and the editor of Imágenes e Historias / Images and Histories: Chicana Altar-Inspired Art.

Chon A. Noriega is professor of film, television, and digital media and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

I saw the need to create images that would elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican Americans, both adults and children, while at the same time serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture.

Carmen Lomas Garza

Today’s digital media has its pleasures, but there are some books worth holding in your hand, allowing the printed page to fall open where it may. This is one of those books.

Latino Studies