Leslie is an artist/painter who expresses visual narratives of her own story as a Latin American woman. Her research work includes her role as educator and curator alongside an artistic practice of making works. She writes, “My emphasis is about my own lived experiences within the U.S. as a Latina and my travel to Cuba. I engage with concepts of hybrid identities, psychological and emotional traveling, and post-immigrant generations.” Sotomayor articulates the struggles and challenges of other Latin American women artists. She represents an unique commonality–“lived experiences as a Latina woman and all the fluid and multiple things that my identity means.” Her identity–their identity.
Journey into Sotomayor’s 2015 site-specific installation, “Reconciling the Waters.
I want to take you in through one of her works to experience of living within borders. From the 2015 site specific installation “Reconciling the Waters,” exhibited at Pennsylvania State University. The installation, ” is Sotomayor’s bridging through bodies of waters of my ancestors migration from the Mediterranean to Cuba and to the United States.”
Resources for this podcast include the writings of Leslie C. Sotomayor. Click link to learn more about the 2015 exhibition “Reconciling the Waters” and please follow Leslie on Instagram @art_by_lcs. Heartfelt thanks to you Leslie for opening me up to the writings of Gloria Anzaldua and her seminal book: Borderlands: La Frontera.
Script: In the story of Western Art, female artists in the late 1960s from the United States, began to focus on women’s lives and experiences. And in a male-dominated art world, they projected female perspectives on the female nude in art and the inequality that pervaded art and society. Feminist artists and their art “encouraged viewers to question cultural injustices in the hope of effecting change, to combat some inequality, and to make female artists more visible. Feminist art is often made with materials that have historically been associated with women, such as textiles, or with media that has rarely been used by men, such as performance and video, to contrast with the traditionally male-dominated art forms of painting and sculpture.
Within this feminist movement, however, not all women are represented. Some were overlooked including Black and Latin American women. In 1971, “Where We At” Black Women Artists (WWA) a collective formed to provide opportunities for black women artists, marginalized by the predominantly male Black Art Movement, the largely white feminist and feminist art movement as well as the mainstream art world. Founded by Dinga McCannon, Faith Ringgold and Kay Brown, their solution from exclusion “was for the artists to establish support systems for each other and to eliminate the barriers keeping their art and ideas from entering the world. Latin American women too experienced the flagrant marginalization by those in power who excluded women and art made by Latin Americans.
For me what is so fascinating, is even within the Feminist Art Movement, pioneered by women, Black and Brown women are segregated from the art history narrative.To be honest, I did not always have this deep awareness of seeing the art story from the perspective of Black and Latin American women. I was entrenched through my studies to see the art story through a mostly marginalized lens–even when it is inclusive of women. And it is a topic I want to explore on the podcast today alongside my honored guest Leslie C Sotomayor. She is the Assistant Professor in Art Education at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania–she is an artist and in 2020 received her dual PhD in Art Education and Women’s Studies.
Leslie is an artist/painter who expresses visual narratives of her own story. Her research work includes her role as educator and curator.” She writes, “My emphasis is about my own lived experiences within the U.S. as a Latina and my travel to Cuba. I engage with concepts of hybrid identities, psychological and emotional traveling, and post-immigrant generations.”
“Artists many times desire to remain attached to their original or ancestral homeland. This remembrance manifests in various ways, including the use of art. Diaspora encourages or deems necessary the introduction of new forms of the arts into culture and society.” The term Diaspora comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “to scatter about.” And that’s exactly what the people of a Diaspora do — they scatter from their homeland to places across the globe, spreading their culture as they go.
Sotomayor actively maintains a link to her parent’s homelands of Cuba and Puerto Rico through heritage, art and research, it impacts her identities in complex and multiple ways. She looks through a feminist art perspective to explore the various ways that she crosses between cultures and experiences. She examines her self-identity by mapping her crossings into her studio art, practice and research.
What I am curious about is the ways the visual arts engage conversations of Diaspora? How it can visual document her experiences and what does it show me, the viewer?
Sotomayor thinks she “straddles two places, Cuba, her mother’s homeland and Puerto Rico, her father’s homeland, and the gap in-between is representative of her work.” I live within the waterways. I am met with resistance and contradictions; these are the walls (patriarchy, silencing, discrimination, and displacement) that stand to keep out the waters. Despite this I seep and cross as I go back and forth.”
In Sotomayor’s studio and in her artistic practice: pieces of fabric represent fragments of her life which are sewn together by hand. Colored threads become symbols. Red threads symbolize my blood line. She says, “As I sew the fabric together I am creating borders and boundaries through the seams. Again, a back and forth movement is happening as I sew in and out of the fabric suturing together my life and my history. The act of back and forth stitching is the crossing. Often the fabric or materials are painted or stained in shades of blue, referencing the waterways. These metaphors are accurate as they illustrate the ways that crossing happens in my life and identity and their manifestation through my studio work. Living in the borders is hard because of the conflicts that arise where the water meets the gate and where the sewing punctures the fabric to create a stitch.
I want to take you in through one of her works to experience of living within borders. From the 2015 site specific installation “Reconciling the Waters,” exhibited at Pennsylvania State University. The installation, ” is Sotomayor’s bridging through bodies of waters of my ancestors migration from the Mediterranean to Cuba and to the United States.”
There is a website (I will add to the podcast notes and include on my website) that both describes the installation but also through images illustrates the creation of the work, from suturing fabric, to staining it, to the culmination or bringing it into the space. What we see is fabric, “stained, torn, stretched, layered fabric,” what Sotomayor calls a “stream of voices trying to reconcile within my body and spirit.
Sutured within the work are pieces of her hair, the colors “staining” the work are glorious deep blues and blue-greens and some reddish-pink the artist. Colors are saturated into the fabric, her paintbrush a mop. The culmination of pieces are further sewn together in the gallery space-there are deep folds and creases–it reminds me of a waterfall, the surface of the water’s flow is a cascade of just colors. In one of the details you can see ringlets of her hair, seemingly float atop those speckled blues and blue greens.
I want to read a passage from the exhibition that so beautifully gives a voice to the overall work–Sotomayor is so articulate.
“Since my girlhood, daughter of my Cuban mother, I have thirsted for her past, trails from Cuba to the United States. My keen ears listening in on family stories as I secretly had tried to weave them together in my heart and make sense of her incredible strength. It was in 2011 that a dormant dream of visiting my mother’s birth land of Cuba came to fruition for me. For 21 days I would be nestled on the island, marking an inexplicable moment in my life. With an open heart I embraced Cuba, it’s culture, rhythm, smells, people, history, and present condition. Having my mother present throughout my trip in spirit; her face, her voice, and the fragmented pieces of her life story. I cried, basked in the sun, meditated to the ocean sounds, and met my maternal family for the first time.”
I read and re-read that passage several times and after each reading, I looked back at the images of the installation–Sotomayor’s description gives a new shape to the work–the drapery becomes or shifts for me–the waterways, the stories of her family are unified into the work==it transforms into a more figural object–it is not just a body of water, a geographical place–Sotomayor becomes one with her homeland, with her lineage.
From Sotomayor’s personal experience, her ways of seeing the world, or expressing it visually does not conform or follow the narrative of the artistic traditions in the story of Western art. Because that story as I noted earlier is not voiced by a broader collective of voices. Sotomayor notes the “gap, absence where I am not represented in institutions that I am often participating with. I have felt this gap many times before in my own studio work where some of my professors may not necessarily understand my work or where I am coming from, consequently, my work is defined as being heavily into identity politics. This has been a struggle for me. I cannot escape my lived experiences as a Latina woman and all of the fluid and multiple things that my identity means. I am retracing my ancestry and family roots from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean by painting fragmented maps of migration and my own journeys.
Sotomayor articulates so well the struggles and challenges of other Latin American women artists. She represents an unique commonality–“lived experiences as a Latina woman and all the fluid and multiple things that my identity means.” Her identity–their identity. And they have been enormously influential in the world of art. The one Latina artist that is globally recognized is Frida Kahlo and well deserved. “She is known for painting emblematic and colorful paintings, including a series of self-portraits that are full of intimate meaning and reflections of her reality. Her works explore several themes, including her Mexican heritage and femininity, leading to her becoming a symbol of feminism across the world. There are others, equally radical Latina women –Tarsila da Amoral and Zilia Sanchez-I explore their impact and works in episode 103.
There is so much to learn and embrace from the artist Leslie C. Sotomayor. Her work, her practice “links her to her heritage, art and the ways it impacts her identities.” She engages us through what she calls “crossings” Crossing the Diaspora, her maternal lineage, the waters in her travels between Puerto Rico and Cuba, crossing race, crossing institutions, crossing her studio. In the studio, and this is a place that truly resonates with me. Sotomayor refers to her studio as her “sanctuary” and where she is most vulnerable. She writes, “I am nothing and everything within it. The borders and boundaries cross over each other into an entangled mess where they begin to disappear. My language is mixed, my body is functional and decorative, I do not filter; I am crossing, straddling, and hanging in the gaps of many borders and boundaries at once. The gaps and in-between-ness are intensified in my studio space because there is a little judgment of self, I exist in my studio as I am. There is no audience for a little while, I am bare within the walls which also serve to segregate me into the world by profession, career choices, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and cultural capital. Within my studio space I travel from one place (as in psychologically, emotionally, mentally) to another.” In her evocative work, she takes us to the crossings. We get to leap into those borderlands and the waterways–and experience with fluidity identities and cultures that muffled by the narrow ridge of artistic traditions.
Leslie and I have had several conversations by phone. I feel a kindred spirit with her. This episode gives you a bird’s-eye view of the depth of her work, her practice, her research and writings. Art is a form of social change–it can reconcile the segregation of diverse voices in the visual arts. Please join me in a conversation with Leslie C. Sotomayor.