Maya Gonzalez: Portrait of the Artist as a Radical Children's Book Illustration

Abstract

A film, the film transcript (Appendix A), and this article are presented here together as a unit in Visual Culture & Gender, volume 3. Together and separately they elucidate the interconnections between the life and work of Maya Gonzalez, a fine artist and children’s book illustrator. Maya Gonzalez identifies herself as a queer-focused, lesbian Chicana with a nature-based spirituality. Because her life and work are rich with critical rhizomatic themes, I have narrowed my focus to four roots within this rhizome–gender, race, sexuality, and environment, although many other threads are embedded within these constructs. To frame this story of an artist working for social and environmental justice through visual culture, I employ Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical work on “conocimiento,” a creative process of coming to know that leads to social activism.