Ana Segovia

By José Luis Blondet, foreword by Johanna Burton In his paintings, Ana Segovia (b. 1991, Mexico City; lives in Mexico City) twists assumptions about masculinity through a queer lens. Working with an aggressive palette of fluorescent colors, daring compositions, and cinematographic framing and cropping, Segovia undermines the gendered basis of national identity built around hypermasculine archetypes—such as the charro or cowboy—that have been standardized by film. The artist, who is a direct descendent of major players in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, an era spanning from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, has been using film stills drawn mostly from this auspicious tradition as a source for his paintings. In MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia, he continues his engagement with film archives, this time turning to Roger E. Alamos’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1983). The film, a variation on 1980s musical dramas, recounts a love story between Buck, an aspiring artist, and Mario, an undocume