Castro Visiting Professor Delilah Montoya urged the students in the audience to “follow the hunger inside of you.”

More than 100 faculty, staff and students converged on St. Cajetan’s Monday morning as artist and educator Delilah Montoya, this year’s Richard T. Castro Distinguished Visiting Professor, delivered the day’s keynote address, speaking about her numerous projects and their investigations of cultural experiences.

While presenting a slideshow of a number of her powerful documentary-styled portraits, Montoya, an associate professor of photography at the University of Houston, spoke on the themes of cultural identity, memory and history. “My work reflects not only how we as Chicanos understand ourselves,” Montoya said, “but how we are understood as well, and sometimes stereotyped, for example by the media.”

Citing the first national Chicano conference held in Denver in 1969 as groundbreaking and ushering in a Chicano Renaissance in activism and the arts, Montoya said, “I’ll bet Richard T. Castro was there… I wasn’t, but I certainly caught the fever from those who were.”

To a crowd that included numerous Metro State students as well as high school students from northwest Denver’s Escuela Tlatelolco, Montoya described arriving in Denver as a young woman from Omaha, Neb., and being invigorated by the city’s Chicano presence, which hadn’t existed in Omaha. “Denver’s activism awakened the artist in me,” she said.

In Denver, she produced a body of work titled “Crickets in my mind,” consisting of black-and-white photographs of the community on Inca Street, where she lived. “The work codifies ‘sensualismo,’” Montoya said.

Montoya showed and described later projects that explored “the way we gravitate toward certain icons that have endured in Chicano culture.” In a series on women boxers, many from Denver’s West Side, Montoya said she was exploring the spirit of a malcriada, or ill-mannered girl. “A malcriada is a woman who will not behave and is determined to do what she wants, regardless of what society rules or even good sense dictates…. These boxers are on the edge of breaking down cultural stereotypes, refusing to conform to social norms.” Montoya showed another body of work that explored the image of the Guadalupe in Chicano culture.

Telling of her efforts to lift herself from being an unemployed, single, teenage mother to getting her master’s degree and becoming a professor and artist of renown, Montoya urged the students in the audience to “follow the hunger inside of you.”

“You have to work hard, identify goals, and then every day do at least one thing that will help you accomplish them.”

That strategy has clearly worked for Montoya, whose work can be found in the permanent collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts in, Santa Fe, N. M., among others.

This year’s Castro professorship events began on Sunday evening with a welcoming reception at the Colorado History Museum, included events throughout Monday and Tuesday, and will conclude with two events on Wednesday: a brown-bag lunch discussion by Montoya on Luis Jimenez’s controversial Blue Mustang sculpture at Denver International Airport (11:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m., TIV 320) and a closing reception highlighting one of Montoya’s art pieces at the Institute for Women’s Studies and Services (3-5 p.m., 1033 Ninth Street Park).

Go to Castro professorship to learn more.