Full Description
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's artwork is marked by her compassionate and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues, from immigration and environmental precarity to the resilience of Indigenous ancestral values and the necessity of decolonial aesthetics in art making. Drawing on the fiber arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminist art, and Indigenous fiber- and loom-based traditions, Jimenez Underwood's art encompasses needlework, weaving, painted and silkscreened pieces, installations, sculptures, and performance. This volume's contributors write about her place in feminist textile art history, situate her work among that of other Indigenous-identified feminist artists, and explore her signature works, series, techniques, images, and materials. Redefining the practice of weaving, Jimenez Underwood works with repurposed barbed wire, yellow caution tape, safety pins, and plastic bags and crosses Indigenous, Chicana, European, and Euro-American art practices, pushing the arts of the Americas beyond Eurocentric aesthetics toward culturally hybrid and Indigenous understandings of art making. Jimenez Underwood's redefinition of weaving and painting alongside the socially and environmentally engaged dimensions of her work position her as one of the most vital artists of our time.
Contributors. Constance Cortez, Karen Mary Davalos, Carmen Febles, M. Esther FernÁndez, Christine Laffer, Ann Marie Leimer, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Robert Milnes, Jenell Navarro, Laura E. PÉrez, Marcos Pizarro, VerÓnica Reyes, Clara RomÁn-Odio, Carol Sauvion, Cristina Serna, Emily Zaiden
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Preface. The Art of Necessity / Luis Valdez xv
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction / Laura E. PÉrez and Ann Marie Leimer 1
I. Spinning-Making Thread
1. The Hands of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: A Filmmaker's Reflections / Carol Sauvion 25
2. Charged Objects: The Multivalent Fiber Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Christine Laffer 35
II. Weaving-Hand Work
3. History/Whose-Story? Postcoloniality and Contemporary Chicana Art / Constance Cortez 53
4. A Tear in the Curtain: Hilos y Cultura in the Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Amalia Mesa-Bains 71
5. Prayers for the Planet: Reweaving the Natural and the Social-Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Welcome to Flower-Landia / Laura E. PÉrez 80
6. Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Welcome to Flower-Landia / MarÍa Ester FernÁndez 91
7. Between the Lines: Documenting Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Fiber Pathways / Emily Zaiden 100
8. Flags, the Sacred, and a Different America in Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Fiber Art / Clara RomÁn-Odio 111
9. Garments for the Goddess of the AmÉricas: The American Dress Triptych / Ann Marie Leimer 123
10. Space, Place, and Belonging in Borderlines: Countermapping in the Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Karen Mary Davalos 142
11. Decolonizing Aesthetics in Mexican and Xicana Fiber Art: The Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood and Georgina Santos / Cristina Serna 161
12. Reading Our Mothers: Decolonization and Cultural Identity in Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Rebozos for Our Mothers / Carmen Febles 181
13. Weaving Water: Toward an Indigenous Method of Self- and Community Care / Jenell Navarro 198
III. Off the Loom-Into the World
14. Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Artist, Educator, and Advocate / Robert Milnes 221
15. Being Chicanx Studies: Lessons for Racial Justice from the Work and Life of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Marcus Pizarro 239
16. Blue RÍo Tapestries / VerÓnica Reyes 244
Notes 261
Bibliography 290
Contributors 304
Index 311
