Barbara Carrasco
Her work critiques dominant cultural stereotypes involving socioeconomics, race, gender and sexuality, and she is considered to be a radical feminist.
[1][7] Her experiences with being simultaneously perceived as not truly Mexican-American and being told to "take advantage of being light skinned" makes up of part of her artistic subject matter later on in life.
[2] However, her mother was also very protective of her girls, and she expected Carrasco to act as a role model of traditional femininity for her sisters.
[6] Some of the nuns, however, noticed and encouraged her talent, including Sister Mary Ann, who continued to stay in contact with Carrasco after she left school.
[2] During the summers, she and her sisters were part of a program that helped young people from the projects attend classes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
[1] Right after graduating from UCLA, Carrasco helped work on art for the Zoot Suit play, which later opened on Broadway.
[11] In the mid-1980s, Carrasco was commissioned to create a mural, The History of Los Angeles: A Mexican Perspective which led to a great deal of controversy.
The publicity generated from the controversy, however, helped Carrasco in some ways: she was chosen to go with a group of artists to the Soviet Union in 1985 and paint a mural in the Children's Museum in Yerevan, Armenia.
[6] In addition, the death of Cesar Chavez in 1993 created a sense of deep depression in Carrasco: she felt that there were not enough Chicano leaders and that few people could take his place.
[6] She is a key figure in this art movement as she is an activist working closely with Cesar Chavez, trying to help bring justice into communities that had been constantly ignored due to their ethnicity.
[1] By protesting within her artwork, Carrasco created a social change for the UFW Union and the Dolores Huerta Foundation.
He had attended one of Carrasco’s press conferences that viewed her artwork, Pesticides, in New York in 1989 which her work was shown in Times Square.
[6] Carrasco credits older Chicana artists, like Santa Barraza, with creating a "positive impact" on her work.
"[5] Carrasco was just 19 years old when she met Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and decided to work with him.
[8][10] Carrasco worked closely with Chavez to create flyers and banners for conventions, rallies, and supermarket demonstrations for the United Farm Workers.
[2] One of Carrasco's largest works, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, is a mural measuring 16 by 80 feet commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles in 1981.
[21] The city approved the sketches of the mural but when Carrasco began the process of painting it, the agency told her to remove fourteen images from the work that depicted incidents of discrimination directed at communities of color.
[7] Events depicted included the Japanese American internment, the whitewashing of Siqueiros's mural; América Tropical, and the Zoot Suit Riots.
Carrasco worked with three different historians to ensure that her information was accurate and conducted oral interviews with "city elders."
[21] After a decade in storage, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County put the Carrasco mural on display from March 2018 to August 2019.
In 2020, NHMLAC announced they were able to obtain "L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective" and, with the opening of NHMLA's new "Commons" entrance wing, the mural now has a permanent home.
[23] In response to the censorship of the L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, Carrasco created the serigraph, Self-Portrait (1985) at Self-Help Graphics.
