Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s artwork is marked by her compassionate and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues, from immigration and environmental precarity to the resilience of Indigenous ancestral values and the necessity of decolonial aesthetics in art making. Drawing on the fiber arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminist art, and Indigenous fiber- and loom-based traditions, Jimenez Underwood’s art encompasses needlework, weaving, painted and silkscreened pieces, installations, sculptures, and performance. This volume’s contributors write about her place in feminist textile art history, situate her work among that of other Indigenous-identified feminist artists, and explore her signature works, series, techniques, images, and materials. Redefining the practice of weaving, Jimenez Underwood works with repurposed barbed wire, yellow caution tape, safety pins, and plastic bags and crosses Indigenous, Chicana, European, and Euro-American art practices, pushing the arts of the Americas beyond Eurocentric aesthetics toward culturally hybrid and Indigenous understandings of art making. Jimenez Underwood’s redefinition of weaving and painting alongside the socially and environmentally engaged dimensions of her work position her as one of the most vital artists of our time.

Contributors. Constance Cortez, Karen Mary Davalos, Carmen Febles, M. Esther FernÁndez, Christine Laffer, Ann Marie Leimer, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Robert Milnes, Jenell Navarro, Laura E. PÉrez, Marcos Pizarro, VerÓnica Reyes, Clara RomÁn-Odio, Carol Sauvion, Cristina Serna, Emily Zaiden

Laura E. PÉrez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial and Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities, both also published by Duke University Press.

Ann Marie Leimer is Professor of Art at Midwestern State University and a scholar and curator of Chicanx art.