Chloe Cortez Studio Visit: A Fat Mexican-American Artist Based in San Francisco

An interview in words + (NSFW) images

It’s a sunny San Francisco day, and I’m walking up to California College of the Arts to meet Chloe Cortez for the very first time. She’s about to complete her MFA, and her work is up at the Wattis Gallery through May 17 (sorry for the late notice!).

What was just going to be an informal walkthrough of her show, turned into an interview with a lunch of chicken kebobs and baba ghanoush at a little Mediterranean place down the street, followed by some processing in her studio about GLP-1s, fatphobic medical trauma and navigating grad school.

Her show creates the sense that you’re walking into a space (maybe a miniature maximalist altar?) that has been delineated from the rest of the gallery. Red walls draw in the eye and act as borders, but also as extensions of the works themselves.

Chloe talks about that decision in this vignette:

The viewer is invited to circulate the space, where there are three large-scale nude self-portraits of Chloe, each alongside a CD walkman that plays a different Spanish-language song. I gaze at the first portrait, which portrays Chloe in a self-embrace, and listen to Chavela Vargas singing La Llorona.

In Vargas’ voice, I feel the emotional anguish that I associate with my grandmother — a Mexican woman — and the music about heartbreak and loss she loved listening to when I was a child. My grandmother was a woman who suffered openly, and as I’ve aged I’ve learned from fellow Latinas how her gender performance (which deeply perplexed and stressed me out) has roots in the Victorian femininity that was common among Spanish women during the era of colonialism in Mexico.

All of the self-portraits of Chloe depict her crying, and I’m curious about her history and connection to her own matriarchs. As I experienced each part of the show, I stop to ask Chloe questions.

Here’s Vignette #2 of my interview with Chloe:

Selena sings Como la Flor as I look at Chloe’s second self-portrait, vulnerable yet confronting:

Here’s Vignette #3 of my interview with Chloe:

Finally, Vicente Fernandez sings Volver Volver:

I watch limes and salt trail the third painting/illustration and rebelliously traverse its borders (mimicking the fat body’s refusal to be contained and also the “illegal” or unsanctioned crossings of Mexicans and other Latin Americans over borders).

Here’s Vignette #4 of my interview with Chloe:

Chloe in her studio at CCA

Back in her studio, Chloe shows me her earlier work, which dealt directly with her painful experiences with fatphobia. She said that the reception to that work was almost universally negative, and it was labeled as too confrontational and vulnerable.

I loved how provocative these images were. Fatphobia is a disgusting and deadly form of stigma that devastates the people who experience it. I think it must be faced with honesty (in art and beyond) if we’re ever going to deal with it as a society.

You can see Chloe’s work for the next two days at CCA in San Francisco.