Feminist Art and "Artivism" in Latin America

Mónica Mayer To write about feminist art in Latin America means to formulate a long list of questions about a long-standing activity and a new field of research that range from "What is feminist art and how and by whom has it been produced?" to "What social factors enabled artists in the mid-twentieth century, myself among them, to approach or reject feminist art in each region of Latin America?"

I began calling myself a feminist artist in the 1970s, and I continue to do so because in Mexico that term is still cause for discomfort. I worked in the feminist movement for a few years, but my battle has always been waged through art and in the art world. In that I was not alone. Artists like Maris Bustamante, Magali Lara, Pola Weiss, and Ana Victoria Jiménez also questioned women's inequality in art by making work about personal experiences and by organizing exhibitions that reflected the belief that it is important to challenge a patently patriarchal art system. That is why, for me, producing artwork has been as important as writing, teaching, disseminating, registering, and building archives. The 1970s also witnessed the emergence of vast production of what we now call "artivism," a combination of art and activism that has yet to be included in contemporary Mexican art history. I am thinking, for instance, of the work of La Revuelta, a collective that did street theater or cultural guerrilla warfare—what we would call performance today. Jiménez documented all that work through the 1980s, and then Rotmi Enciso took over.

María Laura Rosa I would go further back. Throughout history there have been women who have exercised their human and creative freedom, aware that this was neither expected nor commonplace for their gender.

In addition to those individual women who, at the end of the nineteenth and during the first half of the twentieth century, fought for our rights of citizenship as Latin American women or formed part of early feminist movements, there were artists who may not have called themselves feminists or formed part of those movements but who did create works that can now be interpreted in relation to feminist art theory. The photographers Annemarie Heinrich (fig. 1) and Grete Stern (fig. 2) in Argentina, for instance, have been analyzed in terms of that field of study.^# The fact that an artist did not actively participate in those early women's movements does not imply that she was not aware of them; the possibility of combining feminist activism and artistic creation simply did not form part of the mental landscape of women creators until the second wave of feminism, that is, until the 1970s.^#

Women creators like Frida Kahlo questioned what society expected of women. Kahlo was an active participant in political movements. Though from early on her work demonstrated that the private and the personal are political, she did not call herself a feminist. Her work has influenced feminist artists around the world and given rise to a number of interpretations informed by feminist theory. Art historians today, among them Griselda Pollock, argue that the feminist perspectives of many professionals in the art world have been shaped by the work of artists who questioned gender stereotypes and made alternative realities visible for women in their time.^# Since the 1970s, however, there has been fluid exchange between feminist movements and artists. It is at that point that we start to speak of feminist artists and art, meaning creators who bring their feminism to bear on their work.

In Argentina the filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg and the photographer Alicia d'Amico (figs. 3a and 3b) were both members of the Unión Feminista Argentina (UFA). The photographer Ilse Fuskova was involved in the Movimiento de Liberación Femenina (MLF). All of them attempted to subvert patriarchy through their art, using their work as a means to raise consciousness of the oppression of women—an approach that tied them directly to feminist activism. Both subversion and consciousness-raising were, and continue to be, fundamental to feminist art and artists.

The 1960s also witnessed the emergence of artists who, though not activists themselves, created work that addressed gender issues, work that—it can be argued—gave shape to an art of gender.