Carmen Lomas Garza’s artwork is a case study in how making art about ordinary life can be a radical act in itself. But you might recognize her paintings of everyday scenes of Latino life from her children’s books.
In a new career retrospective at the ASU Art Museum, senior curator Alana Hernandez highlights Lomas Garza’s work — and how it is embedded in the Chicano arts movement.
The Show spoke with Hernandez about the new exhibition — and why she wanted to do it.
Full conversation
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Carmen Lomas Garza is someone that had come up over and over again, mostly because of how kind of generous the entry point is into their work, right? Children’s books are often disseminated — that’s how so many people know Carmen’s work to begin with.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s how I recognized it, exactly.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Exactly. And so, and the pictures are so, like I said, they’re so generous as an entry point. You know, we see birthday parties, we see, you know, kitchen tables, we see things like that. So, what I was really interested in is really underscoring kind of a retrospective — seeing a kind of in-depth look at this artist’s career. What did that look like over time?
But I think importantly, when we think of retrospectives, when we think of these kind of large looks at artists’ careers, we’re often, I think, taught that these artists work in silos, right? That an artist is a genius or by themselves or working by themselves, and that’s just not true, specifically for communities of color as well.
And so, what I was really interested in as part of the exhibition was really to show a contextual retrospective: Who was Carmen in her early years as part of, you know, growing up at the milieu of the Chicano movement? There are many Chicano movements, for example. And the Chicano movement in South Texas really was born on the campus of Texas A&I with so many of her peers.
And so, this show really shows that there are all these people she was working with and how these people not only influenced her, but she also influenced going forward. And so, it’s a really wonderful mix of other artists at really kind of pivotal points in her career.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, five decades is a long time, and we should say she’s still alive.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: She’s still alive. She’s still — she’s definitely in kind of large-scale exhibitions. She’s also in this Frida Kahlo exhibition that had just traveled to the Tate. So, it is a really wonderful time to look at her career. I think in terms of timing for this particular show, you have to imagine the last retrospective she had was in 2001, and that’s not really the show that she thinks of as her retrospective. She thinks of the 1992 version really as her retrospective.
So, there’s a whole generation of people that didn’t grow up or know Carmen’s work at all. And so, it’s a really wonderful reintroduction and seeing her work in kind of a new light, in a new era. Perhaps there are things that have changed since she made them in the ’80s. A lot of things have not changed or regressed backwards, and so it’s a really interesting time to see how this work plays in our contemporary moment.
LAUREN GILGER: But especially doing it at a university art museum, right? Like, you are purposefully, it sounds like, exposing a whole new generation to this artist they probably don’t know, but whose work they might recognize.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Yeah, I think it’s that. And then I think to the university, Carmen, you know, really her undergraduate was in arts education. Education was really, really important for Carmen. Disseminating to the youth is really important. That’s why she has children’s books.
And so, being at a university setting was really important for Carmen. We had a lot of conversations, was a good, you know, talking point, selling point, like, "Hey, I really think we’re the place to do this." Of course, the show is going to travel, but it’s really special that it happens on a university campus.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so let’s describe this work a little bit. This is radio, and these are, you know, visual art paintings, obviously.
So, talk a little bit about what speaks to you about these paintings, some of your favorites, what do they look like. I mean, you described some of the scenes that you see here, but it’s a very specific style and one that people might recognize, like not just from Carmen, but from artists of that era.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Yeah. So, a lot of the scenes, they’re incredibly figurative. So, we’re seeing lots of figures. And what’s really special also about Carmen’s work is that she paints from memory, right? So, a lot of these scenes are her personal scenes, her family archive in many ways.
LAUREN GILGER: You see the same people in them, yeah. Probably her family members, yeah.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Exactly, exactly. There is an intentional flatness to what we’re seeing, either the gouache, the canvas, the prints — she was trained as a printmaker. And so, you’re seeing what allows is a very specific perspective. Again, children and dissemination is a big part of Carmen’s aim.
