About the Artist: Celeste de Luna

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARTIST BY SCHOLAR NORMA ELIA CANTÚ

I have been acquainted with painter and print-maker Celeste de Luna’s work for several years. She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Southeast Texas and received her MFA from the University of Texas–Pan American in 2009.

Since 2007 her work has been in group exhibitions in various venues—galleries and university spaces—in the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, Houston, Austin, San Diego, and Chicago. Additionally, De Luna’s work has been part of nationally and internationally exhibited printmaking portfolio projects. Among the many themes and topics that she explores are the geopolitical aspects of post-911 militarization of her environment, such as border walls, drones, checkpoints, and bridges.

Heavily influenced by Gloria Anzaldúa—both the writing and her art and drawings—De Luna extends the ideas from Borderlands/La Frontera and goes beyond to produce political graphic art that is at once fiercely critical but also aesthetically interesting. Her acrylic paintings use a rich palette of bright colors to render scenes of South Texas (also Anzaldúa’s up-bringing): bright blue cloudless skies and Border Patrol agents in East: El Corralón, North: Las Garritas, and I Don’t Know Why Everyone Says They’re Extinct ’Cause They Are Everywhere at My House.

But it is the prints where she explores the nature of evil and grapples with the complexities of living on the border. The prints meticulously highlight icons of her border existence: the crown of skulls in America the Beautiful and the powerful visual metaphors of Breach Baby and Habeas Corpse make her one of the most important artists of the borderlands in the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Her work with the artist collective Las Imaginistas is at the core of her current community activism. Her Lotería Nepantla was the featured artwork for the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa’s annual conference, El Mundo Zurdo, 2018.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work is a tool to understand and deconstruct oppressive paradigms in my physical/spiritual/psychic environment. I explore the complexity of relationships of borderland people and landscape. Common themes in my work include migrant/border experiences of women, children, and families, the Texas landscape, the spiritual struggle of conflicting identities, and “survivor’s guilt.” Common iconography frequently features razor wire, fences, bridges, and anchor babies.

By mapping geopolitical aspects of my environment, I understand myself better. Post-911 militarization of my homeland has been the catalyst of conocimiento for me, a concept written about by Xicana lesbian thinker Gloria Anzaldúa. Sometimes, I use my imagination to create narratives in which I use my family and myself as characters. In this way, I explore the concept of “You are the other me.” By imagining myself as the other, my borderland narratives take on a personal and feminist viewpoint that contradicts superficial “border violence” stereotypes.¹

In addition to my individual practice of creating large-scale relief prints, quilts, and installations, I work in collaboration with the community as a member of the socially engaged arts collaborative Las Imaginistas, recipients of a 2017 Artplace America Creative Placemaking grant and a 2018 A Blade of Grass fellowship. My work is being archived in Special Collections at the University of Houston Libraries.

Currently I am a lecturer for the School of Art at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville and have started a new printmaking press, Metzli Press.