Portrait of the Artist as Virgin of Guadalupe,1978
Margaret F. Steward: Our Lady of Guadalupe,1978
Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady Of Guadalupe, 1978
Because I feel living, breathing women also deserve the respect and love lavished on Guadalupe, I have chosen to transform the image.
-Yolanda López
Yolanda López’s Guadalupe Series presents three small paintings full of vibrant colors. In each, a woman, of different ages, is the central figure while a yellow halo radiates from each and contrasts with the blue background. These are Lopez’s best-known works and were created while she was a student at UCSD. López participated in the Chicano Movement while living in San Francisco and there she noticed that there weren’t many depictions of Chicana women. One prevalent female figure in Mexican culture was the Virgen de Guadalupe. The Virgen presented an idealized version of womanhood and López began researching and deconstructing its meanings. In her Guadalupe series, she depicts herself, her mother, and her grandmother with iconic elements of the Virgin and of their personal lives. The figures have strong presences that defy the stereotypical ideas of Mexican and Chicana women.
From this tryptic, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe became the most widely circulated image of the Chicano movement era, appearing on the covers of books and in landmark exhibitions over the years. Although in reproduction the work is often seen alone, the oil pastel is part of a “triptych” that includes portraits of López’s mother and grandmother, also depicted as Guadalupe. Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe shows the artist’s mother seated at her industrial sewing machine—a working woman, engaged in labor—while Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe offers an unusual representation of an older woman—a subject rarely depicted in popular culture or Western art—sitting placidly but holding a knife in one hand and the skin of a diamondback rattlesnake in the other. Together, the three portraits distill the artist’s experiments in collage, presenting an expansive vision of Guadalupe, defined by multiplicity: she is shown in the prime of life and in old age, and at work, at rest, and at play. Working from studies and other source photographs, López used quick marks and bright colors to impart energy and luminosity to the portraits. The radiant triptych was meant to inspire reappraisals of selfhood, inviting identification with new, extraordinary visions of ordinary Chicana womanhood.
In her best-known work, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978), López depicts herself wearing running shoes. The shoes reflect her identity as a long-distance runner. The shoes also represent the mobility of women who are freed from passive, male-dominated cultural constraints. She is wearing the Virgin Mary’s star-patterned mantle as “an embodiment of physical agency and defiant joy”.
Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978) is one of the most iconic artworks to emerge from the Chicano Movement, López’s Portrait challenges the colonial and patriarchal origins of the Guadalupe iconography, transforming the symbol into one of revolutionary feminist optimism.