Rendering Livable Futures
Tags: Queer, Feminist, Cultural Studies, Latinx, Art

By V. Gina Diaz, American Studies, University of New Mexico

Gina is part of the Publicly Active Graduate Education Fellowship (PAGE) 2019–2020 cohort.

Aesthetics and the visual realm are significant to the production of race, gender, sexual, and other differentiations, but they are also employed to play with, subvert, undermine, refuse, and explode our understandings of them. Cultural studies and minoritized art histories show that active dissent to formations of power are plentiful in the arts, though one must be promiscuous intellectually and methodologically, even anti-interdisciplinarity, to see beyond its glaring absence in Art History.

I enjoy, study, and illuminate radical queer and feminist enunciations within anti-colonial and anti-racist class struggles. Refusing the notions of disposability in dominant discourse, queer Latinx feminist artists flip normative scripts in their practices of figuration and embodiment. In other words, the artists I study rupture and reimagine conventional representations while producing performances that offer alternative, nuanced visions. Here I’m interested in how works of visual activism can gesture toward utopic futures.

I will attempt to briefly and partially illustrate with two paintings. I met these artists while doing curatorial work in New Mexico (NM). Despite Santa Fe being the second largest art market in the U.S. after New York and being home to countless galleries and the only state-wide Department of Cultural Affairs in the country, it has been a particularly inhospitable place for feminist queer art. None-the-less varied forms of creativity thrive in NM.

Adelina Cruz stands next to their painting Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. Cruz, smiling, is adorned with tattoos wears a backward baseball cap, plaid black and white shirt buttoned up to their neck, and black watch and shorts. The cement floor of the art studio is covered in paint drippings, the painting sits on a metal easel. The art work is 48 x 50 inches, acrylic and oil on canvas. The painting is on a white background, on the left is a profile image of the artist as they face a small blue bird. Translucent flowers outlined in red make up the second layer of the image, which covers the surface of the canvas, while the final top layer is a single strand of loose barbed wire.

Adelina Cruz’s large-scale self-portrait/autorretrato Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (2017), shows the artist in a pensive gaze interlocked with that of a hummingbird. Barbed wire noticeably stretches across the top layer of the canvas. A ubiquitous iconography in Latinx art, it often refers to incarceration or the policing of national borders. Cruz similarly uses the symbolism to imply containment and a type of prison. One might only come to this interpretation, however, if they recognize that the middle layer of the painting covers the canvas in opaque poppy flowers, and if they know that the flower is the natural source for opioids. The encounter staged here gestures toward an awakening and consciousness toward a livable future materially and spiritually. Cruz’s embodiment turns our attention to their queer, brown, gender non-conforming, negatively signified body instead strategically objectifying it to imbue queer of color excess and share their story of struggle and change on their terms.

Image is of Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s painting Instructions for a Freedom. The painting is 42 x 105 inches and of gouache, tea, watercolor, acrylic, and marker on paper. The protagonist, pointing to the extreme right side of the painting, rides bareback on a wild horse with a black mane heading that way. The horse’s torso and front legs are white with black spots, their bottom half is black with white spots and leaves a rainbow trail behind it. A conglomeration of bodies emerges from the rainbow, they are thick femmes, various shades of brown, with big hair and they envelop one another, some holding staffs or electric guitars. Resembling a map the work also depicts phases of the moon, rain, and bones. Private Collection.

The painting Instructions for a Freedom (2015) by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski playfully highlights interdependence and inspired leadership in achieving liberation. The lone figure nobly depicted on horseback is trailed by a rainbow from which emerges a grouping of many more figures all with third eye consciousness holding and supporting one another. DeJesus Moleski has developed a visual language that is deeply inspired by fantasy and dimensions beyond our physical and temporal realities. She strives to counter mainstream depictions of femmes of color through imaging their embodied sensuality, joy, and strength. Here positive affect is complimented in her figuring of relationality and collectivity as absolutely necessary.

The enunciations of emerging queer feminist Latinx artists are significant for American art as they pose aesthetic and ethical concerns that deserve attention. I therefore put the work of Adelina Cruz and Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, two artists intimately connected to New Mexico, at the forefront of some of our most important contemporary social dilemmas and political struggles.