Yolanda López

Yolanda Margarita López (November 1, 1942 – September 3, 2021) was an American painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer.

She was known for her Chicana feminist works focusing on the experiences of Mexican-American women, often challenging the ethnic stereotypes associated with them.

Lopez was recognized for her series of paintings which re-imagined the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe.

Her work is held in several public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Yolanda Margarita López was born on November 1, 1942, in San Diego, California, to Margaret Franco and Mortimer López.

She was a third-generation Chicana.

Her grandparents migrated from Mexico to the United States, crossing the Río Bravo river in a boat while avoiding gunfire from the Texas Rangers.

López and her two younger siblings were raised by her mother and maternal grandparents in San Diego.

After graduating from high school in Logan Heights in San Diego, she moved to San Francisco and took courses at the College of Marin and San Francisco State University.

She became involved in a student movement called the Third World Liberation Front, which shut down SFSU as a part of the Third World Liberation Front strikes of 1968 She also became active in the arts.

In 1969, López was instrumental in advertising the case of Los Siete de la Raza, in which seven young Latin American youths were accused of killing a police officer.

Serving as the groups artistic director, she designed the poster "Free Los Siete," where the faces of these men are shown behind an inverted American flag that appears like prison bars.

This poster was featured in the exhibition "¡Printing the Revolution!"

at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where curator Evelyn Carmen Ramos noted it had been "circulated at rallies and in newspapers, and galvanized the Mission District's Chicano and Latino community into a powerful social force with a noticeable presence in subsequent city politics."

During the 1970s, López returned to San Diego, and enrolled at San Diego State University in 1971, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting and drawing.

As Guisela M. Latorre argues, "[i]mages such as Ester Hernandez's 1976 etching Libertad depicting a young Chicana resculpting the Statue of Liberty to resemble a Maya carving, and Yolanda López's pastel drawings (1978) that depicted herself, her mother, and her grandmother in the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe were examples of early Chicana art that placed women at the center of discourses on liberation and decolonization".

López sought to depict the Virgen de Guadalupe in multiple ways due to the religious figures symbolic meaning.

In her 1978 triptych of oil pastel drawings, López depicted herself clutching a snake while stepping on an angel, a symbol of the patriarchy.

López created another set of prints with a similar theme entitled Woman's Work is Never Done.

One of the artworks for the set, The Nanny, addressed problems faced by immigrant women of Hispanic descent in the United States and was featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

Her famous political poster titled Who's the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? features a man in an Aztec headdress and traditional jewelry holding a crumpled-up paper titled "Immigration Plans."

This 1978 poster was created during a period of political debate in the U.S. which resulted in the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1978 that limited immigration from a single country to 20,000 people per year with a total cap of 290,000.

López also curated exhibitions, including Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams, which featured works of art concerning immigration to the United States.

The exhibition debuted at the Galería de la Raza and subsequently toured nationwide as part of an exhibition called La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience.

López produced two films: Images of Mexicans in the Media and When you Think of Mexico, which challenged the way the mass media depicts Mexicans and other Latin Americans.

She served as Director of Education at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and taught at University of California, Berkeley, University of California San Diego, Mills College, and Stanford University.

López stated, "It is important for us to be visually literate; it is a survival skill. The media is what passes for culture in contemporary U.S. society, and it is extremely powerful. It is crucial that we systematically explore the cultural mis-definition of Mexicans and Latin Americans that is presented in the media."

She was awarded a $50,000 fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation as part of their Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2021.

A retrospective exhibition of Lopez work was scheduled to be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in October 2021.

Artwork created by Lopez is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Her artwork is held in the public collections of several museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art, the De Young Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Beginning in 1978 and ending in 1988, López created a series of images that reinterpreted the Virgen de Guadalupe. López earned recognition for the sieries which depicted people close to her as the Virgen de Guadalupe and reinvigorated the image into different forms.

The artwork drew attention with the new, albeit controversial, depictions of the Virgen de Guadalupe.

However, starting a controversy was not López's intention.

In "American Women: Great lives from History", author Mary K. Trigg writes, "López's formal education and burgeoning feminism contributed to her growing interest in the politics of representation, resulting in work that progressively examined the social and cultural invisibility of women".

López wanted to depict the Virgen de Guadalupe in numerous ways in order to give women, specifically those originating from Chicana culture, new forms of representation along with López's own comments on society.

She then enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in 1979.

While at the University of California, San Diego, her professors Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler encouraged her to focus on conceptual practice with social, political, and educational impact.

López is recognized for her iconic series that reinterpreted the Virgen de Guadalupe through drawings, prints, collage, and paintings.

The series, which depicted Mexican women (among them her grandmother, her mother, and López herself) with the mandorla and other Guadalupean attributes, attracted attention for sanctifying average Mexican women shown performing domestic and other forms of labor.