Women artists from Latin American in narratives about Latin America: subsidiary human beings? The Latin American Women Artists 1915-1995 case study

GLUZMAN, GEORGINA

Chicago

Conferencia; College Art Association 108th Annual Conference; 2020

College Art Association

In 1995 the exhibition Latin American Women Artists 1915-1995 opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It was the first survey exhibition of art produced by women artists of Latin America conceived and presented in the United States of America. Curated by Geraldine Pollack Biller, the show included works by thirty-five women artists active in eleven Latin American countries during the encompassed period. The aim of this paper proposal is twofold: firstly, it aims to explore the analytical categories that were developed in this exhibition ("women", "Latin American art", "Latin American women artists"); secondly, it seeks to examine the inclusions and exclusions of the show. I will ask and answer the following questions: which artists were presented?; what were the implications of the selection?; and, finally, did they reinforce certain stereotypes associated with Latin America and its art? This proposal is informed by feminist re-readings of art history and by Latin American art theories, which have helped to deconstruct the Euro-American notions often applied to Latin American art. I will argue that the focus on women artists did not alter radically the label ?fantastic?, often applied to Latin American art. The thesis the anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner introduced in 1974 ("women are being identified or symbolically associated with nature, as opposed to men, who are identified with culture") may be usefully applied to better understand the Latin American exotic cliché the exhibition suggested. In this context, women were seen as doubly subsidiary human beings (in Rivolta Femminile words): as non-Western and as members of the second sex.