Grappling with the craft of Mariana Williamson de Coronel: resilience or extraction

Multiple disciplines actively support the invisibility of Mariana Coronel’s (1850-1918) life and art. Chicana/o/x studies’ paradigm of resistance overlooks an elite, California residents, particularly late 19th-century biracial women such as Coronel. Art history’s quest for virtuosity ignores her paintings and textiles, and patriarchal and racial norms classify her creativity as craft and thus, a low art form. Yet, bringing her art to light cannot ignore the extractive methods and practices she used among Native Americans in California and the appropriation of Indigenous aesthetics, both of which are at odds with the recuperative approach in Latinx and feminist studies.

This presentation grapples with the life and art of Mariana Williamson de Coronel, who was a major figure in bringing the Antonio F. Coronel Collection to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Mariana’s life as an artist fits uncomfortably between restorative Chicana and feminist history that celebrates her art and agency and Indigenous epistemologies that question her extractive methods. The paper explores these tensions due to interdisciplinary analysis, even as it grapples with a method that celebrates and acknowledges her needlework, textiles, and other crafts made for her home but preserved for the public.