Artist lecture response - Delilah Montoya

After attending her lecture, I found visiting artist Delilah Montoya to be quite an interesting individual. Her presentation on Chicana artwork by women seemed like a very specific and fascinating topic to explore, and was very representative of her purpose, interests, and identity as an artist; however, I felt that the information on this topic was rather poorly presented.

The only thing that I really remembered from her lecture without looking back at my notes was one of the first artists from her "Bad Girls" show who did a performance/instillation type piece involving a huge "tree of life" sculpture hanging from the ceiling as the main focus around which the performance was based. I found it interesting how this piece incorporated sculpture art with performance art, with several dancers dressed in costumes resembling Adam and Eve performing around the hanging tree. I also thought it was neat how the performance ended with a symbolic biting of the apples from the "tree of life" that hung above them. After hearing Delilah speak about this particular piece, I was able to imagine the actual performance, and I was very interested in seeing it done.

Another striking image that I took note of was the large digital piece by Alma Lopez of the Our Lady Guadalupe that Delilah began the presentation with. I liked this piece because, while it obviously had substantial religious meaning, it also dealt a lot with the specific cultural influence that Chicana women faced. This was especially interesting because of the empowerment that this image gave the women - it clearly celebrated their courage and vision to rise up and survive against things like racism, sexism, and masogyny, with many different hidden strengths that revealed themselves in the art work. In front of a piece of similar work done by a Chicana woman sat a label that said "Please resist the temptation to touch," which is something that I think very cleverly expresses and addresses women's rights, and also playes with the idea of an actual label in front of a work of art reminding viewers not to touch.

"Women abused by someone they know cannot get police protection."

I wrote down this quote from a large piece done on a huge piece of fabric containing hundreds of clippings from news accounts of violence against women, mostly because it really stood out to me as shocking and quite disturbing to think about. It really made me think about culutural differences between what I am used to and what others have to face, and how these things are significant influences for artistic expression in both cases.

Although the lecture presented many ideas about Delilah's curatorial work with the "Bad Girls" show about Chicana art work, I really was quite interested in her own work as a photographer and digital media artist, especially because I was under the impression that a good portion of the lecture would be about herself as an artist.