A Book Discussion and Artist Talk

A book discussion with Georgina Guzman, Alma Lopez and Alicia Gaspar de Alba published by UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center 2011.

A discussion about two books:
Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade and La Frontera, edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Georgina Guzman, and
Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s “Irreverent Apparition”, (UT Press, 2011), a series of essays about the history of Guadalupe and what her pervasive imagery means in lives of Mexicans and hispanic people in America, edited by Georgina Guzman and her sprouse queer Chicana artist Alma López. Lady of Controversy includes a 46 minute DVD.

Art Censorship Controversy

Alma López’s small digital collage “Our Lady” caused a huge art censorhip controversy, when exhibited a decade before this book discussion took place in 2011. Alma explains in the introduction of her recent (2014) crowd funding art project, Luchadoras – Mexican Female Masked Wrestlers by Alma Lopez: “For over a decade I have been involved in an international art censorship controversy. The controversy began in 2001 over a photobased digital print titled Our lady on exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of conservative Catholics organized to censor my work from that museum, and a decade later a few hundred organized to remove that same print from an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California and from an exhibition at the University College Cork in Ireland.”
– The controversy about this work continues… but Alma López has moved on to new art projects.

The discussion of Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s “Irreverent Apparition with Georgina Guzman and Alma López starts at 33:26 (see above video).