[UPDATED with Songs for Shifra] Shifra Goldman, Latino/Chicano Art Historian, Dead at 85

Courtesy of the Family

Shifra Goldman in her office

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UPDATE: Sept. 15 10:31 A.M.: As a reader let me know, Eric Garcia, the son of the late Shifra Goldman, released an album in tribute to his mother a month prior to her passing. The guitarist, who in the course of his musical life has lent his talents to Motown, Bob Dylan and the Nobodys, recorded a collection of songs he played bedside at the hospital where she was entering the final stages of Alzheimer's disease.


ORIGINAL ITEM, Sept. 14, 12:12 P.M.:Shifra M. Goldman, an early scholar, author, and activist for Latin American and Chicano art, died Sunday due to complications of Alzheimer's disease. According to an informative obituary written by Center for the Study of Political Graphics founding director Carol Wells, Goldman was born in 1926 to Russian/Polish immigrant parents, before moving on with her family to Los Angeles from New York in the 1940s.

As an undergraduate studio art major at UCLA, she involved herself in more than just coursework. She enlisted in the social movement of the times, tasks that found her subpoenaed before the House UnAmerican Activities. Living in East Los Angeles, Goldman learned Spanish and took a deep interest in Mexican and Chicano culture. As she later completed her bachelors degree from UCLA in the 1960's, the historian went on to obtain her masters from CSULA, before returning to her former university to enroll in the doctorate program.

It was in her Ph.D program where the activist scholar railed against Eurocentrism insisting that she be able put forth a dissertation on modern Mexican Art. When faculty member finally agreed years later, Goldman's work Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change would eventually go on to be published in 1981. Among other publications that followed included the 1994 collection of her essays compiled in Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States.

Locally, in addition to authoring books and essay on Latin American and Chicano art, Goldman was a long time professor at Santa Ana College earning an inaugural faculty publications award in 1987. She continued to advocate for Mexican art curating at Santa Ana's Bowers Museum and telling the Los Angeles Times in 1994 that, "To say that Tamayo is not as good as Picasso, that's Eurocentrism." Emigdio Vasquez, a well known Chicano artist and muralist who attended Santa Ana College in the 1970's, was praised by Goldman for his work including 22 murals in Orange County. "To see his paintings is to enter into and relive the history of a people," she wrote.

Donations in memory of Shifra M. Goldman are being asked to be made to Tropico de Nopal, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and Avenue 50 Studio. Information on an upcoming memorial in October will be made available on the websites for those establishments.