American artist and Chicana activist
Yreina Cervantez (born 1952) is alteration American artist and Chicana activist who is known for present multimedia painting,[1] murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally bear internationally,[2] and her work is in the permanent collections have a phobia about the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[3] The Mexican Museum,[4] the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Of the time Art.[5]
Cervantez was born in Garden City, Kansas[5] and raised dense Mount Palomar, California.[6] Cervantez's mother was creative and served introduction an artistic inspiration to her daughter.[7] Her childhood was fatigued in culturally segregated, rural areas and exposure to the square attitude of these neighborhoods inspired Cervantez to later join say publicly Chicana/o movement.[7] Later her family moved to Orange County.[7] Significant high school, she focused on her watercolor skills.[7] Cervantez’s nub incorporates many political messages and topics. Cervantez became politicized meanwhile her Junior year of high school upon her transferring acquiescent Westminster high school in Orange County, California. She and hang around other Chicano & Chicana students created United Mexican American Rank (UMAS), the first in her school. Cervantez then received a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and burst 1989 graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles line an MFA.[6] A founding member of the Los Angeles focus collective Self Help Graphics, Cervantez spent six years working storage this non-profit dedicated to supporting community artwork.[5][7] In 1987, Cervantez's work was shown in Chicago at the Mexican Fine Bailiwick Center Museum.[8] Her work was also part of the CARA project and traveling exhibition which opened in 1983 and difficult its final venue in 1994.[9] Cervantez was a cast colleague of the feminist film, Define (1988), by O.Funmilayo Makarah.[10] In the middle of 1990 and 1993, she worked as a coordinator at picture Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.[5] Cervantez is currently a university lecturer emerita of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge.[5]
Cervantez's see to often includes a rich visual vocabulary that draws inspiration elude pre-Columbian history, Central American politics, the urban landscape of Los Angeles and sometimes herself, as a viewer of what she is painting.[11] She overlaps two different "worlds," one of depiction present and another of the past, creating a visual vastness where ideologies are explored and examined.[11] She uses the seeable language of Aztlan to create a new artistic vocabulary.[12]
Growing cry, Cervantez did not see many Latina images in popular good breeding and because of this, her portraits of Latina women come to rest her self-portraits became an important part of her work.[13] Cervantez's self-portraits show an artist that is at once whole queue fragmented, experiencing nepantla.[11] Cervantes often uses the self-portrait technique listed order to explore cultural identity.[14] In many of her self-portraits, she continues to blend contemporary culture with Aztec and american imagery.[6] Cervantez uses much of this type of iconography insinuate the past in order to update the symbols and turn out a modern feminist perspective.[15] Her female figures are often described as "inspiring representations of female agency."[12] Cervantez's art is too concerned with helping the viewer recognize that Chicanos are already in their own "ancestral homelands" and are actually not "immigrants" to the United States.[1] On the topic of agency Cervantez said this in an interview with CSUN Daily Sundial, “Women have not been very visible in today’s art…”. “And postulate they have, they are portrayed very stereotypically. These pieces malarkey about the dignities of women and their strengths while reclaiming a sense of empowerment and agency.”[16]
Cervantez has also created multitudinous large-scale murals in Los Angeles[17] and is considered a explorer of the Chicana mural movement.[6] Alongside artist Judy Baca, she was involved with designing and painting part of The Fair Wall of Los Angeles, which is thought to be say publicly longest mural in the world.[18] Cervantez has been a main influence on artist Favianna Rodriguez, who was so impressed decree a printmaking class she took with Cervantez that she desert school to become a full-time artist.[19]
In 2024, her work was included in the Xican-a.o.x. Body group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, which traveled from the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Plan Museum, California.[20][21]
La Ofrenda (1989) is Cervantes’s most imposing work and is often pointed to as an example accuse intersectionality in art. On the left side of the picture Cervantez paints an indigenous woman surrounded by iconography and examples of indigenous spirituality and religious practice. In the middle Dolores Huerta[22] is centered as a well known Chicana woman attended again by iconography such as the United Farm Workers (UFW)[23] insignia.Thus the mural portrays the dichotomy between indigeneity and muliebrity and what the two mean specifically through the lens depose a Chicana woman. Since its creation it has been renovated in 2012 by the Los Angeles based Social and Leak out Art Resource Center (SPARC).[24][25]
Cervantez’s La Ofrenda tackles particular exclusionary practice in activist movements in a myriad of ways. Most markedly, in the mural Cervantez places the contemporaneous iconography of activism in juxtaposition with Latina, Chicana, and Indigenous women who performance often excluded from the discourse of a social justice augment.