Reading Craft Book Event—Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision

Please join the Craft in America Center for an online presentation and discussion with editors Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer on their book Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision. The book was awarded the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publishing Grant.

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.

The book is available for purchase directly from the Duke University Press or your preferred bookseller.

You can preview the book’s introduction here. And find a discount coupon here.

About the editors

Laura Elisa Pérez is professor in the Program of Chicanx Latinx Studies and the Department of Ethnic Studies, and since 2018-19, is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas Latinx Research Center, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and of the Department of Women’s Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies. Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), a work in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities. Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial was published by Duke University Press in the fall of 2019 and received a Book Award Honorable mention from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies in 2020. She is currently co-curating with María Esther Fernández a major retrospective of the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive which will open spring of 2023, and editing the exhibition catalog for “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory.” 

Ann Marie Leimer is Professor of Art at the Juanita and Ralph Harvey School of Visual Arts at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Her published work has appeared in the journals Afterimage, Chicana/Latina Studies, The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies (JOLLAS), and Religion and the Arts and in the books Beyond Heritage, Border Crossings, Chican@ Critical Perspectives and Praxis, New Frontiers in Latin American Borderlands, Tina Fuentes: Marcando el relámpago, LatinX: Artistas de Tejas, Voices in Concert: In the Spirit of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Los Maestros: Early Explorers of Chicano Identity. She has curated several exhibitions of Chicana/o/x art including “¡Adelante Siempre! Recent Work by Southern California Chicana Photographers,” “Chicano Photographer: The 1970s from a Chicano’s Perspective,” and “Globe, AZ: A Community at the Crossroads.” Leimer serves on the National Advisory Board for Mexican American Art Since 1848, a research initiative inaugurated by Karen Mary Davalos and Constance Cortez in 2016, which hosts a searchable digital platform (MAAS1848.umn.edu) and will produce a multi-volume book, Adjacent Imaginaries.

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