Nepantla Aesthetics: Applying New Mexican Art Criticism

This essay is an amplification and application of an aesthetic framework, nepantla, that emerges from New Mexican art history. The amplification is necessary because of the disproportionate attention to California Chicana/o/x artists in American and Chicana/o/x art histories, the latter to which the author has contributed. Though largely ignored by American and Chicana/o/x art histories, nepantla aesthetics account for the coterminous expression of traditionality and modernity. It illuminates art that critically reflects the structural realities of modern society, namely racialization, heteropatriarchy, and material precarity, through traditional epistemologies, methods, forms, and media. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, the essay examines three geographically dispersed and generationally distinct artists: Minnesota-based artist Dougie Padilla (b. 1948), Texas-born artist Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, and Portland-based artist V. Maldonado (b. 1976). Padilla creates calaveras (skulls) to access family memory and relations, using discarded materials to refuse the excess and consumerism of contemporary capitalism. Meza-DesPlas works with human hair to critique the fetishization of the female body, visualizing the intersection of racism, sexism, and agism as the orthodoxies of capitalism. V. Maldonado’s artistic practice itself is an embodiment of nepantla aesthetics, a declaration of their trans, queer, Indigenous, and Mexican subjectivity through art that “takes up space” in normative institutions. Rather than subordinate traditionality, nepantla aesthetics promotes a more capacious understanding of Chicana/o/x art, and by extension, art in the United States.