Yreina Cervantez (born 1952) is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting,[1] murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally,[2] and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[3] The Mexican Museum,[4] the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.[5]
Yreina Cervantez | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 (age 69–70) |
| Education | University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California, Los Angeles |
Notable work | La Ofrenda |
Cervantez was born in Garden City, Kansas[5] and raised in Mount Palomar, California.[6] Cervantez's mother was creative and served as an artistic inspiration to her daughter.[7] Her childhood was spent in culturally segregated, rural areas and exposure to the conservative attitude of these neighborhoods inspired Cervantez to later join the Chicana/o movement.[7] Later her family moved to Orange County.[7]
During high school, she focused on her watercolor skills.[7] Cervantez received a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and in 1989 graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with an MFA.[6] A founding member of the Los Angeles art collective Self Help Graphics, Cervantez spent six years working for this non-profit dedicated to supporting community artwork.[5][7] In 1987, Cervantez's work was shown in Chicago at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.[8] Her work was also part of the CARA project and traveling exhibition which opened in 1983 and had its final venue in 1994.[9] Cervantez was a cast member of the feminist film, Define (1988), by O.Funmilayo Makarah.[10] Between 1990 and 1993, she worked as a coordinator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.[5] Cervantez is currently a professor emerita of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge.[5]
Cervantez's work often includes a rich visual vocabulary that draws inspiration from 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 the present and another of the past, creating a visual space where ideologies are explored and examined.[11] She uses the visual language of Aztlan to create a new artistic vocabulary.[12]
Growing up, Cervantez did not see many Latina images in popular culture and because of this, her portraits of Latina women and her self-portraits became an important part of her work.[13] Cervantez's self-portraits show an artist that is at once whole and fragmented, experiencing nepantla.[11] Cervantes often uses the self-portrait technique in order to explore cultural identity.[14] In many of her self-portraits, she continues to blend contemporary culture with Aztec and mesoamerican imagery.[6] Cervantez uses much of this type of iconography of the past in order to update the symbols and create a modern feminist perspective.[15] Her female figures are often described as "inspiring representations of female agency."[12] Cervantez's art is also 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]
Cervantez has also created many large-scale murals in Los Angeles[16] and is considered a pioneer of the Chicana mural movement.[6] She was involved with designing and painting part of The Great Wall of Los Angeles, which is thought to be the longest mural in the world.[17] Cervantez has been a major influence on artist Favianna Rodriguez, who was so impressed with a printmaking class she took with Cervantez that she quit school to become a full-time artist.[18]
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