In Her Bag: Yvette Mayorga’s First Solo Museum Exhibition is a Declaration of Latina Artist Autonomy
Figure 1: Artist portrait courtesy of Yvette Mayorga.
Artist Yvette Mayorga’s first solo museum exhibition What A Time To Be, currently on view at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas through October 15th, 2023 marks a significant moment in Latina feminism and contemporary art. Consisting of new and site-specific works created exclusively for the occasion, which required a major investment of resources from The Momentary, the exhibition declares that this Latina artist from a working-class background with no gallery representation is securely in her bag. Mayorga takes her place in the art historical canon and claims this success unapologetically in the work The Brunette Latinx Self-Portrait, After Francois Boucher’s The Brunette Odalisque c.1745 (2022), which stages an encounter between the museumgoer and the Latina as both artist and muse. While the exhibition features many works that pay homage to members of her family, it includes this rare self-portrait of the artist in the manner of a rococo nude to set the tone for the rest of the show; we are confronted with the maker and the visionary upon entering the first gallery.
Figure 2: Yvette Mayorga, The Brunette Latinx Self-Portrait, After Francois Boucher’s The Brunette Odalisque c.1745 (2022). Acrylic nails, false eyelashes, collage, plastic rings, plastic nail charms, rhinestones, car wrap vinyl, and acrylic piping on canvas. 60 x 122 x 5 in. Courtesy of the artist.
In an art world context that continues to marginalize Latina artists, Mayorga’s self-portrait is a taking up of space that is at once vulnerable and inaccessible. While the rococo painting on which it is based features a feminine body on display for voyeuristic male pleasure, Mayorga’s body is situated in a context that foregrounds her conceptual process and emotional state. The figure reclines nude in what appears to be a moment of respite from work. A laptop is open that displays some of the source imagery that appears in her practice; her body and surroundings are punctuated by images of sad faces and broken hearts. While she is nude, her body is denaturalized with skin painted pink and her expressionless face gazes at the viewer, making them subject to her look as well. Mayorga’s citational practice of the rococo is a performance of pastiche that utilizes a visual language of power and privilege to tell different stories. In this case, it is the story of a Latina artist using visual means to explore the heartbreak of colonial violence and its afterlives, along with self and communal love.
Figure 3: Installation view of Bedroom After 15th (2022) at The Momentary. Courtesy of The Momentary.
What A Time To Be articulates a vision for using memory and community as a radical resource in our current dystopian context, and suggests femininity and the aesthetics of mass consumption as potential avenues for alternate ways of finding meaning in an oppressive world. The artist has infused the institutional art space with what I call in my book the aesthetics of excess, those working-class Black and Latinx styles of being, dressing, and living that revel in visual abundance and refuse shame and assimilation. For example, the installation Bedroom After 15th (2022), based on the artist's childhood bedroom, is dripping with gold and sumptuous pinks, objects covered in thickly applied paint, Y2K aesthetics, and a girls’ bicycle customized with hand-piped gold and pink paint, plastic roses, and butterflies. Like the Chicana artists who precede her, such as Amalia Mesa-Bains and Carmen Lomas Garza, Mayorga’s gaze centers on the everyday practices and styles of Mexican American people, and primarily the domestic and body adornment practices of women and girls. This line of Chicana feminist art production located power in gendered vernacular rituals, and it finds contemporary life in Mayorga’s practice, which adds the material culture of contemporary girls and women to the mix with objects like strip lashes, Telfar bags, and acrylic nails.
What A Time To Be occupies a large footprint at the Momentary, with the exhibition taking up several galleries that cohere through Mayorga’s signature bubble-gum pink wall paint and a Versailles-inspired checkerboard floor pattern that snakes through the show. Part palace, part toy box, the exhibition is layered with the artist’s signature iconography of heart-shaped cell phones, hands with long fingernails, and Jeeps, but with innovations that bring them to a larger scale. The icons from the ornate, cake-like canvases that brought her practice critical attention in 2017 leap from the picture plane onto the gallery floor as sculptures, pulling the viewer into an embodied relationship with the work. For example, the entrance to the artist’s Bedroom After the 15th is flanked by two sculptures, Palma 1 and Palma 2 (2022), who can be read as protective guards. The sculptures are fashioned to appear like Ixtle, the agave and palm tree fibers that Mayorga’s family crafted into capes called China de Palma prior to their migration from México to the United States. Mayorga anthropomorphizes the fibers to appear like puppet-like sentries with large eyes. Palma 1 surveys the viewer and exhibition space while simultaneously holding up a hand mirror to gaze at itself. The gendered and racial politics of surveillance has been a long-standing interest of Mayorga’s as she has addressed the policing of Latinx migrants and their homes by the state, and the internalized gaze that Latina girls apply to themselves as they negotiate their visibility and invisibility in the U.S. cultural sphere. Thus, the bedroom in Mayorga’s practice is a fraught space of respite for Latina girls but also a site where self-gazing could be violent and where the state could intrude at any time.
