Art / Arte
“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.” Borderlands
Although Gloria is best-known for her writing, she was a multi-modal artist. As she explains in Interviews/Entrevistas, she considered a career as a visual artist but decided that she needed to specialize and so decided to commit herself to the writing. Throughout her life, though, she also loved doodling, art-making, and drawing.
Along with her unpublished manuscripts, she also left behind an extensive collection of mano-drawn art of which we share a few below.
TENDER NOTE
We include these rarely seen works of art online because art, community, trust, and sharing were deeply woven throughout Anzaldúa’s entire life, touching everything she created. But Anzaldúa also knew how to create boundaries, as we do here: The work remains the sole property of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust.
Feel free to enjoy, meditate, and commune with the art shared here, but please do not republish, reprint, screenshot, reproduce, or share this work online, on your website and/or your social media without express permission from the Trust’s Agent.
We gratefully appreciate your honor & respect for Anzaldúa’s legacy and work, which you demonstrate by following these guidelines.
HAND DRAWN
SELECTED WORKS
Anzaldúa typically included visuals as part of her lectures. She referred to these visuals as “glifos” and used them to bring her theories to life, to invite her audience’s imaginations into the talk. The glifos were also part of Anzaldúa’s idea-generation process; she used doodles and drawings to develop her philosophy. These three visuals represent the many glifos that Anzaldúa often used in her talks. See Interviews/Entrevistas and Light in the Dark for her discussions of these images and the theories behind them.
“Spiritual Activism”
Anzaldúa often associated her theory of spiritual activism with the hand and the tongue,” as indicated through this image. This image can also be read as the final stage of conocimiento.
“Mestisaje”
Anzaldúa used glifos such as this to discuss the complexity of individual and collective identities.
“Geography of Self”
Anzaldúa developed this drawing as part of her 1990s UCSC dissertation; it represents an early attempt to think through what later became geographies of selves (described in chapter 4 of Light in the Dark).
ON THE COVER
Anzaldúa’s writing notas are filled with doodles such as these. Here, we see her thinking through her theories of nos/otras and la naguala. (See Light in the Dark for more information on these theories.)