Once dubbed "the original digital diva," Alma López creates and collects photographic images from a wide variety of sources, using computer technology to collage them together in powerfully subversive ways. Typically, her works are scaled to the size of large billboards or murals, although she often makes more intimately-scaled iris/giclee prints on paper or canvas. López's 1999 Our Lady of Guadalupe, which references the popular Latin American image of the Virgin Mary, attracted controversy when it was exhibited at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. In this work, the Virgin, her gaze direct and defiant, is shown wearing a bikini of flower garlands. She stands on a curved platform that is held by a large-breasted angel with butterfly wings (a recurring motif in López's work employed to symbolize migration, flight, and the hidden intelligence of genetic memory). Not only is this image unabashedly erotic and pro-female, it revels in its lush icons of natural fecundity. Many in the Catholic community as well as the Santa Fe legislature mistakenly viewed the picture as sacrilegious in intent. López, however, insists that this and other works are a deeply personal attempt to relate traditional religious and cultural iconography to her own life and identity as an artist, a lesbian and a Chicana.