Malcriadas’ Dona Sebastiana & Women Boxers

Start date: Friday, November 24, 2006
Event is ongoing: Until Saturday, December 16, 2006

Delilah Montoya’s work has always been focused on Chicano culture and this project continues by exploring the character of the bad girl, or "malcriada," who chooses to define herself as a strong, defiant force seeking her own unique path. Doña Sebastiana, a New Mexican folk icon, traditionally used in Northern New Mexican by the Penitential Brotherhood. Doña Sebastiana known simply as La Muerte is the allegorical icon for death. According to Mollie Garcia, Montoya’s mother, Sebastiana never wanted to be "Death" really all she wanted was love, if not love at least respect. What Sebastiana brings to the deathbed is good old fashion humanity that is she loves gossip and “Time” can be gained by occupying her with a little seedy personal history. Certainly she never understands why people fear her; for when she looks at herself in the mirror she is a beautiful diva but when we look at her she is a skeleton. San Sebastiana: Angel de la Muerte portrays a woman empowered and is the ultimate malcriada - that is, she is a very Bad Girl.

Women Boxers: The New Warriors will be presented in the large gallery and the exhibition and book project portrays professional female boxers as malcriadas. By crossing the ropes and getting into the ring, these professional athletes enter into the bastions of manliness to confront a brutal sport. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and the feminist movement gave them the right, and they willingly have taken it. Female boxers fight because they can – they are professionally trained and the boxing rules are now modified to allow women athletes to participate in this sanctioned combat. The exhibition is curated by Lilly Albritton, B.A. and MA in Art History from SMU.

Born in Texas and raised in the Midwest, Delilah Montoya later returned to New Mexico, the ancestral home of her mother’s family. Her work is grounded in the experiences of the Southwest and brings together a multiplicity of syncretic forms and practices from those of Aztec Mexico and Spain, to cross-border vernacular traditions, all of which are shaded by contemporary American customs and values. In her work she explores the unusual relationships that result from negotiating different strategies of understanding and representing the rich ways of life and thought found in the Southwest. Montoya’s numerous projects investigate cultural phenomena whether it is the spiritual rituals or questioning gender traditions she, always addresses and often confronting viewers’ assumptions.

Information from venue's website