comparison-and-contrasting

 

Comparison-and-Contrasting Yolanda Lopez, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1978, Feminist Art

VS

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (You Are Not Yourself), 1982, Feminist Art/Postmodernism

 

In this essay I will compare and contrast two outstanding women, who paid their priceless contribute to intellectual wealth of the society. Their views on the most nagging problem of that period of time, has changed the world. Their works brought so much information to every human, it has changed the world, it has changed the standards, it has changed the society. And it has changed it forever. Barbara Kruger and Yolanda Lopez were the destiny’s delegators, that conveyed the simple truth. And I decided to write about this two remarkable women because people need to know with whose help we became to who we are.

 

Now let’s discuss life and achievements of Yolanda Lopez.                   Yolanda M. López is an American muralist, painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer, was born in San Diego, California in 1942.  As the eldest daughter of three, she and her two sibilians was raised by her mother and her mother’s parents in the Logan Heights neighborhood. A third-generation Chicana, her grandfather had been a tailor in New York City.  After graduating from high school in Logan Heights, she moved to San Francisco and became involved in the student movement that shut down San Francisco State University in a 1968 strike called the "Third World Strike". She also became active in the arts, working as a community artist in the Mission District with a group called Los Siete de la Raza.  When she graduated high school López writes "I had no idea how to go about studying for a career in art. In my senior year I had tried to get into mechanical drawing or drafting but was turned away because girls were not allowed in those classes. I didn't know how to start, although I did know art was taught in college. With the help of a teacher I enrolled myself in junior college." Statement provided by the artist. During the 1970s, López returned to San Diego. She enrolled at San Diego State University in 1971, graduating in 1975 with a B.A. in painting and drawing. Afterwards, as a scholar as well as an artist, Lopez has taught studio classes and has lectured on contemporary Chicano art at the University of California at Berkeley and San Diego. Lopez has produced a video, “When You Think of Mexico,” on the topic of cultural stereotypes in print and electronic media, and has presented the video and accompanying lecture throughout the West.

Yolanda has viewed her work as an artist as a tool for political and social change and sees herself as an artistic provocateur. Her work focuses on the experience of Mexican American women and often challenges ethnic stereotypes associated with them. According to López, "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." As a visual artist, she is best known for her groundbreaking Virgin of Guadalupe series, an investigation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as an influential female icon. Classically trained as an artisan, her work has expanded into installation, video and slide presentations. Her video, Images of Mexicans in the Media, has toured internationally and is collected in university libraries nationally. Her media series, Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams, has comprised numerous installations, including Things I Never Told My Son About Being a Mexican, an installation that explores identity, assimilation, and cultural change. Project, Woman's Work Is Never Done, includes a series of prints, as well as the installation The Nanny, which explores the invisibility of immigrant women as domestic workers. The installation was showcased in the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s exhibition “Mirror, Mirror…Gender Roles and the Historical Significance of Beauty.” As a visual artist, she is best known for her Virgin of Guadalupe series, which re-envisioned the iconic image in both personal and political terms. Classically trained as a painter, her work has expanded into installation, video and slide presentations that illustrate Mexican stereotypes and play with notions of Mexican kitsch. Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is one of a set of three portraits depicting the artist, her mother, and her grandmother. To the extent that the portraits are likenesses of the women they depict, they document the appearance of three women within a family.

In a statement provided by López, she writes that it [Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe] is "an investigation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a powerful female icon." In the year the drawing was made, López wrote "Essentially, she [the Virgin of Guadalupe] is beautiful, serene and passive. She has no emotional life or texture of her own.....Because I feel living, breathing women also deserve respect and love lavished on Guadalupe, I have chosen to transform the image. Taking symbols of her power and virtue I have transferred them to portraits of women I know....As Chicanos we need to become aware of our own imagery and how it functions. We privately agonize and sometimes publicly

 

 

 

 

 

speak out on the representation of us in the majority culture. But what about the portrayal of ourselves within our own culture? Who are our heroes, our role models?" "Yolanda M. López Works: 1975-1978," San Diego, 1978.

