Guisela Latorre: Latorre highlights the ways in which Chicano/a artists address issues of sexuality, gender and exclusion from a perspective outside the patriarchal norm.

Alma Lopez: By depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe as a modern woman, Alma Lopez incited a great uproar amongst religious men who deemed the work sacrilegious and offensive, raising issues of context, censorship and modern identities.

Alma Lopez’s Our Lady raises distinct issues of censorship and the role of the museum. Wielding complete curatorial control over a body of works gives museums the right to choose which works are shown and, fundamentally, which are not. In regard to Silencing the Lady, critical voices vehemently rejected the appropriation of the iconography of the Virgin Mary. The so-called offensive nature of the work depended upon the way in which the artist re-appropriated the image of the Virgin Mary and depicted a modern, sexualized version of the cultural and religious icon. Furthermore, intellectual and scholarly camps voiced resounding support for both the artist and Our Lady in resistance to censorship, but also in support of the ways in which the work incorporated women into the cultural narrative. The work thus highlights Guisela Latorre’s recognition of the ways in which the patriarchy excludes anyone they deem other. This distinction therefore highlighted gender, race and class as modes of exclusion and denial. By showing the Virgin in this way, the artist complicated religious imagery, but more importantly, the image confronted and undermined the whiteness and masculinity of the offended men. In this scenario, the exhibiting museum could easily have removed the so-called offensive work, but instead opted to keep the work on display. However, in the context of the museum (and not, say, a church), the act of censorship holds no grounds.