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Jacqueline Valenzuela ‘19 applies a dollop of teal paint to a canvas in her City of Industry studio, while her fiancé paints a lowrider car in the adjacent auto body shop.

She grew up watching lowriders cruise on Whittier Boulevard in Whittier, ever since elementary school. She really became interested in cars and car culture in her early teens, and incorporates that into her art.

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Valenzuela now has her own cruiser, a hot pink 1975 El Dorado Cadillac that she and her fiancé call “La Playgirl.” The nickname is kind of a joke, and Valenzuela does like to joke around and laugh. But it also has some deeper meaning.

“It’s a play on the sexualization of women,” said Valenzuela, 27, who graduated from The Beach with a B.F.A. in drawing and painting. “It’s almost like an alter-ego, I would say .... I hated pink growing up, now I have a big pink car. And I like when pink is used alongside other color schemes.”

Valenzuela is a Chicana, LGBTQ-identifying artist who has made an impact in the traditionally male and straight SoCal lowrider car scene. She has also made inroads into the regional fine art scene with work that blends “high” and “low” art, as well as classic and unconventional, industrial materials.  

“After Cal State Long Beach, I took a break from fine art and spent three years painting cars. I was doing murals on lowriders,” she said. “I felt like I had a lot of experiences I wanted to unpack. I wanted to explore what it is to be a woman in that community.”

Valenzuela paints with oils on various-sized canvases, depicting details from lowriding culture, as well as women who play prominent roles in the scene. Her paintings are accented by graffiti and pixelized squares, which almost look digital.  

She also creates framed, three-dimensional mixed-media works that echo the interiors and exteriors of decked out lowriders. 

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“Having that experience where I was working on cars, I was drawn to other materials besides oil on canvas, like auto paint and faux fur,” she said. “Customized cars can be used in fine art. The (works) are like deconstructed lowriders.”

Valenzuela is a proud ������ graduate who has recently been featured in several high-profile exhibitions. She’s got more coming up – including a solo exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in the fall – and is the featured fine artist at this summer’s OC Fair.

She has also attracted a fair amount of media attention recently, from Lowrider magazine to LAist. And she started her own car club called Prophets, which is intentionally women and LGBTQ-friendly.

“From an outsider’s perspective, or when you’re first starting to be in these spaces, you do immediately get that male-dominated aspect to it,” she said. “But once you meet a couple more people, or interact with more women in the space, you realize how big a role they play. They’re maybe the wives of car builders, but they also have a car as well. Some of the women grew up around car culture, so it’s almost a way of tapping into childhood memories.”

She also points out that similarities exist between lowriding and queer cultures.

“It’s a group of male peacocks that get together and show off their colorful feathers to each other,” she laughs. “You have a sparkly car. I mean, let’s get real. They’re almost like the drag queens of car culture.”

Valenzuela, who’s represented by Munzón Gallery in Long Beach (founded by Elizabeth Munzón ’17), is part of a group of Chicano/a and Latinx artists who have graduated from ������’s art program and are now making waves in the art world and establishing names for themselves. In addition to her exhibitions, Valenzuela was a 2023-24 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow representing L.A. County and is currently a Professional Artist Fellow for the Arts Council for Long Beach.  

She attributes much of her success to what she learned, and who she interacted with, at The Beach.  

“I’m really happy I went there,” she said. “I had access to a lot of really great professors: Yu Ji for figurative painting and drawing. Marie Thibeault for color theory. She was really great at that. Walking around campus, my mind was just blown by looking at a shadow and I would know how to mix that.”

Valenzuela also made a lasting impression on her instructors.

Daniel Dove, a professor in the School of Art and program head of the drawing and painting program, said, “Jacqueline is a polymath within the arts, able to code-shift between traditional painting (using time-honored techniques to create convincing depictions of the visible world) and custom painting of automobiles (a practice that doesn’t tend to have many female practitioners). She is able to successfully hybridize these influences, creating a body of work as accomplished and unique as she is.”

Siobhan McClure, a retired lecturer of drawing and painting, said, “She is a talented young artist who distinguished herself in my classes by her ambition to push boundaries and to excel as a painter. Unpretentious, forthright and focused, she uses her artistic gifts to celebrate Latina, lowrider culture.”

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Valenzuela will be heading to UCLA this fall to start an M.F.A. program in drawing and painting. She will continue her craft, and in fact, will be doing several in-person workshops at the OC Fair this August.  

She says she’s thankful to The Beach for providing the foundation for building a successful art career.  

“I would say that ������ was one of the best schools I could have gone to,” she said. “The resources were there, which were super helpful. I had really great financial aid. I graduated without any debt. They have a really great arts program. I’ve met artists that have graduated from (other universities), and they’re jealous. We had access to great professors.

“������ alumni are now teaching for some other great schools. We gotta spread that knowledge beyond Cal State Long Beach.” 

View a gallery of Jacqueline Valenzuela's art: