Deep in the Heart of Chicana Art

A curandera (faith healer) uses a broom to sweep evil spirits away from a woman who is lying on a kitchen floor, surrounded by kneeling family members and a pot of incense.

Two teen-age girls scuffle outside a nightclub, kicking up dust and pulling out clumps of each others’ hair.

And 13 family members gather in a well-lit kitchen, each part of a well-organized assembly line in the endless preparation of traditional Christmas tamales.

Such are some of the scenes depicted in the art of Carmen Lomas Garza, a Texas-born Chicana whose mid-career retrospective of 47 paintings, etchings, altars and papel picados (paper cutouts) opens tonight at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery.

Organized by Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Tex., and scheduled to complete a seven-venue tour at the Oakland Museum in March, the show, called “Pedacito de Mi Corazon (A Little Piece of My Heart),” makes Lomas Garza the first Chicana to be the subject of a major traveling retrospective--an honor she accepts with relish. She hopes it will open doors for her peers, who after many years of fighting the double barriers of race and sex, appear finally to be gaining status.

“Actually, I think the females are now surpassing the men,” said Lomas Garza, now based in San Francisco, who was the sole Chicana and one of only three women featured in the landmark traveling exhibition “Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors,” which appeared at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1987 when mainstream doors first began to open for Chicano artists.

“It’s becoming easier because of the political pressure (forcing many previously Eurocentric institutions to offer multicultural programming), and also, my peers are now in positions where they can open up doors and help channel funding.”

In addition, she said, many Chicanas have grown tired of devoting themselves to community work, and are focusing more heavily on their artwork--something Chican o artists have done for years.

“As Chicanas, we’re translators of the culture,” she said. “Most of us have been busy at the alternative spaces, doing all the nitty-gritty work to keep them going, and our work has really lagged behind because of that. We’ve spent a lot of precious time having to do the political work, and haven’t been able to really sit down and concentrate on our artwork. It’s very hard to sit in your studio if you know, for instance, that there are kids out there that are not getting the right education. . . . But a lot of us have finally said, ‘OK, that’s enough, it’s time to concentrate on my artwork now.’ ”

Despite taking such a vow five years ago to concentrate solely on her artwork, Lomas Garza found that even with the current retrospective, she still was required to do much of her own legwork.

In Texas, for instance, she worked through the Hispanic Women’s Network to arrange several community events surrounding the exhibition, and even negotiated the contract with one of the show’s venues, Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, on her own.

“As a Chicana, I feel that I have to spend a lot of time educating people . . . about what they should do to expand their audience and involve the Chicano/Latino community. . . . It’s taken a lot of energy and time, and I don’t think a mainstream artist would have to do that kind of footwork.”

While she is far from being a prolific painter, spending anywhere from three to nine months on each piece, the body of work in “Pedacito” presents a wide sampling of Lomas Garza’s depictions of memories of her own childhood in Kingsville, Tex. The works are quite folksy, but at the same time incredibly intricate in their depiction of every blade of grass or strand of stray hair.

“The biggest gratification comes from seeing the Mexican-Americans, and especially the children, see the work and say, ‘That’s me’ or ‘I did that last week,’ ” said Lomas Garza, the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a 1990 California Arts Council fellowship, and author of a bilingual children’s book recounting the stories behind her paintings.

“I do the work primarily for the Chicanos to see their culture and that there’s something to be proud of. But I also do it for people of other cultures . . . to see and learn (about the Chicano culture) and realize that there are a lot of similarities and that the differences are not so threatening.”

In an introductory essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, Lomas Garza writes of experiences that led to her art-making career--instances where she and other Mexican-American children were punished with a paddle for speaking Spanish at school--at the same time that Anglo students were encouraged to walk around practicing new phrases learned in their Spanish classes.

As a result, she decided at age 13 to become an artist to “heal the wounds inflicted by discrimination and racism,” with her art serving “in the same way as the salvila (aloe vera) plant when its cool liquid is applied to a burn or an abrasion.”

Lomas Garza, who spent the past six months assembling a huge, two-room Day of the Dead installation at Smith College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, said she decided not to have children because being a mother would not leave her enough time for her art-making.

“I was 8 when I saw my first artist,” she reminisced with a smile, a sound of childlike wonder coming into her voice. “My mother made loteria cards--in pen and ink and in watercolor--and when I saw her doing them I thought it was magic. And I wanted to do the same thing.”

Lomas Garza said that she immediately began drawing compulsively, gathering up used notebook paper from classmates to get her through the summers.

“I taught myself how to draw by drawing everybody around me. If somebody was sleeping, or sweeping the floor, or whatever, I was drawing them on the back of my notebook paper. By the time I was finally able to take an art class (in her senior year of high school), I had stacks and stacks of drawings.”

Not surprisingly, the earliest work featured in the 19-year (1972-91) retrospective is Lomas Garza’s own loteria cards, which contain the first of her intricate monitos , or little figures, for which she is recognized.

Three of those early works are featured, along with a series of her remembrances from elementary and junior high school and two recent works from a new parallel series in which the artist deals for the first time with a make-believe world in tryptich-like depictions of her ideas of “Heaven and Hell.”

“The ‘Heaven and Hell’ series lets me give myself the chance to play with something that is more contemporary and give myself the chance to play with fantasy, or fantasia , so it’s not observation, but imagination. It also gives me a chance to play with lessons. For instance, that if you’re lazy, greedy or unloving, those are things that will cost you.”

In keeping with the 44-year-old artist’s desire that her art instruct viewers, many works are accompanied by explanatory text panels, such as the one with “Para la Cena (For Dinner),” which tells of the day Lomas Garza and her siblings entered the family back yard to find her mother violently strangling a chicken, and her own shock when she first realized how the chickens got from the yard into the chicken soup served at the dinner table.

“I have no qualms about using artwork as a tool to enlighten, educate and inform,” says Lomas Garza. “Because if you see my heart through my art, then you cannot discriminate against me and be disrespectful.”

At Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery, corner of West 80th Street and Loyola Boulevard, (310) 338-2880, through Dec. 12. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays and during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend.