But nothing of the sort spices this exhibit. Other Tex-Mex artists, Luis Jimenez for example, allow their up-the-people art at least a shiver of defiance. If they wanted to be seen as wholly innocent and girlish, they wouldn't be pachucas. If you're going to paint pachuca girls with razor blades, as Lomas Garza does in her "Las Pachucas Razor Blade 'do" of 1993, you might as well include at least a tiny tone of menace. One flaw is the bitelessness of its political correctness. Because Mexican Americans deserve the same empowerment and pride and self-esteem that everybody else does in 1995, one has to be a grouch to grumble at the flaws of this good-willed art. So is deep affection for one's people and one's childhood, one's parents and one's culture. It helped to heal the wounds inflicted by discrimination and racism." What her critics "failed to see," Lomas Garza writes, "was that the art I was creating functioned in the same way as the salvila (aloe vera) plant when its cool liquid is applied to a burn or an abrasion. If their goody-goody glow seems excessively emollient, that isn't accidental, either. Some, in fact, were reproduced in "Family Pictures," published in 1990 by the Children's Book Press. If these friendly little pictures tend to have the look of friendly illustrations for little books for children, that isn't accidental. It's Carmen's sixth birthday party: Her birthday dress is pink and green she's wielding a baseball bat, trying to break open a blue fish-shape pinata. The painter and her sister wonder at the moon. Rogers has a neighborhood as benign as this. No drunken macho meanness disturbs the perfect kindness of this little Texas town. Despite the many details that Lomas Garza's paintings so lovingly depict - the specklings of white on the blue enamel pot bubbling on the stove, the key-ring on the nail beside the kitchen door, the doily on the dresser - these images of barrio life are never quite believable. Their countless little figures in their brightly colored clothes look like smiling dolls. Some 30 of her pictures are now on exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. They are very highly respected.") She'd conjure up a Tex-Mex heaven in her art. ("Curanderas," she explains, "know a lot about healing. She'd recall the local faith healer, the visiting curandera, banishing the flu by waving branches of rue. She'd remember all her neighbors, and the little lizards crawling up the window screens. She'd paint her grandfather at peace watering his maiz. She'd leave out all the bad stuff and put in just the good. She'd summon gilded memories of her childhood in Kingsville. Empowered by the movement, Lomas Garza had a mission now, and she would not be moved. "The anger, the pride and self-healing," Lomas Garza writes in her book "A Piece of My Heart," "had to come out as Chicano art - an art that was criticized by the faculty and white students as being too political, not universal, not hard-edge, not pop art, not abstract, not avant-garde, too figurative, too colorful, too folksy, too primitive, blah, blah, blah!" Let the white folk grumble. By the time she finished college, she'd decided what to paint. ("It would have been real cool," she writes, "when I was in high school to have known that way before Columbus invaded this hemisphere the Maya were playing a form of basketball wearing open-toe high top tennis shoes with rubber soles.") At 13, she'd determined that she would be an artist. It nourished her self-confidence and made her view with warmth the culture of her people. By the time she went to college, so the painter writes, she was introverted, angry, depressed and confused. White girls in the lunchroom made fun of her tortillas. In high school she was spanked for speaking Spanish in the halls. In grade school she was laughed at for the way she spoke English. Though she had it pretty rough growing up in Texas in a Kingsville barrio, you wouldn't know it from her art. Carmen Lomas Garza's paintings are relentlessly idyllic.
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