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• 1 media/Screenshot_49.png media/3085ef6876a90b40_A.jpg 2019-12-08T13:57:24-08:00 Does This Art Provide Answers? 23 plain 2019-12-15T20:56:12-08:00

  
  To review, the questions that I asked going into this project were the following:

  1.     "How is art ‘Latinx’?"
  

  2.     "What is the role of Latinx art?"

  3.     "Who makes Latinx art?"

  I want to first address what the questions are asking before I begin my debrief on whether I have found answers to them. The first question asks of me, “What makes art Latinx,” and to that I have found art is Latinx when it visually portrays the Latinx experience as it is lived and described in literature. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua discusses her experience as an outsider since she has marginalized identities (84). Similarly, Jesus Colon’s Grandma, Please Don’t Come! mentions the contrasting ways of life between Americans and Latinx people (500). Such notions are expressed through the art made by Riojas and Flores in which women undergo isolation and make different choices than that of their American counterparts. In regards to question two, the role of Latinx art is to reframe these literary ideas into a visual medium as well as to amplify the narratives of Latinx individuals. While the artists add their own interpretation of what it means to be Latinx, their art always returns to central ideas of belonging, community, and identity. These themes are consistent in Latinx literature ranging from Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima to Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X. Anaya’s main character feels conflicted over two career paths and the significance of each to his family (49). Similarly, Acevedo shows how a person is influenced by the people and systems of power around them (3). More specifically, the art made by these two Latinx women in particular further illustrates the role of the Latinx feminist much like Borderlands/La Frontera describes the collective power of women despite language or country of origin differences (Anzaldua 76). At this moment, the third question remains unresolved. While the art analyzed so far is made by and for Latinx people, there is art that exists with similar qualities even though it is not necessarily made by a Latinx person. 
  
  This dilemma, of whether art can be called ‘Latinx’ despite its maker not identifying as Latinx, is one I intend to further explore. I will do so through one piece of artwork made by Ashley Lukashevsky, who does not explicitly identify as Latinx. Her Instagram account, which recognizes her as a “Mixed queer illustrating just futures,” has nearly ninety thousand followers. In a LA Weekly article, she discusses a relationship with Hawaii and no Latin American countries or descent from them. For these reasons, I will consider Lukashevsky as a non-Latinx artist. Though this remains unconfirmed, I argue that the very ambiguity about Lukashevsky potential identification as Latinx is reason alone for her to be labeled, in this text, as not being a Latinx person. This is because of the concept that, “The personal is political.” Should Lukashevsky in fact identify as Latinx, her decision to not associate her online presence with a Latinx identity decreases the visibility of Latinx artists rather than enhances it as Riojas and Flores do. My original understanding of Latinx art, that it is about the Latinx community, is extremely important here. I used this framework to choose one Lukashevsky piece that appears to involve Latinx the community. I will analyze this piece to identify if there are similarities to Riojas’s and Flores’s Latinx art. With my analysis, I hope to articulate more concrete answers to my three guiding questions.