Apparently this really happened: During World War II, pinball machines in family restaurants exhorted players to “Kill The Jap.”
How ugly, indeed.
The Que Feo exhibit is a collection of artwork previously displayed at the 105 Art Gallery and created by artists’ collective Vistas Latinas. It has taken up residence in the LGBTQ Resource Center until the end of May, and the pieces pull no punches.
Regina Araujo Corritore’s “WWII War Toy,” for example, features a caricature of a Japanese soldier and the aforementioned words of “encouragement.”
A plaque next to the painting explains that it’s based on an actual pinball machine Corritore saw as a kid, and it draws connections to modern war-themed video games.
Corritore, the exhibit’s curator and an art instructor at UNM’s Valencia campus, said the Vistas Latinas collective formed in New York City in 1992 as a reaction against the annual tradition of Columbus Day.
“They were doing a lot of artwork and exhibitions around Columbus, and we wanted a more indigenous, more grassroots point of view about the colonialization of America and the conquest. We wanted to tell a different side of the story, so we decided to do our own exhibition and it was called Adios Columbus.”
Corritore and several other members of the collective recently moved to Albuquerque and decided to continue their provocations against mainstream culture. She said they got the idea for the theme of the first exhibit from the “ugliness” they perceived in sexualized advertisements that degraded women.
The group decided to undermine the advertisements by placing stickers on them that read “Que feo,” or “How ugly,” Corritore said.
“Any cigarette or liquor ads, any overly sexist advertisement, like when Lobo Louie and Route 66 got together, and they started doing really sexually offensive imagery, we put a ‘Que feo’ sticker on that,” she said. “And also, you know, with all these racist and homophobic advertisements going around, you know. The way they’re going after immigrants. Any time we see any stuff like that, we put our opinion on it. Sort of like an urban guerrilla graffiti kind of thing.”
The group decided to put together the exhibit as a commentary on rigid cultural standards for beauty, Corritore said.
“We decided that women are so beat up about beauty, you know, and feeling bad about themselves and being told what is beautiful and what is not, that we decided that we were going to take ownership of it. We decide what’s beautiful and what’s ugly,” she said.
Many of the pieces feature a combination of violence and sexual imagery, like Justine Ortiz’s “Cat Show (2).” The oil painting depicts a woman with the head of a cat, holding her severed legs at a suggestively spread angle to the viewer.
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Ortiz said the piece reflects the hidden darkness at the root of sexual symbolism in mainstream American culture.
“When you get closer, you don’t get what you see from afar… She’s got her legs spread up, like in some kind of typical stripper-joint kinda place,” she said. “But when you get closer you see that her legs have been cut off and, like, did she cut them off? It’s the idea that you think you’re getting one thing, and you think you’re attracted to it because of the typical idea behind it. But then when you get close you see what it actually is, is something violent and ugly, which again points back to the objectification of women in that kind of environment, strip shows.”
Alma Rosa Silva-Bañuelos, the Program Coordinator for the LGBTQ Resource Center, said she hopes the exhibit will encourage students to express themselves through art.
“I think a lot of these pieces also have some great messages and also are part of healing. And I feel like that’s something we want our community to be able to access: how to be creative, how to use art in a way to help them with their own identity, but also how to express themselves through the struggles and successes of their life. And then to be inspired to actually show their artwork here at the resource center,” she said.
Corritore said Vistas Latinas is encouraged by the success they’ve had so far in Albuquerque, and the collective appreciates the opportunity to display its work on campus.
“We’re really happy that Alma Rosa and the people from the Resource Center brought our show there, so we wanted to thank them,” he said. “It’s really good to meet and dialogue with different communities and different people. That’s what it’s all about, is the dialogue.”