Figure 4: Installation view of Palma 1 (2022) and Palma 2 (2022) at The Momentary. Courtesy of The Momentary.
Figure 5: Detail of Palma 1 (2022) at The Momentary. Courtesy of The Momentary.
The Palma sculptures reference the severing of cultural tradition, as Mayorga’s family had to take up manual labor rather than use their hands for craft upon arriving to the U.S., but they also articulate the creation of new cultural identities through consumption, as the sculptures’ bodies are adorned with intricate nail art, tattoos of Tweety Bird, and bedazzled cell phones, referencing Mayorga’s generational vantage point. The Palmas’ animated, outstretched arms and hands appear joyful, but their bodies are held in gated enclosures that, despite being cheery and ornamental, keep them from moving. The sculptures can be read as a metaphor for Latina being in the 21st century, straddling dying traditions and emerging innovations while negotiating self-expression and bodily constriction, consuming and making.
What A Time To Be arises from a wider cultural movement of reclaiming racialized femininity as a radical idiom by artists of color in recent years such as Pamela Council, who used acrylic nails to pay homage to our collective survival of the pandemic and post-Trump politics in A Fountain for Survivors, and Kenya (Robinson), whose gold hair processing caps in BLACK OF ENTITLEMENT (2021) invite a consideration of how Black beauty practices have metaphysical properties that sustain the self and the collective (see Omise’eke Natasha Tinsely’s new book The Color Pynk for a brilliant analysis of the politics of 21st century femme of color cultural production). Survival, beauty, pain, climate change, and familial ties are explored in What A Time To Be through Mayorga’s distinct melding together of European art historical references, images culled from social media scrolls, and family photos sent via text to Mayorga during quarantine. These disparate elements merge and play intimately through Mayorga’s confectionary aesthetics, namely her pastry piping bag method of applying acrylic paint to objects and canvases and her visual lexicon of femininity and rasquache aesthetics. Polly-pocket style melds with images of Nike Cortez, and Hello Kitty meets Fragonard.
Figure 6: Yvette Mayorga, The Reenactment with Nike Air Jordans, After “The Last Supper”, 2022. Acrylic nails, Nike shoes, false eyelashes, collage, plastic ring, plastic gummy bears, cherry nail rhinestones, rhinestones, car wrap vinyl, and acrylic piping on canvas. 64 x 72 x 5 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Like artists who traffic in the aesthetics of excess such as Kehinde Wiley, Mayorga’s paintings place her family members in atmospheres of power and leisure. Considering the politics of labor and “respectable citizenship” for immigrants through dominant U.S. narratives of hard work and sacrifice, Mayorga fashions an alternate mode of belonging for Latinx people that emphasizes leisure, such as in her painting Resting Scrolling, After Francois Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour (2022), where her sister occupies the position of Madame de Pompadour as she amuses herself on a cell phone. In another painting based on the iconography of The Last Supper, Mayorga’s young nieces and nephews gather around to contemplate the sublime beauty of a pair of Nike Air Jordans. Abundance and consumption in these works serve as alternate modes for declaring a place in the U.S. for these Latinx youth who are navigating post-pandemic life and what appears to be a bleak future. For example, the works Resting Gurl 1 and Resting Gurl 2 (2022), feature portraits of the artist’s nieces holding cell phones displaying images of the earth on fire, referencing the climate crisis.
Figure 7: Installation view of Resting Gurl 1 (2022) and Resting Gurl 2 (2022) at The Momentary. Courtesy of The Momentary.
While addressing urgent political issues, Mayorga’s What A Time To Be employs the approach that has made her work so compelling to audiences, it allows the viewer to linger in ornamentation and have a respite from the world while reminding us of what it takes to get through it, together.
Figure 8: Author selfie at What A Time To Be at The Momentary. Courtesy of Jillian Hernandez.
Jillian Hernandez studies the autonomous aesthetics and sexualities of Black and Latinx people. Her scholarship crosses the fields of art history, performance, gender, ethnic, Latinx, and Black studies, and is informed by her work as a community arts educator, curator, and cultural producer. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, published by Duke University Press, traces how the body practices and art making of Black and Latinx women and girls are intertwined, and how their creative work complicates conventional notions of cultural value and sexual respectability. She is an Associate Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research at the University of Florida.