Event Details

Zoom Event: https://macalester.zoom.us/j/92227281150…

Join Chicago-based installation artist Yvette Mayorga in conversation with scholar and curator Jillian Hernandez as they discuss  “aesthetics of excess,” and femininity as radical iconography, both within the artist’s work and in broader contexts of contemporary racist violence. They will explore how signifiers of femininity often associated with consumerism and frivolity can perform political work. 

The conversation will draw on Hernandez’s recently published book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, which examines how the styles of working-class women and girls of color racialize them as deviant, while simultaneously being a source of cultural capital in the contemporary art world. Hernandez shows how Black and Latina women and girls make art with and about their bodies to resist respectability politics and sexual policing. In Mayorga’s artwork, color and decorative stylization are used to deploy and critique images of contemporary violence. 

About the Speakers

Dr. Jillian Hernandez is a scholar, community arts educator, curator, and creative working out of Gainesville, Florida. Her work is inspired by Black and Latinx life and imagination, and is invested in challenging how working-class bodies, sexualities, and cultural practices are policed through gendered tropes of deviancy and respectability. She studies Blackness and Latinidad as relational formations and attends to the political, cultural, and communal dynamics of aesthetic production. Dr. Hernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies Research at the University of Florida. Her book, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, was released Fall 2020 with Duke University Press.

Yvette Mayorga is a multimedia installation artist. She boldly engages viewers in socio-political dialogue centered on the immigrant experience in the U.S. by fusing confectionary aesthetics with references of familial labor. Mayorga holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mayorga has exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum, EXPO Chicago, Untitled Art Fair, Art Design Chicago, LACMA's Pacific Standard Time, the Chicago Artists Coalition, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and GEARY Contemporary. Mayorga has attended the Fountainhead Residency, BOLT Residency, and is a recipient of the MAKER Grant. In 2020 Mayorga's work, "Meet me at the Green Clock," was commissioned by Johalla Projects as part of Andy Warhol's exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

She has been featured in ARTFORUM, Artnet, Art News, Chicago Magazine, Hyperallergic, NewCity, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, and on the cover of the Chicago READER. Her work has been featured in arts advocacy conversations like the Arts Alliance Illinois. In 2020 the DePaul Art Museum announced their acquisition of Mayorga’s “A Vase of the Century 1 (After Century Vase c. 1876)” into their permanent collection. 

This program is a part of Yvette’s remote-residency and current project Monuments of the Forgotten, on view now at instagram.com/lawwarschawgallery.