Delayed institutional recognition is anall-too-familiar storywith artists of color, especially women. Rio Yañez, son of groundbreaking California artist Yolanda López, knows that well.

“There was always a glass ceiling of being ‘ethnic art,’ or being a Chicana artist,” he said.

López, who lived and worked in both San Francisco and San Diego, did not get her first solo museum show until two years ago — six weeks after her death on Sept. 3, 2021. Now, a new version of the joyous “Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist,” first mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, is on view at the San José Museum of Art through Oct. 29.

“It’s both really exciting and bittersweet,” Yañez told The Chronicle in reference to the show, which has brought together nearly 50 pieces of his mother’s work from the 1970s and ’80s.

Seeing these artworks under museum lighting at last is reason enough to head to the South Bay institution, but the major revelations come from being able to see so much of López’s work in one place. “Portrait of the Artist” showcases her art from a period when she was establishing themes of family, feminism and freedom from barriers that would persist throughout her oeuvre.

A third-generation Chicana born in the Barrio Logan district of San Diego in 1942, López’s ethnic identity informed her work and life. While studying at the College of Marin and San Francisco State University in the 1960s, she supported the Third World Liberation Front. In 1969 she became a founding member of Los Siete de la Raza, a movement to support seven Latino youths wrongly accused of killing a police officer in the Mission.

At SJMA, curator Nidhi Gandhi has included López’s flyers, Basta Ya newspaper covers, and courtroom sketches showing the longtime San Francisco resident “responding to the political and contemporary events happening in the Bay Area.” Gandhi said she felt it was “important to reference… the way she approached activism and art making as intertwined.”

López returned to San Diego in 1971, earning a bachelor’s degree in painting in 1975 from San Diego State University and a master’s degree from UC San Diego in 1979 — the only person of color in her fine arts program. When art professors failed to understand the cultural content of her work, López resorted to enlisting the only Latina faculty member around, Dr. Faustina Solìs, a medical professor who would later become the university’s first Latina provost, to sit on her thesis committee.

Her thesis show, “¿A Donde Vas, Chicana? Getting through College,” on view in its entirety at SJMA, celebrates the freedom and autonomy López found by joining a running class at UCSD in the years immediately following 1972’s gender equity law, Title IX. She was the only woman in the running club.

In six paintings and two studies, López shows herself jogging past UCSD buildings unconstrained by traffic lanes or waiting for public transit. By the last painting, “Runner: On My Own!,” López, her work no longer restricted by expectations of feminine stillness, literally breaks free from the rectangular paper. Her head, hand and foot carry her past the frame into a self-determined future.

López’s MFA program may have posed difficulties for a Chicana artist, but she took those learned skills to create paintings showcasing freedom from barriers both for herself and for Latinas in general.

Her next body of work took on freighted subject matter: the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was a bold choice. The original 16th century Virgin of Guadalupe image is said to have appeared miraculously on an Indigenous man’s cloak after the Virgin appeared to him on the Hill of Tepeyac, which had been a shrine to the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. An archetype of virginal maternal feminity, Guadalupe also serves as an avatar for Spanish colonialism, but simultaneously Mexican independence.

Here, López wears the icon’s mantle like a cape. Backed by the original image’s full-body mandorla halo, López is shown sprinting and smiling out of the painting in a pair of running shoes, squashing a cherub with red, white and blue wings as she goes. She later identified the patriotically colored angel as her symbol of the patriarchy.

López’s Virgin of Guadalupe work attracted a great deal of ire from people who saw the paintings as sacrilegious. Yañez remembers his mother, who was not Catholic, receiving threatening phone calls at home as well as shouting protesters and smashed windows at galleries. But López hadn’t rejected the Virgin. An additional two paintings in the exhibition show the artist’s mother and grandmother against Guadalupe’s mandorla in one, while the other depicts her grandmother seated atop the mantle and her mother sewing the mantle. It’s an act of mutual creation: The Virgin of Guadalupe shapes women’s lives and they in turn create her mythology.

洛佩兹的魔力所在’s artwork: The quotidian is special, and individuality is not at odds with lineage or community identity. We shape and are shaped by our families, natal and chosen.

In the exhibition’s first room, monumental charcoal portraits of the artist, her mother and her grandmother rise above the visitor. Two clever portrait trios show the three women assuming each other’s poses, awkwardly but with respect for the way each stands in the world.

Locals also will get a kick out of the “Las Santas Locas” photographic series documenting a Mission District female lowrider crew. In a group portrait, López took care to let each woman choose her own gesture, conveying how individuals comprise the collective.

As a cherished mentor and neighborhood fixture, López saw the Mission community she had nourished return the favor when her family faced eviction from its home in 2014. The SJMA show ends with an installation arranged by Yañez and Adriana Camarena, a San Francisco artist and activist, about that event, including a re-creation of López’s “eviction garage sale cum happening.”

While we may find progress in López having a solo show at last, or in the fact that activists managed to keep the then-71-year-old artist in her apartment of 34 years, we might do better to ask what we could do differently for the next generation of Chicana artists, lest we live bereft of their work.

Letha Ch'ien is a freelance writer.