Artist

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

born Sacramento, CA 1949

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Also known as: Consuelo J. Underwood
Born: Sacramento, California, United States
Active in: San Jose, California, United States

Biography: Fiber artist and weaver Consuelo Jimenez Underwood is the daughter of migrant agricultural workers, a Chicana mother and a father of Huichol Indian descent. She has degrees in religious studies and art, and today is a tenured professor at San Jose State University in California. In her richly textured creations, she weaves common threads of history and cultural resistance and affirmation.
Jonathan Yorba Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001)
: Luce Artist Biography
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood grew up in California, the eleventh of twelve children born to a Chicana mother and a Huichol Indian father. She was the first person in her family to finish high school, and went on to enroll in religious studies and art at San Diego State University. She started as a painter, but became interested in fiber art while in college and soon turned all of her attention to weaving and textile design. Underwood imbues her pieces with powerful messages about her Chicana heritage, creating images that call attention to the dangers that Mexicans face trying to cross the border into the United States in search of a better life.

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Meet the Artist: Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
Artist Conversation with Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

CONSUELO JIMENEZ UNDERWOOD: It glows! It has this glow to it! Which is what you get when you dy your own material.

WOMAN: It becomes yours.

CJU: It becomes yours.

The most important form has been needle and thread. All indigenous women throughout the world know this medium of the thread, and I’m one of them. From a plant, I can make a thread, and now that I know how to weave with sticks or a loom or whatever, I can create art with nothing except me and myself and I, and the earth. So, that’s what attracts me to this process.

I’ve almost gone full circle. When I first began the walk as an artist, the impetus was the form, that needle and thread: how can I make weaving and fiber cutting-edge art? But I was getting to the point where I felt that the artwork that I was doing was becoming predictable. I had the form, I had my issues, I had my methodology all down – twenty years of it. It becomes like a formula. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want formula. I wanted to make a new kind of art.

Seventeen miles north of the border of San Diego, there’s another border crossing. And there were a lot of people being run over in these freeways. So, they decided to put up a sign to warn the motorists that there might be a family crossing here. The image is of a running family, the father dragging the mother and the mother dragging this little girl. And on the top, it says, “Caution.” And for me, I thought, “Oh, my God, they’re thinking of us as animals now.” Because you would always see these freeway crossings for animals. That just hit so hard that I can’t shake it. So I decided to make the quilt for them. For those young ladies or little girls that perished travelling that freeway.

I acquired the cloth in a thrift store, and it was a beautiful cloth that needed embroidery. Halfway through the embroidery, I saw The Virgen, I saw her in there, and she was dead. And right after that, barbed wires, there’s got to have barbed wires here. Then I saw the caution sign that needed to be quilted into the piece. In “The Virgen de Los Caminos,” you can barely see it. Why can’t you see the family? Because they’re dead. They’re ghosts. They’re spirits. It’s there, but it’s not there. And that’s how the stitching is. When I see a dead person, I think of flowers as their soul. Barbed wire, I see as the futile attempt of man to control life. So, they’re two very powerful forces, the flowers and the barbed wire, and they’re always butting against each other. Maybe in the next generation or two, those two will come be at peace, but right now, I’m the one bringing these two together.

Exhibitions

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Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women

May 31, 2024–January 5, 2025

Renwick Gallery

The artists in Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women mastered and subverted the everyday materials of cotton, felt, and wool to create deeply personal artworks.

This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World

May 13, 2022–April 2, 2023

Renwick Gallery

This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World showcases the dynamic landscape of American craft today.

Related Books

Six duotone book covers are show with "This Present Moment" in black text

This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World

This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World showcases American craft like never before. Accompanying a 2022 exhibition of the same name, it features artists’ stories of resilience, methods of activism, and highlights craft’s ability to spark essential conversations about race, gender, and representation. This book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the nation’s preeminent center for the enjoyment of American craft. It honors the history of the American studio craft movement while also introducing progressive contemporary narratives.

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Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

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