In this video, award-winning Chicana artist Patssi Valdez discusses the early years of Asco, an avant-garde Chicano art collective that worked together from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. The talk is followed by a conversation with English Professor Genaro Padilla. Professor Marcial González gives the introduction. Valdez received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1985 from the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles. She also studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Like so many other artists of her generation, Valdez's artistic career was influenced by her participation in the political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Valdez launched her artistic career with the Chicano art group ASCO (Spanish for "nausea"). Significantly, she was the only female among the founding four-member group, which included photographer Harry Gamboa and artists Willie Herron and Gronk. ASCO, which operated from 1972 to 1987, expanded the definition of Chicano art beyond murals and posters by experimenting with a range of art forms including street performance, photographic montage, mobile installations, pageantry, "no-movie" cinema, and conceptual art. But Valdez's representational critiques of gendered ideologies in glamour and fashion also gave her work within the group an edge which was distinctly feminist. After the disbanding of ASCO, the multi-talented Valdez continued to work in photography, installations, and graphic arts, as well as theater stage and costume design. But ultimately, it was painting that became her most compelling art form. Valdez's paintings represent the best of Chicana avant-garde expressionism. Many of Valdez's paintings focus on domestic interior spaces—kitchens, living rooms, etc. Her images are saturated with color and convey an overabundance of dream-like emotions. Human subjects are scarce in her paintings, but the works are nevertheless profoundly humanistic in their representations of loneliness, emotional pain, and the desire to fill the absence of human contact. Art critic Tere Romo writes that "Her home scenes are very much a metaphor for her own interior home and how she feels about herself. She is projecting her sense of home within herself, and it's not always comfortable." The discomfort one senses in viewing her work can be understood as a critique of social alienation. And yet, her paintings continue to be imbued with an implied commitment to civic responsibility. Valdez herself states, "My paintings . . . are snippets of environments that I consider meaningful and symbolic of my individual as well as collective Chicano experience." Valdez has won numerous prestigious awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts award, a grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, the Latina of Excellence Award in the Cultural Arts from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Brody Arts Fellowship in Visual Arts, a Flintridge Fellowship, a Durfee Foundation Grant, and a UC Regents' Lectureship. Valdez's work has also been featured at the Alma Awards, the Latin Grammies, and in several high profile collections, including the Smithsonian Institution and public museums nationally and internationally. Her work was also included in the traveling exhibition entitled "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge," curated by Cheech Marín which began touring in 2008.

Bio Engineering/ME C117: Structural Aspects of Biomaterials - Professor Lisa Pruitt This course provides an overview of medical devices, FDA regulatory issues, biocompatibility and sterilization technology. It examines biomechanical properties: isotropy/anisotropy, stiffness, bending stresses, contact stresses, multiaxial loading, plasticity, fatigue, fracture, wear, corrosion, design issues. Also covered: Orthopedics, Dental, Cardiovascular, and Soft Tissue Reconstruction. Professor Pruitt's current research is focused on fatigue and fracture micromechanisms, cyclic damage zones, and evolution of structure due to cyclic loading and environment in advanced polymers and biomaterials; tribology of...