Las Meninas 2018

Works by Erin Currier | Acrylic and mixed media on panel

Las Meninas, Spanish for "Ladies in Waiting", is a title borrowed from one of the most significant, most analyzed, and most alluded to, paintings in art history-- that of Diego Velazquez.  For philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote extensively about the elusive painting in The Order of Things, Las Meninas represents a midpoint between the "two great discontinuities": the Classical and the Modern; for Giordano Bruno, it embodies the very "Theology of Painting": described as "the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of easel painting". 

For my own purposes, however, in its ability to inform and inspire Las Meninas epitomizes an ancient Japanese concept that my current body of work is engaged in exploring: that of Honkadori-- i.e. what photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto calls "picking up the melody". Honkadori refers to an allusion within a poem to an older poem which would be generally recognized by its readers.  Although sometimes copied word for word, Honkadori goes beyond a mere reference to another poem: by seeking to affect the reader in the same way as the original poem, but with difference in meaning and atmosphere.  There is no other painting in art history that has given rise to more such Honkadori-- from Goya to John Singer Sargent to Picasso to Eve Sussman to New Mexico's own Joel Peter Witkin, to name but a few,-- than Velazquez' Las Meninas.

My new series pays homage to Classical and Modernist masterpieces while addressing contemporary issues that have long compelled my work: immigrant rights, worker's rights, women's rights, civil rights; in short: human dignity.  For example, Eugene Delacroix's epic and controversial revolutionary painting, (hidden for many years by the French monarchy so as not to risk inciting further rebellions), Liberty Leading the People, provides the composition, palette, and overall "weather",--the groundwork upon which I have portrayed Indigenous women on both sides of the Mexico/US Border dismantling it in American Women (dismantling the border) III.  In my rendition, as in the era in which we find ourselves-- an era that has seen a resurgence of Native Resistance movements, the Goddess/Woman Warrior/Matriarch, the vanguard of feminine strength and grace in action, is in the form of an Indigenous woman.  Rather serendipitously, Liberty Leading the People had already spawned an immigrant rights related Honkadori  over a century ago in the form of Freder Auguste Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World: otherwise known as The Statue of Liberty!

Like Velazquez' Las Meninas and Delacroix' Liberty, all of the works in my new series are grounded in a feminine focal point.  United Farm Workers cofounder and longtime organizer and activist Dolores Huerta, for example, replaces the male gardener in an homage to Vincent Van Gogh's The Gardener. In this way, the direct English translation of Las Meninas, "Ladies in Waiting", is especially relevant to the works and to today-- alluding to the fact that women the world over have felt that they have long been waiting, yet in full preparedness-- ready and willing, for the appropriate moment to take direct action.  That moment is now.  And for me, as an artist, the moment is now to recognize and pay my respect to those who came before me through Honkadori-- by approaching significant works with the same courage with which they were originally rendered,  but within a wholly new and radical context relevant to the 21st Century.