Flor Garduño's 'Inner Light'

The essay, “Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit” by Leslie Marmon Silko tells a story in which beauty is shown by the differences between the Laguna Pueblo community and the rest of the world. The effectiveness of such representation through reflection and flashbacks convey a timeline that illustrate the meaning of beauty.

　　Natalie Diaz's debut collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, is a book of poems that accounts Diaz's skills in imaginative and lyrical language. The collection explores her past in unexpected form and images, tackling the subjects of her family, most notably her meth addicted brother, life on the reservation, and being a Native American woman. In this collection Diaz has filled the pages with rich and interesting images that rely on Native American culture, experiences of her own as a Native American woman, and mythology. As I read this collection I was struck by how heavy her images rested on the page and yet how weightless they seemed to fly off.

“Perpetua’s Passion” is one of the only few records of the life of a female martyr Vibia Perpetua. This record is very special because it contains Perpetua’s own narrative of her last days before her execution, along with an editor’s comments. Most of Perpetua’s narrative is about her experience after the capture, and her dreams, or visions, or the “revelations” of the divine to Perpetua. In this paper, I will discuss the presentation the symbols in her dreams, in order to exam the power balance of female and male presented in her voice, and reveal the struggle of Perpetua’s voice under the editor’s manipulation.

In the Heart of the Andes’ painting by Robert Seldon Duncanson, an immensely deceptive illusion is cultivated. This 1871 naturalistic landscape entices the viewer’s senses and lends itself to being part of the “beautiful” which is _____. This painting is a rendition of an earlier work done by Frederic Church in 1859. The formal qualities present in Heart of the Andes appear to fabricate an amicable symbiotic relationship between man and nature with motifs of God acting to legitimize human fallibility.

In the Basin of Mexico about 7,000 ft above sea level lies the ruins of the ancient city of Teotihuacan, “the place of the gods,” which flourished from 100-650 A.D. Little is known about this city’s mysterious demise of power, besides evidence of what appears to be ritualized burnings at major temples and centers. The impact of Teotihuacan throughout Mesoamerica is evident, and the most obvious indicator of this influence is through artistic style. Just how far was the expansion of Teotihuacan’s artistic influence across Mesoamerica? I will use a variety of sources not only to define the Teotihuacano art style as a whole, but also to map the path of its successful impact, (and also resistance,) across subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations, focusing principally on the Maya.

Alvarez, Julia. The Other Side = El Otro Lado. New York, NY: Plume Book, 1996. Print.

At the Detroit Institute of Arts, Mexican artist Diego Rivera murals are displayed all over the walls. His brilliance and talent is captured on the east wall of the gallery, where five separate photos hang for all eyes to view. The wall is filled with bright and beautiful photos sharing a unique special story. In the top left and right corner of the east wall, heavier women with big round eyes, sit in the nude with their arms filled with grain and fruits. While in the middle of the wall is a long rectangle painting of a small white baby nestled and cradled in the centre of a plant, being surrounded by two plowshares. Diego Rivera paintings represent beginnings and new life. In addition the sunrise shines on the east wall to help show his

*Andrien, Kenneth J. Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532-1825. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Often when studying history we encounter a paradigm of thinking that explicitly emphasizes the importance of written history above all else. In art history however, we are struck with the issue of navigating this paradigm in a field of study that sometimes only has visual culture for us to reference. Because of this, it often becomes a challenge to incorporate this visual evidence with a written record, whether it be another culture’s record or a written record that isn’t inherently “written”. And when it comes to examining the visual culture of Post-Classic Mexico, both of these are the case. With Mixtec and Aztec codices made entirely of pictographs and glyphs, we are forced to consider colonial hybrid documents in addition to these glyphs

This art study will define the underlying principles of surrealism and female nudity that are found in the Primitivism painting entitled: “Spirit of the Dead Watching” (1892) by Paul Gauguin and Wilfredo Lam’s “Jungle (1944). Surrealism provides a psychoanalytical framework in which the mind tends to repress the primal fears of the mind. The Freudian theory of the repression of the subconscious mind provides an example of the Primitivist style Gauguin utilizes in the “spirit” painting, which defines the primal nudity of women that he releases through this depiction of a Tahitian woman, named Teha'amana. This Tahitian woman, Gauguin’s wife, is an example of a painting that releases the primal sexual instincts of the repressed mind, yet it also defines the fears of the woman that lies in fear of the “spirit of the dead” that watches over her. Lam’s depiction of four nude women in “Jungle” also defines the pressed sexuality, which is released in this surrealist representation of the primal. Surrealism provides an analytical framework in which Gauguin’s depicts the primitive as a gateway to releasing his own desire to release sexual primitive desires through Teha'amana’s female identity. In essence, a historically–based surrealist/psychoanalytical examination of Primitivism will define the release of repressed sexuality in Paul Gauguin’s “Spirit of the Dead Watching” (1892) and Wilfredo Lam’s “Jungle (1944).

By introducing work with pre-Columbian imagery that often mirror Western iconography- Magallanes presents imagery in which the viewer is visually confronted with facing the dominance of western culture over indigenous cultures. Magallanes’ art allows

Both the paintings Clothing and Status in Colonial Mexico and A Chocolate Party in Spain demostate similarities such as the symbolization of high-class, the use of porcelain, and their expensive fashion despite their differences in race and location. Clothing and Status in Colonial Mexico portrays the intense desire for status ambition and blending of cultures between a native woman and a African husband. Both the man and woman were low-class in Colonial Mexico, but their interracial marriage symbolizes their transformation to high status and the blending of European and Mayan culture. The man is wearing European clothing while the woman is dressed in traditional Mayan clothing, and their child of mixed-race is categorized as a “loba” or “wolf.”

Her book on the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution, of the women who did far more than stand in the background of photographs in pauses between cooking and bearing children and binding the wounds of others as well as themselves rewrites the iconography of the Revolution.

We see the sun and moon in the clouds as how she, herself, sees them. Kahlo also uses indigenous art on the Mexican side of her portrait showing the ruins, the fertility doll as well as the plants and exotic flowers with strong roots. The

Upon entering the Estampas de la Raza exhibit located in the National Museum of Mexican Art, you get a warm, almost nostalgic homey feeling. The walls are in those bright, vibrant typical mexican folklore colors of pinks, greens, oranges, and blues. There are familiar faces all around the walls waiting to greet you: Che, Frida, La Virgen de Guadalupe. It’s truly a wonderful, well organized exhibit with much to chose from. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on three of the art pieces from the exhibit, Che, Cruising Turtle Island, and Maya Virgin.