Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, Virgen de los Caminos, 1994, embroidered and quilted cotton and silk with graphite, 58 x 36 in. (147.3 x 91.4 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1996.77
“My mission was to bring the border down between craft and art.”
Follow the threads of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s fiber artworks and soon a message will become clear: this artist weaves together her heritage and personal experience to create personal reflections that encompass the lived experiences of communities navigating cultural identity and resilience, inviting viewers to delve into the ultimate complexity of connection and belonging. She stitches pain, history, and hope into richly nuanced personal narratives about immigration at the US-Mexico border. Her father was an undocumented fieldworker in California, and her family regularly crossed the border. Through her intricate textiles and evocative storytelling, she brings to light the struggles and triumphs of the immigrant journey.
This Hispanic Heritage Month, here are four ways to explore Underwood’s art and life.
On view as part of the exhibition, Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Renwick Gallery, Underwood’s Virgen de los Caminos (1994) was initially intended as quilt for her baby granddaughter. While she began by embroidering beautiful flowers and, toward the end of the project, realized the quilt was also meant for all little girls who crossed the border. Zoom in to explore this quilt online or visit the galleries for a deeper look.
This brief episode from SAAM’s Backstitch podcast series explores Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s case for textiles—especially weaving—as art, not folk art or craft. She recounts how the dresses her father wove for her as a child planted a seed that eventually grew to inspire her artistic practice. Underwood explains that her father came from an indigenous background, the Huichol, in western Mexico, in which men made textiles. She explains, “And the baddest—the best wise men, or curanderos, are the ones that have the most intricate, detailed embroideries on their costume, on their dress."
These short- form audio explorations take a deeper look into the lives and creative practices of ten trailblazing artists represented in the exhibition Subversive, Skilled, Sublime. Ranging from eight to thirteen minutes each, it is easy to devour each episode one after another.
The colorful illustrations of Catherine Vo, a student-illustrator from the Ringling College of Art and Design, conjures magic in her telling of Underwood’s story, “Born to Weave.” In this story the streets are paved not with gold, but with yarn—an interesting word whose multiple meanings include both textiles and storytelling. Twenty-nine more beautifully illustrated comics about the lives of inspiring women artists await as part of the Drawn to Art series.
Finally, don’t miss this engaging “Meet the Artist” video, which offers a visual and conversational exploration of Underwood’s process.
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.
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.
Artists have been capturing all the different moods of light for millennia. American artists such as members of the Hudson River School, or the American impressionists, managed to capture light as a way of defining the landscape.