Lourdes
Primary
Antonia Guerrero
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1946–Cuernavaca, Mexico and New York, New York, present )
NationalityAmerican, North America
Place MadeNew York, New York, United States, North America
Date2005
MediumCharcoal drawing and mixed media
DimensionsFramed: 64 1/2 x 44 1/4 in. (163.8 x 112.4 cm)
Credit LineBlanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gilberto Cárdenas Collection, Gift of Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia, 2023.68
Rights Statement
Collection AreaPrints and Drawings
Object number2023.68
On View
Not on viewLourdes is an homage to a domestic worker whom Antonia Guerrero employed in Mexico. The artist here embraces a frenetic physicality, using her entire body to compose this large-scale work. By sewing and interlacing mixed media and natural objects in addition to the diverse mark-making and drawing techniques she utilizes throughout her composition, Guerrero challenges our preconceptions about creativity. She bases the central image on a photograph of Lourdes, reframing the portraiture genre’s long legacy of memorializing the elite. Instead, Guerrero commemorates and immortalizes an everyday person as a reflection of the hidden, and often forgotten, social strata of Mexico’s population that has been historically neglected by the political system. Lourdes opens a reflective space to argue for cultural and social equality that eludes our present reality.
Exhibitions
![Muchacho leyendo [Boy Reading]](/internal/media/dispatcher/15265/thumbnail)
![Niño [Child]](/internal/media/dispatcher/18180/thumbnail)
