MACLA’s ‘Xicanx Biennial’ Returns

‘Muxeres Rising’ grapples with issues of culture and gender fluidity

January 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Edalatpour

The largest work of art at MACLA’s seventh “Xicanx Biennial: Muxeres Rising” is Pilar Agüero-Esparza’s eight-paneled mural. Without knowing anything about the artist, you notice the earthen color palette and a series of interlocking shapes and patterns. When you discover a “Skin Tone Drawing” series she experimented with in 2017, the meaning of the mural comes into focus.

Agüero-Esparza made that series in crayon and colored pencil using a variety of colors like white, apricot, peach, tan, burnt sienna, mahogany, sepia and black. The mural expands on the idea, as MACLA’s curators point out, to “depict evidence that skin cannot be reduced to a single color, when in reality, skin is spectrum of tones ‘woven’ together.”

“Muxeres Rising” is a group show of 13 “self-identified Latinx women,” some of whose work “openly critiques the repressive qualities of American politics and Latino culture.”