Immigration, class conflict and discrimination have long been at the heart of American politics. The local artist and activist Yolanda M. López (1942-2021) spent her life making art that addressed these issues head-on. She’s finally getting the recognition she deserved.
López was recently memorialized in two major murals in the Mission District, where she lived for the last 40 years of her life, and is the subject of a traveling exhibition currently at the San Jose Museum of Art.
She’s also being venerated in “Women’s Work is Never Done,” an extensive exhibition at the University of San Francisco’s Thacher Gallery, featuring recently rediscovered artworks and ephemera from López’s home, curated by her son, Rio Yañez, and archivist Angelica Rodriguez.
With more than 50 drawings, paintings, photographs, prints and other objects (including her own clothing and her son’s first Halloween costume), the show is a deep, intimate dive into the artist’s life and legacy.
“It was incredibly exciting to discover this work, but also a little heartbreaking,” Yañez said. “All of these works had been boxed up in storage in her apartment or in the basement of her building for decades.”
The show, divided into decades from the 1960s to the 2010s, starts with López’s revelatory figurative sketches, made when she was a teenager. They’re masterful, delicate portraits, at odds with the collage technique she employed later in much of her explicitly political work — a trade she made in the interest of urgency.
But even her early emphasis on representation was a political act. An early painting of López’s mother, for instance, shows that a “woman who is older, and not skinny or conventionally beautiful by Western standards is still a worthy and important subject of art,” Yañez said.
For López, her personal experience as a blue-collar feminist was inextricable from her artistic message. She worked day jobs her entire life, including as a live-in nanny, as a Mary Kay saleswoman (the show includes her logbooks from this gig), and at the gift-wrap counter at Macy’s.
“She had to perform so much extra labor to afford a life for herself and her family and to create the artworks she had inside of her,” Yañez said.
She was also politically active, becoming involved in the 1968-69 Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front strike for ethnic studies at San Francisco State and helping found the Los Siete Defense Committee, a collective that provided legal defense for seven young men accused of murdering a police officer in the Mission District and worked closely with the Black Panther Party.
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“She was very conscious of her position in society,” Rodriguez said, “and her body of work really demonstrates that.”
“Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?,” a protest image that became vernacular in the immigrant rights movement in the ’70s, features a drawing of an Aztec warrior crumpling immigration papers in one hand and pointing his finger at the viewer, Uncle Sam-style, with the other, the titular demand emblazoned in block letters beneath him.
López produced a major series of protest posters later in her career from which the exhibition takes its title.
“Homenaje a Dolores Huerta,” a silkscreen print collaging an image of female agricultural workers with a picture of the labor leader holding a protest sign. The original picture of workers appeared on the front page of the Oct. 30, 1994, San Francisco Examiner in an article reporting on California Proposition 187, which passed that year, banning undocumented immigrants from accessing non-emergency health care, public education, and other state services.
Another silkscreen print from the series shows a woman holding a ballot with a baby swaddled to her back. The top of the frame reads “Your vote has power,” while the bottom presents the slogan “Woman’s work is never done.” It’s a stark presentation of López’s overlapping themes — labor, domesticity and politics.
A to-do list from López’s apartment stands out as emblematic of these broader themes. Written in capital letters above a list of domestic labors — laundry, housecleaning — is the word “VOTE.” López’s placement of her civic duty alongside her chores reveals how entwined the personal and political were in her life; its placement above the rest speaks volumes to the value she gave it.
“That generation in the ’60s and ’70s really set the tone for the discontent that continues to this day,” Rodriguez said. “I think that’s part of why her legacy is so relevant.”
Political art exists in a strange paradox. Its relevance is imperative, but it isn’t meant to stay relevant — that means things aren’t changing. López’s art is acutely relevant, a stark reminder that the issues she addressed — xenophobia, sexism, inequality — have remained fixtures of American politics.
López’s work isn’t done. It’s just left up to us to carry it forward.