 

According to Lili Wright, Yolanda López' Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, (along with two other drawings in the series) "was López's way of providing role models, while paying homage to working-class women." "Yolanda López's Art Hits 'Twitch Meter' to Fight Stereotypes," in The Salt Lake Tribune, May 14, 1995.

Yolanda López' grandmother, a Native American, helped connect the young Yolanda with her cultural past. As a Chicana growing up in California, López is aware of the many stereotypes of Mexicans in the United States, as well as the traditional roles for women in Mexican culture.

In an interview with Amalia Mesa-Bains, López said: "The ideal was white, and I was not. I didn't understand it in those terms as such, but I knew very well that I didn't look like that. So I never considered myself pretty or anything like that." (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmations, 1991, R. G. del Castillo et al [Eds.], Wright Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles: Los Angeles, p. 137)

Yolanda López' work can be seen as part of the feminist art movement, however, within that movement it has been significant not only as the art of a woman, but specifically the art of a woman of color. "For women artists of color-despite their concern with women's issues--ethnicity more than gender has shaped their primary identities, loyalties, and often the content of their art. Also from the start the women's art movement has been dominated by Euro-American leadership....Thus, despite the many efforts and good intentions of white women in the arena of political art, racial separation and racism existed de facto within the Feminist Art Movement from the beginning." Yolanda M. López and Moira Roth, 1994, "Social Protest: Racism and Sexism," in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, New York: Harry N. Abrams, p. 140.

Now let’s turn to Barbara Kruger and introduce with her life and artworks. Barbara Kruger (born 1945) is an American conceptual artist represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London. She was born in Newark, New Jersey and left there in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. After a year at Syracuse, she moved to New York, where she began attending Parsons School of Design. She studied with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who, as a graphic designer and art director for Harper's Bazaar in the 1960s, introduced Kruger to photographers and fashion/magazine sub-cultures. After a year at Parsons, Kruger left school and started to work at Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, becoming chief designer within a year. During the late 1960s and early 1970s she also designed book covers for political texts and became increasingly interested in poetry, writing and in regularly attended readings. From 1976 to 1980 Kruger lived in Berkeley, CA, teaching as well as doing design work and reflecting on her art. In the 1980s she became known for her fine art work incorporating experience in graphic design and picture editing with short direct phrases.

Much of Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases included in her work are usually declarative, and make common use of such pronouns as "you", "I", "we", and "they". The juxtaposition of Kruger's imagery with text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in the work. In The text in her work of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "you invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."

In 1980 she had her first solo exhibition at P.S. 1, Long Island City, New York. In 1987 she joined the then dominant contemporary art gallery of Mary Boone, and has had eight solo shows there since.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Her messages have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces, as well as framed and unframed photographs, posters, postcards, t-shirts, electronic signboards, billboards and on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France. For the past decade Kruger has created installations of video, film, audio and projection. Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, her work is consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of social life: about how we are to one another. Kruger's works are direct and evoke an immediate response. Usually her style involves the cropping of a magazine or newspaper image enlarged in black and white. The enlargement of the image is done as crudely as possible to monumental proportions. A message is stenciled on the image, usually in white letters against a background of red. The text and image are unrelated in an effort to create anxiety by the audience that plays on the fears of society." (Janson, p. 992).

In 2005 Kruger was honored at the 51st Venice Biennale with the "Golden Lion" for Lifetime Achievement. Kruger is currently a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

 

 

Artworks of Yolanda and Barbara for the first site seem to be so distinct. And even if it was made almost at the one period of time it still has many differences. For instance Yolanda’s art is more about immigrant and Latin women problems. As it was mentioned before, some of her works were inspired by political and personal problems, regarding attitude to Mexican women, and stereotypes that so bothered her. In fact Yolanda is a fighter. And her artworks are her the strongest knocks. Drawing another picture, or making a movie on a burning theme she was just like taking out her weapon. So gentle, female and full of personal anxiety, emotional experience, on her feelings, but still a weapon. And Barbara. Barbara has had another weapons to fight with the bad sides of humans stereotypes. She did not draw, she was closer to some kind of fashion, some kind of picture arts. And the main distinct of these women is that Barbara used acute phrases with odd and unused pictures.

Anyways, these two women similar in trying to convey their ideas to society, using the same weapon.

It’s art.