Special for Infobae of The New York Times.

Yolanda López, an artist and activist who created one of the most famous works of art in Chicano history by boldly transforming the Virgin of Guadalupe into her own image, as a strong, dark-haired young woman wearing running shoes and smiling broadly, he died on September 3 at his home in San Francisco. Lopez was 78 years old.

Her death was caused by complications caused by liver cancer, said Río Yañez, her son who is also an artist.

López did other types of work, including conceptual art installations and political posters, but her 1978 painting, “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe” is by far her most acclaimed and reproduced work of hers. Over the years, that piece has been included in art books, feminist histories, and Chicano anthologies. It has appeared on T-shirts and tattoos. And along with similar work by Patssi Valdez and Ester Hernández, she inspired younger generations of Latina artists to rethink the Roman Catholic icon, a vision of the Virgin Mary popular among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

In essence, López took Guadalupe, a paragon of demure femininity, and set her free. She redesigned the voluminous and heavy robe of the religious image as a short, sporty dress. She turned her star-encrusted blue cloak into a superhero cape. She depicted her running, instead of standing still in one place, and she looks happy.

Jill Dawsey, who curated an exhibition of Lopez's work opening in October at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (it will be her first museum tribute), called it "a startling revision of Guadalupe, stripped of its colonialist and patriarchal origins, and transformed into an image of radical feminist optimism”. (It was so radical that López regularly received death threats.)

Few realize how many versions of the Virgin of Guadalupe López created, including at least 20 collages and photomontages made as studies. Her depiction of the running Guadalupe is part of a larger triptych that celebrates working-class Chicanas of different ages and body types, and the idea of ​​matriarchy itself. An image of her shows her corpulent mother mending the Virgin's cloak at a sewing table. Another one has her grandmother sitting on the piled fabric as if she were a throne, casually holding a knife and a snakeskin.

Yolanda Margarita López, the oldest of four daughters, was born on November 1, 1942 in San Diego to her parents, Mortimer López and Margaret Franco. Her father abandoned her shortly after she was born, and her mother and her maternal grandparents raised her in a largely secular home. Her mother worked as a seamstress for the US Navy base in San Diego, among other employers, and as a child, Ella Lopez dreamed of becoming a costume designer.

Frustrated by the conservative values ​​of her hometown, she left the day after graduating from high school to live near San Francisco with her uncle and her uncle's boyfriend. In 1965, she enrolled at San Francisco State University, where she joined activist groups such as the Third World Liberation Front, which sought curricular, hiring, and admissions reforms for students of color. She participated in the group's five-month strike, which led to the creation of a school of ethnic studies and a department of black studies.

In 1969, she was one of the founders of a group called Los Siete de la Raza that sought justice for seven young Latinos accused of killing a police officer. (They were later found not guilty.) López designed the group's newspaper, ¡Basta Ya!, as well as some posters, including one that twirled the American flag so that the stripes looked like prison bars on men's faces. According to Karen Mary Davalos, chair of Chicano and Latino studies at the University of Minnesota, Emory Douglas of the Black Panthers was one of Lopez's mentors, teaching him design proposals using cheap materials like newsprint and various cut-and-paste techniques. .

Later, Ella Lopez returned to Southern California to complete her Bachelor of Arts at San Diego State University in 1975. The following year, she began studying for a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

Her graduate exhibition featured three important bodies of work: the Guadalupe triptych, done in oil pastel and paint on paper; a series of self-portraits in acrylic and oil, “Where are you going, Chicana? Pass the university”; and an eight-foot-high set of charcoal-on-butcher paper drawings she made of herself, her mother, and her grandmother. These drawings were intended to show "ordinary" women, she wrote in an exhibition guide, to counteract "the lack of positive representations of Latin Americans as normal, intelligent human beings" and "the continued use of stereotypes such as the attractive and glamorous Latina and the passive and long-suffering wife/mother”.

“Where are you going, Chicana?” She emerged from a new hobby: running. During her master's program, she discovered a love of running, both as a form of exercise and a way to get around town without a car. This led to a series of self-portraits showing her running through the hills of La Jolla and past the new state-of-the-art modernist buildings on campus. The works show López demanding her place as a Chicana woman in a community in which whites were an overwhelming majority. “I was the only graduate student in the Visual Arts Department who was a person of color,” she said in a 2020 interview.

After she and her partner, René Yañez, returned to San Francisco, they had her son, Rio, in 1980. They separated at the end of that decade.

One of her last works of art was a collaboration with her son. In 2014, after receiving eviction notices from her apartment in the Mission district, López created an “eviction representation” with the help of her son by selling her clothes, jewelry and household goods at the Gallery of the race. It was a garage sale that also served as an art exhibit and, according to Rio Yañez, “it was also a way to make a lot of noise about the eviction.” (Ultimately, López stayed in her apartment after a community organization stepped in and bought the building.)

Details about other Lopez survivors besides her child were not immediately available.