Index of /Artemisa Clark

La clase de dibujo libre (2000-2004/2017/2018)

For this series of performances, I taught and posed for an unabashedly Chicanx/Mexican-American figure drawing class. Using jewelry, make up, and hair to clearly mark my body as Chicanx, I held poses based on Mexican-American and Mexican iconography. While songs from a playlist of old school Chicanx music filled the space, I asked members of the audience to join me onstage in the construction of tableauxs. Our bodies shook in a communal effort to embody cultural memories that can never be perfectly reperformed or held together, using this imperfection to create new images, which the audience is able to draw and take home.

My source images were as varied as an Aztec goddess, Selena, Brown Berets, and ASCO’s “Decoy Gang War Victim” (1975). I used historical, cultural, and popular images from across time periods to reflect the ways in which ideologies, expectations, and tradition interweave in our bodies when we perform cultural memory and identity.

It was inspired by a series of the same name performed by Ema Villanueva and Eduardo Flores from 2000 to 2004 in public spaces throughout Mexico City. I performed my versions twice, as public programming for "Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico," which was curated by Irene Tsatsos with Daniela Lieja Quintanar. For the first iteration in late 2017, I took over an already scheduled figure drawing class. My second Clase, which took place in early 2018, was part of "Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA.”