Linda Vallejo – Select Works, 1969 – 2024 at parrasch heijnen – Art and Cake

On view August 17 – September 21, 2024

By Betty Ann Brown

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness. ~Maria Popova

          Linda Vallejo’s oeuvre is remarkably diverse. A stranger might walk into her current exhibition at Parrasch Heijnin Gallery and assume it is a group show. Throughout her more than 50-year-long career, Vallejo has worked in a wide range of materials, techniques, and subjects, generating paintings, prints, sculptures, and assemblage objects. She has focused on issues of identity, gender, and race, often deconstructing cultural stereotypes as she does so.

          The first work a viewer sees as she enters the galley is a three-foot-tall sculpture of the allegorical figure of Justice, repurposed to make a comment about institutional inequities. Make ‘Em All Mexican: Justice (2017) presents Justice as a brown woman. As such, she points to racial divides in our legal system.

          Identity is also the subject of the conceptual piece National Latino Physicians and Surgeons: 63% (2016). A small hand image emerges from a field of tiny dots, each representing a medical doctor of Hispanic heritage. So, although it addresses identity like Justice, it does so on a flat framed surface, rather than converting a found sculpture to make the artistic point.

          Vallejo’s Self Portrait: Day (2006) presents a beautiful image of the artist’s face floating in the sky over a low hilly landscape. Plants appear to grow up and through her chin and cheeks. The symbolic realism of Self Portrait contrasts sharply with a small abstraction from 1969 (Untitled III), an array of colored discs floating in a colored field. And both are aesthetic worlds apart from El Pacal (1990), a mixed-media sculpture of a Maya Lord created on a tree fragment. (Shield Pacal was the Maya lord of the prehispanic site of Palenque in southern Mexico.)

          One of the most powerful works in the exhibition is Eternal Seed from 2000. It is a six-foot tall painting on canvas, depicting a female figure enclosed in labia-like layers of the earth. She holds a small seed pod symbolizing the generative abundance of nature. In 1986, Vallejo wrote about her work with female images, whether they be the Eternal Seed goddess, allegorical figures, or Vallejo herself.

I have worked to discover woman in her modern and ancient place as a source of strength, love, and integrity. I believe that all women are a part of the earth and can be inspired by a relationship with and through nature. It is my firm belief that woman is the symbol of the earth and that each woman can learn aspects of loyalty, integrity, honor, generosity, and courage directly from the earth.

          Vallejo’s work on identity, diversity, and feminism has taken her in so many directions that her oeuvre (as I said before) almost appears to have been produced by multiple artists instead of just one. Many twentieth century artists—from Meret Oppenheim, to Marcel Duchamp, to Pablo Picasso–used multiple modes of expression in their works. From our twenty-first century perspective, we realize that artists are no longer limited by the expectation of a unitary style. Indeed, as poststructuralist thinkers assert, none of us is limited to a singular autonomous self.  Instead, we are decentered.

          Vallejo’s work is quintessentially postmodern. When we walk into her exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen, we should realize is it NOT a group show—but a careful exposition of the wide-ranging mind of a postmodern woman.