Artist

Carmen Lomas Garza

born Kingsville, TX 1948

Also known as: Carmen L. Garza
Born: Kingsville, Texas, United States
Active in: San Francisco, California, United States

Biography: Painter and printmaker. While attending Texas Arts and Industry University (Texas A&I) in Kingsville, Lomas Garza joined the Chicano movement. In addition to earning a B.S. in art education and a Texas Teaching Certificate from Texas A&I (now Texas A&M, Kingsville), she holds an M.Ed. from Juárez-Lincoln/Antioch Graduate School, Austin, Texas, and an M.A. from San Francisco State University. Awards and fellowships include VIDA Award, Arts Category; several California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Grants; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Painting and Printmaking; and a California Arts Council Fellowship.
Latino Art and Culture Bilingual Study Guide (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1996)

Works by this artist (4 items)

Little Paulus

Artist

S. Seymour Thomas

Daten.d.

oil on canvas

A Portrait (Lady and Dog)

Artist

Henry Wolf

Copy after S. Seymour Thomas

Date1905

wood engraving on paper

Mrs. O’Connor

Artist

Henry Wolf

Copy after S. Seymour Thomas

Date1904

photomechanical wood engraving on paper

Watching

Artist

S. Seymour Thomas

Date1896

oil on canvas

Videos

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This audio podcast series discusses artworks and themes in the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In this episode, director Eizabeth Broun discusses Camas para Sueños by Carmen Lomas Garza.

BETSY BROUN: Hello, I’m Betsy Broun. I’m the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I love this exhibition because it culminates years of effort and lots of excitement as we build what we hope will be one of the truly great collections of Latino art in any museum in America. We’ve had so many dedicated people working for a long time to make this happen. It’s hard to pick just one thing in the exhibition to talk about, but I guess I might pick a beautiful painting by Carmen Lomas Garza called “Camas para Sueños,” or “Beds for Dreams.” It’s actually a gouache on paper, maybe 28 by 20 inches.

For me, it is a kind of emblem of literally the hopes and dreams that animate the Latino community and, actually, immigrant communities everywhere in America. It tells the story of the American promise. It tells a story that is why people want to come here to try to create a better future for themselves, their children, and their families. It shows a simple house and, through a window, we see a mother of a family, and she’s shaking out the spread and making the bed, and up on the roof of the house are the two children lying up in the roof under a nighttime sky and gesturing towards the moon that appears in the clouds. In every way, you see the efforts of the family to create a good home, to provide the environment where their children can thrive, and then you see the children staring into the night sky as they imagine what they want to accomplish and achieve.

It’s an endlessly hopeful image. It seems so current today. It was done in 1985; already these hopes and dreams were paramount within the Latino community. In fact, we have a whole generation called “the Dreamers,” which are named for this phenomenon, and here it is now, roughly thirty years later, and still the same ambitions, desires, wondering what will come of your life, hoping it will be as good as you imagined it could be. To me, it’s just an exquisitely beautiful, simple image that says so much about this generation, about Latino immigration in general, really about all the communities that have come to America hoping for the promise of a better life for themselves and their families.

Exhibitions

Media - 2011.12 - SAAM-2011.12_1 - 77591

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art

October 25, 2013–March 2, 2014

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge.

Media - 2012.53.1 - SAAM-2012.53.1_1 - 82036

¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now

November 20, 2020–August 8, 2021

Smithsonian American Art Museum

In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today.

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Carmen Lomas Garza

Works by this artist (4 items)

Videos

Exhibitions

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