Texas Tech University

Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza

Book Description: 

Carmen Lomas Garza (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) Widely known for works that celebrate the traditions of her family and her South Texas Latino community, Carmen Lomas Garza has been active as a painter, printmaker, muralist, and children's book illustrator since the 1970s. Born in Kingsville, Texas, she experienced institutionalized racism in a segregated school system that punished Mexican American students for speaking Spanish. Through her art, which draws on her childhood memories and depicts the relationship between family and community, Garza challenges the legacy of repression while establishing the folk art idiom, as employed by nonwhite and immigrant artists, as a vital element of American modernism.

Garza's art illustrates how, despite racial inequities, cultural conflict, and urban pressures, the Mexican American community has sustained a rich and vital cultural identity. In this volume of the pathbreaking A Ver series, Constance Cortez explores Garza's artwork in the context of the Chicano/a art movement, family and regional traditions, and Garza's own political and social activism.

Connie Cortez

Author Bio: 

Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles

Associate Professor of Chicana/o Art History and Post Contact Art of Mexico

Dr. Cortez teaches courses in Modern and Contemporary Art as well as in Colonial Art of Mexico. She publishes in two fields: Contemporary Chicano/a Art and Post-Contact Art of Mexico. Her three most recent volumes include: Aztlán to Magulandia: The Journey of Chicano Artist Gilbert "Magu" Luján, co-edited with Hal Glicksman (University Art Galleries, University of California, Irvine/DelMonico Books•Prestel, Munich, London, New York, 2017); Carmen Lomas Garza (Los Angeles and Minneapolis: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the University of Minnesota Press, 2010), for which she was awarded first place in the category of Best Arts Book (English) at the 2011 International Latino Book Awards; and Death & the Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World co-edited with John Beusterien (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, Hispanic Issues Online).