Spiritual Reclamation:
Laura Pérez charts new directions in contemporary Chicana art

When Laura Pérez began researching what she thought would be a book surveying contemporary Chicana art, she found a common thread that both surprised and challenged her: an exploration of spirituality in the work of each artist.

“I found that these women artists who didn’t define themselves as religious – and maybe even defined themselves as atheist – were constantly making reference in their work to spirituality of one sort or another,” says Pérez, an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group on Gender.

	From the Oppression series ©Christina Fernandez, 1989

Pérez’s planned overview of post-1960s female, Mexican-American artists became instead her soon-to-be-published book, Altarities: Chicana Art, Politics and Spirituality, which looks at the work of forty contemporary Chicana artists mainly from the period of 1985-2000. In the book, Pérez tackles subjects such as how the artists mix and match religious symbols from different traditions, address the split between Western and non-Western indigenous religious and visual cultural backgrounds, and struggle to define what makes up the spiritual.

While Latina artists are commonly thought to base their spiritual works around the Catholic faith, Pérez says she found something to the contrary, a “do-it-yourself spirituality” that cuts and pastes from different religious and spiritual traditions.

“You see aspects of Santeria, an African diasporic religion, maybe Judaism and Buddhism, and then revisions of Christianity from a philosophical perspective very different from Christian orthodoxy,” Pérez notes.

Consuela Jiménez Underwood is among the artists Pérez discusses. Underwood’s work incorporates weaving, the traditional high art of her indigenous ancestors, with painting and materials such as barbed wire and metal netting.

“She marries both forms of art and creates something new that respects the traditions of the Huichol people from which she comes on her father’s side, while also respecting the Western art tradition she’s been trained in. She’s at the intersection of both.”

Laura Pérez, third from right, with artists Yreina Cervantez, Diane Gamboa and Francés Salomé España

Pérez also writes about Los Angeles-based photographer Christina Fernandez, whose work includes a series of ghostly, haunting images done with reverse negatives. One [pictured above] features a man’s silhouette and a non-gendered figure that is bound, gagged and blindfolded. “I found that in fact a lot of these women’s work was about using the metaphor of the spiritual or the ghostly to speak about social marginalization or social absence.”

Pérez notes that the artists reflect the cultural life of cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, which since the 1960s have had increased migration that has resulted in a myriad of spiritual traditions living right next door to each other.

“Wherever you see a lot of ethnically different cultures living together, you see a lot of hybrid spirituality,” Pérez observes. “There is a picking and choosing that brings everything together in a new synthesis.”

Many of her students understand this intuitively, Pérez says. “A lot of them just get it. They’ve grown up next to an Indian family and maybe with a Buddhist temple down the block.”

According to Pérez, the use of spiritual metaphors and religious imagery takes up themes last reopened during the 1960s and the civil rights movement. While many left-leaning artists and intellectuals have spurned religion and spirituality as naive and anti-intellectual, Pérez says that is changing.

“A whole generation has been trying to reclaim the spiritual, whether through tradition, institutionalized religiosities, or the more hybrid variety, and not a minute too soon,” Pérez says. “September 11 and emergence of the religious right have helped people see how important people’s religious beliefs are, and that they do have social and political effects.”

For Pérez, the project has been a revelation. “I was scared when I started this,” she says. “In ethnic studies – unlike disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and theology that have traditionally studied religion and the spiritual – we have traditionally shied away from the religious, or ghettoized it."

The Sacred Jump, © Consuela Jiménez Underwood, 1994

That has begun to change within academic institutions, Pérez notes, and that’s a good thing.

“Spirituality and religion do matter,” she says. “Silencing, championing and denigrating them are all political acts. We now know that spiritual belief and religion are in the realm of social struggle. If we don’t engage with it, someone else will. With their work, these artists have led the way for us.”

-- Doug Merlino