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Icons of love and devotion: Alma Lopez's art.

Article Excerpt
KNOWN FOR HER STUNNING digital montages as well as for her feminist reconceptualization of traditional Mexican iconography, Chicana artist Alma Lopez has emerged as one of the leading voices in the Chicana/o art scene who addresses the perilous intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality with her visual work. Born in Mexico but raised in Los Angeles, Lopez came of age as an artist in the late 1990s, although she witnessed the Chicana/o arts renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s as a child and adolescent. Like prior Chicana feminist artists, Lopez has challenged the exclusion and/or erasure of female agency within conventional Mexican and Chicano nationalist imagery. Although Chicano nationalist discourses understood empowerment primarily in male terms, Lopez's work places women at the center of discourses on emancipation and decolonization. Her imagery also expounds what gender scholars would call a Chicana queer aesthetic, as much of her work explores the contours of lesbian desire and sexuality at a time when issues of race and sexuality were often articulated independently and even in opposition to one another.

Although Lopez is a talented and skilled painter, printmaker, photographer, and video artist as well as a committed community activist, she is best known for the moniker, "the digital diva." (1) The artist often recounts that when she was first introduced to the computer as an artistic medium, she immediately "clicked" with this new tool in part because of its ability to transform pre-existing imagery. (2) Digital art refers to work produced with a computer as an artistic tool. Images are generally created with software like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, among others. Artists then produce high-resolution printouts of the images for the purposes of exhibitions and sales. One of the most salient characteristics of digital media is its ability to manipulate and transform pre-existing imagery in seamless and organic ways, thus allowing artists to bring together images produced with different media and within different contexts. Lopez's digital work differs from her nondigital oeuvre in that it features layers of different images that are digitally woven together. These usually include hand-drawn or painted motifs, photography, and pre-existing archival/historical material. Thus digital media allows Lopez to piece together images from previously fragmented histories in her work.

Lopez also belongs to a generation of Chicana artists who have begun using computer technology as a viable and potentially empowering medium for creative expression. (3) By using this medium, they are infringing on a territory that has traditionally excluded their presence as women of color, namely the realm of science and technology. Lopez's use of digital imagery also counters the paradigm of the digital divide, which maintains that ethnic minorities have limited access to digital technologies, an idea that many media and race scholars have denounced as a self-fulfilling prophecy. (4) This relatively new artistic tool has also allowed Lopez to engage in various forms of cyber activism through the construction and maintenance of her own artist's website (www.almalopez.net). Not only does this websites contain low-resolution scans of her artwork as well as her biography, it is also an open forum for the public discussion of issues that affect Chicana/o/Latina/o and queer communities of color. The site contains a blog as well as public postings of e-mail messages that the artist has received throughout her career.

Lopez's work centers around a feminist and queer re-thinking of traditional Mexican icons, many of which are imbued with a deeply ingrained patriarchal discourse. The Virgin of Guadalupe--a popular symbol of Mexican/Chicana/o spirituality and cultural resistance from the seventeenth century to the present--has become the object of feminist critique among Chicana artists since the 1970s. In Mexican culture, the Virgin of Guadalupe represents the ideal woman, one who is...

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