Sweeping it under the rug: research on women artists in 19th century Buenos Aires

GLUZMAN, GEORGINA

Nueva York

Otro; Preconference Colloquium International Issues in Art History; 2015

College Art Association

This talk aims to discuss the tensions provoked by importing modes of analysis to "peripheral" zones and the risk of obliterating peculiarities by doing so. My background as an art historian working in the reconstruction of women's art careers in Buenos Aires (1890-1920) offers an interesting starting point. The art scene of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires encompassed a large group of women artists working in different media. In the first formal art exhibitions, organized between 1893 and 1898, the percentage of participant women artists registered high numbers, much higher than twenty years later. Their careers went unnoticed until very recently. Some of the survey books of the 1920s and 1930s, notably the one written by Eduardo Schiaffino (the first director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes), showed no interest in them. The 1990s witnessed the arrival of early feminist theory in the arts to Argentina, following the years of the last military dictatorship.