Jacqueline Valenzuela as an artist

Jacqueline Valenzuela is an East L.A born artist currently living in the City Terrace community of Los Angeles. Jacqueline is a first-gen Mexican-American, born of immigrant parents who heavily nurtured her creative interests from childhood. She credits her father and older brother as her greatest artistic influences. Valenzuela’s father looked to family and friends as models for cartoon drawings while her older brother focused on realism. As a young girl, she would browse his sketchbooks and borrow art supplies to make work of her own.

Valenzuela developed an early interest in the subcultures within her community, from the underground punk scene in East L.A. to the candied lowriders cruising Whittier Blvd every Sunday morning. She would eventually come upon a lowrider of her own, a 1975 Cadillac El Dorado. As Valenzuela committed herself further into the scene, she became increasingly aware of the lack of female representation. She took issue with how a woman’s role in lowrider culture has been limited to sexual objectification, often relegated as models and accents to the cars themselves.

Valenzuela began focusing her work on lowrider women hoping to magnify the importance of their presence, broadening how the public perceives their influence. Using bold colors, portraiture, and the urban landscape she creates compositions that emphasize femininity in an otherwise designated male-dominated world. Her work combines the murals commonly seen in Latinx communities that focus on religion and social issues, with the erasure of women in the hierarchy of lowrider traditions.

Valenzuela has exhibited her work at various non-profits, artist-run spaces, and galleries throughout Los Angeles. She recently organized a collaborative show at the artist-run Flatline Gallery in Long Beach, and collaborated on the stand out lowrider build known as The Heart of Gold.

Watch Valenzuela’s video interview with ñ here.