@ the Cheech

EXHIBITION ON VIEW: August 31, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Location: Second floor

This exhibition of rediscovered artworks, process pieces, and archival materials charts the evolution of creative projects by Yolanda López from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Curated by her archivist, Angelica Rodriguez, and her son, Rio Yañez, this body of work reveals López’s inquisitive approach to artistic mediums with daring and influential sensibilities that emerged in her practice through life experiences, research, and community activism. Included in the exhibit are studies for many of López’s iconic projects, such as the Guadalupe series, Three Generations: Tres Mujeres, and Women’s Work is Never Done as well as her political posters, photography, experiments with Xerox, and her final projects.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Yolanda López (1942–2021) was born in San Diego and became one of the most important Chicana artists and activists of her generation. Her formation can be traced to her student activism as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and her ongoing role as a cultural worker within the Chicano civil rights movement. She was a founding member of Los Siete de la Raza, a Black Panther-backed movement that galvanized San Francisco’s Latino/a/x community and produced works of protest art. She later played a significant role in the San Francisco Bay Area working as the educational director for the Mission District Cultural Center and as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, Mills College, the California College of the Arts, and other Bay Area colleges. López received the National Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and a Latinx Artist Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2021. Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is her first solo museum exhibition.

Yolanda@ucsdstudio, 1977. Courtesy of the Yolanda López Legacy Trust.