Patssi Valdez at the 2000 Festival. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

In 1974, Los Angeles-based Chicano artists Gronk and Patssi Valdez collaborated on an ephemeral art project called the Instant Mural. As traffic sped past on a busy East L.A. street, Gronk used thick white paper tape to transform Valdez’ body into an instant icon.

Unlike the static and idealized models offered to young women in Chicano murals of that period (the paradigm of the ascending Virgen and the reclining, scantily clad Ixti), Valdez’ temporary enshrining and subsequent bursting forth from the tape represented an awareness of herself as a mutable and trangressive image in the urban landscape. (And quite possibly it was the first Chicana action painting!) Chameleon-like, Valdez’ personas, oftentimes constructed with little more than thrift store clothes, colored crepe paper, glitter, platforms and mascara, were influential to a group of artists and performers in Los Angeles in the seventies and eighties. (Word did spread beyond L.A., when her style and face were memorialized in an Interview magazine profile.) It is Valdez’ economy of means and its bold and larger than life creations that now characterizes Valdez’ foray into art direction for films. The 2000 San Diego Latino Film Festival is proud to forefront the marvelous work Patssi Valdez has done to enrich the backdrops of recent Chicano films.

Although Valdez had participated in the performance art group ASCO (with initial members Willie Herrón, Gronk, and Harry Gamboa Jr.) in countless spontaneous interventions until the early 1980s, it wasn’t until the mid-eighties that she started to show her own work as a solo artist. After attending Otis-Parsons Institute in Los Angeles, Valdez began to focus on life as a mixed media artist, with a predominant focus on painting. Although her early work showed a strong interest in conveying the multiple layers of urban life, it is everyday and domestic life, with its textures and subtly shifting ambiences that has continued as a constant in Valdez’ work. Since that point, Valdez has been the recipient of countless art foundation awards, including the prestigious Durfee Artist Fellowship, and was recently featured in Patssi Valdez: Precarious Comfort, a major museum retrospective shown at the Mexican Museum (San Francisco) and the Laguna Art Musem. Beyond her work as a visual artist, Valdez established a career in theatre and films as art director and set designer.

Art direction is a curious blend of realism and hyperrealism. Making a totally artificial set with objects culled from Hollywood prop shops and suburban thrift stores look real and gently used is a tricky, yet totally absorbing practice. For Valdez, the shift from her installation art and detailed still life paintings was an excessively natural one. Chief among her reasons for working on Latino productions was her strong conviction that representations of Latinos by Latinos should be truthful and devotional, but not hokey or magical realist. The beauty of an archetypal working class Chicano home with a proud presentation of ceramics, lace tablecloths, plastic furniture covers and family photos is what makes La Familia (1995, Gregory Nava) so radiant. It is Valdez’ obsessive concern for color and object placement that makes the settings of Luminarias (1998, José Luis Valenzuela) so true to form. Valdez remarked in Juan Garza’s documentary ASCO is Spanish for Nausea (1995) that when she was growing up she felt invisible, not portrayed on television, overlooked (or perversely overexposed and targeted) by government officials and the police, and generally boxed in. Valdez’ work over the last two and a half decades has turned the box inside out, and now notably has created a recognizable Latina aesthetic in contemporary film.