Emma Oslé

“The Space In-Between: Latinx Art and the Maternal” addresses how Latinx artists utilize maternity as a discursive space, thinking holistically about aspects of family life across the U.S. that are deeply rooted in Latinx identities and aesthetics. Conceptualized through the stages of physiological birth, I argue that Latinx maternity functions as a womb-like in-between, allowing artists to operate in multimodal capacities. This in-between is the locus of the mother’s womb, both life-giving and outside of time and space. I argue that Latinx maternity is a deeply fluctuating, variable space that allows artists to oscillate fluidly between culture, nation, language, and self, commenting on cultural heritage standards and U.S.-American attitudes towards motherhood and family. This is an intersectional feminist project that centers personal narrative in Latinx maternal experiences.  

Centered in the contemporary moment, this comparative dissertation addresses artists across the broad constellation of backgrounds that make up the Latinx diaspora. Inclusive of border spaces, Blackness, Indigeneity, diasporas-in-diasporas, and U.S.-born Latinxs, I focus on artists creating work from the late 1970s to the present. The project covers an extensive range of media, paralleling the expansive range of identities that make up the Latinx diaspora. It is inclusive of performance, drawing, painting, installation, photography, and digital media. I counter a practice of exclusion by the art world toward historically underrepresented groups in the history of American art including women, mothers, and Latinx communities.   

I conceptualize Latinx maternity as a feminist “third space” like Emma Peréz’s pivotal reimagining of Homi Bhabha in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), and I assert that thinking through the maternal in a U.S. Latinx context renders this womb-like space in between as a site of critical artistic intervention. In doing so, a space emerges that allows for the reproductive potential of the maternal to flourish. By foregrounding the myriad ways that artists utilize maternity as a space of generativity and narrative expression, this project reveals how the effects of maternal care ripple across borders from generation to generation.