BORDER BOOK FESTIVAL
FEATURED WRITER AND ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

SANTA BARRAZA

A native of Kingsville, Texas, Santa Contreras Barraza is a contemporary Chicana/Tejana artist who is a Professor of Art at Texas A&M University at Kingsville.

She formerly taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Penn State University at University Park. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1975 and her Master of Fine Arts in 1982 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Her artwork has been widely exhibited in the United States, México, Italy and Spain. Her vita reflects a career replete with awards, appearances and lectures, exhibitions, and publications.

Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Texas Tech University, Mexican Museum in San Francisco, Del Mar College, Fondo del Sol Museum, South Texas Museum, Olin Museum at Bates College, the Hispanic/Latino Archives of the Tomas Ybarra Fausto Collection at the Smithsonian Institution at Washington DC, and other collections and various art collectors.

Her artwork has been exhibited in the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, Austin Arts Museum, Albuquerque Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bronx Museum, Wright Art Gallery in Los Angeles, Intar Latin American Gallery in New York City, Kohler Art Museum in Soboygen, Wisconsin, National Gallery of American Art of the Smithsonian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Modern Museum of Art in México City, Santo Domingo Museum of Art in Oaxaca, México, Centro Cultural de la Villa Madrid in Spain, among others.

In 2001 Texas A&M University Press published the book, Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands, which received the annual Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association in 2002.

Among many awards received by Barraza are a Recognition Award for Contribution in the Arts, from National Chicanos in Higher Educaion; the Reader’s Digest-Lila Wallace Grant and  the Professional Achievement Award from the Women of Color Association.

Santa Barraza (Karankawa/Chicana) paints bold representations of Nepantla, a mythic “Land Between.” The term was first used by Nahuatl-speaking people of México in the 16th century to describe their situation vis-à-vis the Spanish colonizers in their midst.  Her work depicts the historical, emotional, and spiritual land between México and Texas, between the real and the celestial, and between present reality and the mythic world of the ancient Aztecs and Mayas.

She says Nepantla could also represent the “in-between-ness” of Latinos like herself who are embracing their newfound Native American heritage and Indigenous ways.

Over her career, Barraza has explored what it means to be a Chicana. Using a variety of media, she has embarked on an artistic journey full of family portraits, watercolor dream scenes, mixed media artist books, and murals that harken back to a pre-Columbian past.

By tapping into pre-conquest symbols, personal memories, and traditional sacred art forms such as the retablo and the Codices, Barraza shows how Mexican artistic traditions have the power to nurture and sustain cultural identities on this side of the border. Her art has increasingly drawn on the colors and forms of Mesoamerica. Most recently, the Aztec Codices have offered her a symbolic way to claim her roots and to invoke much from the ancient ways of her ancestors.

She is not trapped in that past, though. She adapts these images by incorporating contemporary figures such as her own mother or labor leader Emma Tenayucca. Barraza depicts her own sister with a physical heart, representing a healing heart
as she underwent open heart surgery, guarded by the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe floating on the horizon.

She proudly identifies as a Chicana, but just as proudly has traced her heritage to the 1700s and a woman ancestor named Cuca Giza, a Karankawa Indian from the region that was once part of México but is now known as south Texas.