Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López's “Irreverent Apparition”

Chicana Matters Series

by Alicia Gaspar De Alba (Editor), Alma López (Editor)

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition. Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America). Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Art

344 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.

She is from the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where she lived until age 27. She has a B.A. (1980) and a M.A. (1983) in English from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico (1994). She started her doctoral work at the University of Iowa in 1985 but left after a year, then lived in Boston, Massachusetts for four years. In 1994, she was hired as one of six founding faculty members of the then César Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She has published and organized a conference on the Juarez murders. Alicia Gaspar de alba also keeps a regular blog called "Cooking With Sor Juana".

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Shimon de Valencia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have really enjoyed this read. Bringing together some of the leading Latina/o , Chicana/o and Southwestern scholars, what emerges is a well thought out book that moves beyond the scandal and hyperbole. What emerges are the aesthetics of a spiritual politics which represents a transformation within the Southwest. A purely Native feminism emerges that deserves closer examination. I have come through a door into a whole new world of understanding. Alma Lopez and Patricia Gaspar de Alba have managed to continue the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Laura Perez and the other trailblazers who began to speak in an authentic American feminist voice which speaks of the complexity and vibrancy of the American Southwest,