So, you know, I remember us talking through some of the works, and she said, you know, she was really interested in intentional flatness so that if a child were to see that, they would see the flatness of the table. They could see, for example, like if it’s a lotería scene, they could see the cards, the hands of every person around the table, right? And so, in that way, it is a form of learning.
It is an intentional naïveté to see details, to see people and figures in what I describe as a really radical sense, to see them in an everyday scene of joy, of celebration, or of rest, right?
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Well, so why do you see that as radical, right? Because they are sort of everyday scenes of like Latino life for her, for her community.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Yeah. Yeah, I think when you have to imagine when these pictures are made in the ’70s and the ’80s, some earlier, this is kind of the age of the Chicano movement, the late ’60s into the ’70s, right? So much of the images that were coming out for the movement were about LUCHA, were kind of fighting for rights. And that is really important, right? That’s hand-in-hand with the movement, of course.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: But another part of that is picturing our communities radically, just brown bodies, people of color in intimate scenes of joy, you know, in getting ready to step out to the world in adolescence, healing rituals. This wasn’t seen before. And so, in many ways, Carmen was so ahead of her time taking up space in a world that wasn’t, you know, ready to reconcile what that looks like.
And so, even today, that’s so important, right, when we’re still discussing who can say they’re American or not, what does it mean to be American? And here, she unabashedly says, "This is what it means to be American," right? "Cakewalk," for example, it’s like this beautiful scene where there’s children running around. There’s this game, it’s called cakewalk in the middle of the canvas with numbers on it. It’s kind of like —
LAUREN GILGER: You’ve done this at a party, right? You walk, you land on a number, they draw the number, you get the cake with the number. Everybody brings a cake, yeah.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Yes! So, it’s a fundraiser, right? And so, her parents were organizers, right? And so, they were organizing funds to make sure that they could have scholarships for Mexican American students to go to college, right? And so, this particular scene is what? Community building.
But it also, the auxiliary that, you know, her mother and her father are a part of, they have uniforms that are red, white, and blue, right? Because they’re all, they were either in the army, they were in the service. But so much of the work they did was really under the guise of: We’re Americans, we’re sending our children to college.
And so, I mention this story because it’s — it’s important when we think about the context of where we are in this country now. And so, these pictures remain radical in that way.
LAUREN GILGER: It’s fascinating. Do you have a favorite?
ALANA HERNANDEZ: A favorite image? There are so many that I am really drawn to. "Cakewalk" is one of my favorites, "Quinceañera" is one of my favorites. But on the cover of the book, it’s "Las Pachucas’ Razor Blade Do." It’s painted in this like kind of bubblegum pink color. It shows two girls kind of getting ready to step out into the world. They’re young girls, they have a cousin lying on the bed watching them. And it looks very sweet, looks like a very sweet scene. We see cats around, we see heels getting ready to be put on, this dress that’s hanging.
But then we also see a cousin kind of slipping razor blades into the hair as a way of protection. And it’s showing this image is both sweet, but also has this kind of dark side to it to understand that women, especially women of color, as they enter the world, it’s both an exciting but dangerous place.
LAUREN GILGER: It’s a subversive moment there that you almost don’t catch.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Yes, yeah. And so, for me, it’s one of my favorite scenes. So, it’s a mix between all of these different things, an exciting yet complex time for women as they enter the world.
LAUREN GILGER: You put it on the cover for a reason, I guess.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: It is one of my favorites.
LAUREN GILGER: All right. Alana Hernandez, senior curator at ASU’s Art Museum, editor of the new book on Carmen Lomas Garza, "Picturing the Familiar." The exhibition runs through September 10th. Alana, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us about this. I very much appreciate it.
ALANA HERNANDEZ: Of course, thank you.
LAUREN GILGER: "Carmen Lomas Garza: Picturing the Familiar" runs through September 10th at the ASU Art Museum. And if you want to see what those paintings look like, head to our website, theshow.kjzz.org.
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