gilda posada
class of 2017
about
Gilda Posada is from Southeast Los Angeles, CA. She received her A.B. from UC Davis in Chicana/o Studies and Comparative Literature. She is a third year dual-degree candidate at California College of the Arts in the MFA Social Practice program and the Visual and Critical Studies program.
Her artistic practice is rooted in working from and with the Xicanx community. As a visual artist she utilizes printmaking, fabric/weaving, and a digital process to bring forward concepts of intersectionality dealing with: identity formation, feminism, queerness, gender, nepantla, mestizaje, radical third-world feminism, trauma, liberation, alternative healing methods, democracy, and decolonial practices.
Gilda’s curatorial practice is rooted in organizing intersectional, multidisciplinary and intergenerational exhibitions which challenge patriarchal hetero-normative oppressive structures.
Her research interest includes decolonial theory and its formation through Xicanx Studies, the evolution of Xicanx identity and its visualization through art and curation, and Xicanx art social engagement in methodologies and curriculum.
gilda’s thesis
ADVERTISING XICANX: DECOLONIZING THROUGH THE VISUAL PUBLIC SPHERE
Galeria de la Raza in the Mission District of San Francisco is home to one of the oldest ongoing public art projects in the nation, the Billboard Mural. This thesis focuses on three queer-centric murals—Alex Donis’ My Cathedral (1997), Alma Lopez’s Heaven (2000) and Maricón Collective’s Por Vida (2015)— which were vandalized upon installation. These Billboard Murals are taken as case studies through which to examine interrelated phenomena: the evolution of the term Chicano (Chicano/a; Chican@, Chicanx, Xicanx) as successive generations have challenged misogynistic and hetero-normative ideologies; and the role of Galeria de la Raza in developing an alternative strain of social-practice art, one that originated during the Civil Rights Movement and remains central to the process of decolonization through public visual culture.