Ana Victoria Jiménez

Born in Mexico City in 1941, Ana Victoria Jiménez engaged in feminist activism and militancy in the 1960s. During this period she was a member of the Young Communist League and Unión Nacional de Mujeres Mexicanas, a group affiliated with the Mexican Communist Party. She also studied graphic arts at the Sindicato de Pintores, Escultores y Artistas Gráficos de México, an experience that would be foundational to her photography and publishing.

In 1971 Jiménez began working intensively with photography, documenting feminist demonstrations in Mexico City during the presidency of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–76). By the end of the 1970s she had integrated her photographic practice with radical feminism, then emerging in the visual arts in Mexico City. In 1978 Jiménez and the artist Mónica Mayer (b. 1954) collaborated with Cine Mujer, a collective founded in Mexico in 1975 by Rosa Martha Fernández and Beatriz Mar with the objective of producing films centering on women's issues. Jiménez provided photographs for Fernández's films Cosas de mujeres (Women's matters, 1975–78), on abortion restrictions, and Rompiendo el silencio (Breaking the silence, 1979), on the issue of rape. Jiménez began Ensayo sobre trabajo doméstico (Essay on domestic work, 1978), a photographic series on the lives of domestic maintenance workers. In 1979 she participated in and documented the staging in Mexico City of the International Dinner Party, a transnational happening celebrating the first exhibition of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in San Francisco. That same year—under the leadership of Mayer, Jiménez, and the visual artists Yan María Castro (b. 1952) and Yolanda Andrade (b. 1950), along with Mayer's mother, Lilia Lucido de Mayer—Mónica Kubli, Ester Zavala, Marcela Olabarrieta, and Ana Cristina Zubillaga organized the international forum "Traducciones: Un diálogo internacional de mujeres artistas" at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

An active participant in feminist art collectives, Jiménez has recently dedicated her efforts to writing and editing publications on diverse women's issues. Perhaps most remarkable is the archive that she formed between 1964 and 1990, comprising more than three thousand of her photographs documenting demonstrations and protests as well as over five hundred posters, flyers, and other ephemera from Mexico's feminist movement. The Archivo Ana Victoria Jiménez is housed in the Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and was the subject of the 2011 exhibition Mujeres ¿y que más?: Reactivando el Archivo Ana Victoria Jiménez. Jiménez lives and works in Mexico City.

—Mari Rodriguez Binnie