Yolanda López, artist who painted the iconic Virgen de Guadalupe series, dies at 79

Yolanda López, an artist acclaimed for her reimagined paintings of the Virgen de Guadalupe as well as her early work in political posters, died of cancer this morning at her home on San Jose Avenue. She was 79 years old.

At nearly 80, and in her apartment surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of work in San Francisco’s Mission District, López remained determined this summer to continue to create art.  

Only recently had she received some of the recognition that others felt she had long deserved, winning a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation, as part of its new Latinx Artist Fellowship, and learning that the first solo retrospective show of her work would take place in San Diego. 

Looking for a way to showcase her artwork and ideals, López, like others before her,  discovered that printing images and text on business cards was a classy and affordable way to showcase her work. “I’m trying to create a methodology where women can do something that’s easy and inexpensive,” López explained in the spring while revealing her latest project, one that involved business card-sized reproductions of her art that were slipped into small manilla envelopes: “Pocket Posters,” she called them.

The small posters feature a photograph of one of her works on one side and a feminist declaration on the other. “Once we as women start treating [men] as victims of patriarchy, they will begin to rebel against it, but they will begin to understand it,” is written on the backside of one of the cards. 

The pocket posters had statements on them such as, “Men need to learn aggression is not power.”

López concluded this after years of trying to teach men to be feminists, and failing. “Men have to save themselves from patriarchy if they want liberation,” she said.