Consuelo Jimenez Underwood Pérez and Leimer

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

Art, Weaving, Vision LAURA E. PÉREZ and ANN MARIE LEIMER, editors

“Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s extraordinary body of work receives a richly detailed analysis in this comprehensive and nuanced anthology that brings out the layered, playful, and decolonial aspects of her innovative fiber art. A critical contribution to Chicanx art history, borderlands studies, and the history of textiles in the United States, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision, pulls together an impressive chorus of scholarly and poetic voices that sing to the true spirit of the artist’s work.”—JENNIFER A. GONZÁLEZ, coeditor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology

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, 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, María 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

Also by Laura E. Pérez

Eros Ideologies Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial

paper, $27.95tr/£20.99 978-0-8223-6938-7 / 2019

Chicana Art The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities

ART, WEAVING, VISION

LAURA E. PÉREZ AND ANN MARIE LEIMER / EDITORS

July 384 pages, 95 color illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1832-2 $29.95tr/£22.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1569-7 $109.95/£88.00

Photo by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza.

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 is a scholar and curator of Chicanx art.