Indigeneity and Embodied Knowledge in the Art of Linda Vallejo
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, UCLA, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2025
by Charlene Villaseñor Black
Los Angeles, CA
Full Essay
This essay is inspired by her recent solo show at the Parrasch Heijnen gallery in Los Angeles, Linda Vallejo: Select Works, 1969–2024 (August 17–September 21, 2024), as well as the artist herself and previous scholarship.
“Vallejo’s embodied knowledge of Indigenous cultures, gained through her participation in ceremonia and danza, and her solidarity with contemporary Native Americans in the United States have produced a unique point of view and artistic practice.”Expressions of indigeneity have been a hallmark of artist Linda Vallejo’s (b. 1951) creative output throughout her career. Informed by her background, personal life, and political commitments, these visual references date back to her earliest work, including that done in graduate school in the late 1970s. While it is not unusual for a Chicanx artist to reference Native cultures, Vallejo’s particular means of articulating indigeneity are unusual. This brief commentary focuses on the centrality of indigeneity in her work—from her earliest expressions to later, more abstract representations—and on her early ecofeminist works, which are intimately tied to her Chicana Indígena identity.”
Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black is the first Loevner Fellow & Tutor in History of Art at Worcester College. She is professor in the Art of the Americas in Oxford’s Department of the History of Art.
Professor Villaseñor Black is a world-renowned authority on the art of Central and South America in the early modern period, as well as of contemporary Latino/a art across the Americas. She currently chairs the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she has been a full professor since 2014.
As a scholar of the highest distinction, with impressive records of publication and grant capture, Professor Villaseñor Black brings to Oxford her research on the politics of religious art and global exchange. Actively engaged in the Chicana/o art scene, her upbringing as a working-class, Catholic Chicana from Arizona forged her identity as a border-crossing early modernist and inspirational teacher.