Carmen Lomas Garza
Picturing the Familiar

Alana Hernandez (Edited by)

9781477334416, University of Texas Press

Hardback, published 30 June 2026

168 pages, 90 color illus.
28.6 x 22.9 x 2 cm, 0.454 kg

Exhibition catalogue of the life's work of a renowned Chicana artist.

Carmen Lomas Garza, born in the United States in 1948, is one of the most important artists working in the country today. As an artist, activist, and educator, Garza is a central figure in the Chicano Movement in South Texas but is rarely considered within larger narratives about movements around the country. Her work, marked by vivid and detailed representations of daily aspects of the lives of Mexican Americans in South Texas and beyond, is subversive and radical in its simplicity. The artist's images of tamaladas, cake walks, curanderas, among others, show Mexican American communities in all their humanity, historically left out of the conversation of art of the United States.

This collection of essays and reproductions of her work accompany an exhibition that significantly reassesses Garza's career within the broader cultural landscape of Chicana/o/x art, and includes contemporaries who worked alongside the artist at various points in her career. Her oeuvre traverses a range of media including works on paper, installation, painting, and sculpture. This catalogue spans several decades of the artist's practice, beginning with her relationship with El Movimento in 1960s and 1970s South Texas, to vernacular work produced in the 1980s and 1990s alongside several Chicana artists, as well as her contemporary work in the San Francisco Bay Area.