CAA 113th Annual Conference New York City (2025)

We are thrilled to present the conference panel that the project particpants presented at the CAA 113th Annual Conference New York City:

1975–2025: Revisiting 1970s Art and Feminism in Latin America and Eastern Europe

 Year 2025 marks the 50^th anniversary of the United Nations International Women’s Year. In 1975, UN countries organized events focused on women and their active role in contemporary society. These included governmental (or government-supported) projects and grassroots initiatives presenting various perspectives on the “woman question,” for example, the major international events staged in Mexico City (June 19-July 2) and East Berlin (October 20-24). Although art was not central to International Women’s Year, it featured in many exhibitions, both in Mexico City and East Berlin and elsewhere. The 50^th anniversary presents an opportunity to revisit International Women’s Year and analyze anew the ways it either reflected or catalyzed feminist discourses on women artists and women’s art. Our papers will discuss the subject using examples from Eastern Europe and Latin America but place them in a global context.

The papers presented by this panel are the outcome of the research seminar “Narrating Art and Feminism in Eastern Europe and Latin America” (supported by the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Art Histories initiative). Those who attended the seminar exchanged interregional and transregional perspectives on how to undermine the dominant narrative regarding art and feminism and aimed to envision the construction of an alternative global discourse.

Andrea Giunta

1975: Women Artists in Latin America Between Recognition and Revolution

The first International Women’s Conference, held in Mexico in 1975, gave rise to numerous exhibitions featuring work about women or by women artists organized in this country. Other examples in Latin America included Women in Art, held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile, and the smaller-scale Santa María de los Buenos Aires biennial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This paper presents a comparative analysis of these and other events that took place in Latin America in 1975, enabling us to profoundly question art histories and configure the ways of seeing formulated since 1975. In Latin America, the ’70s were marked by the Cuban Revolution, the politicization of art and culture, coups d’état, dictatorships, and exile, but the paper maps a particular turning point: the aforementioned International Women’s Conference. Although the exhibitions of that year were a crystallization of representations conceived to promote international equality, peace, and development, they did so from aesthetically and politically conservative perspectives. The paper contrasts the content of these exhibitions with the radical and revulsive work that was being produced by women but not included therein.

Talita Trizoli

The American Women Artists Project and the Silent Reception of Feminist Art in Brazil

Researchers agree that second-wave feminist agendas in Brazil were politically and socially specific. In the political chaos of a military dictatorship, the resistance and combat strategies of left-wing groups, conservative Catholic values, and a mass culture that emphasized the female body as an object of consumption, there was little space for the dissemination and circulation of feminist literature or the formation of enlightened groups even though 1975 was International Women’s Year. While some members of the artistic community attended the first international conference on the status of women in Mexico City that year, reverberations from the event were diluted in the Brazilian context; special issues in magazines and newspapers were not sufficient to break down the misogyny and social divides that characterized Brazilian society. This paper discusses the University of São Paulo’s 1980 Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition American Women Artists, which was a unique event in this context. It featured 46 artists selected by Mary Dritschel, Glenda Park, and Regina Silveira. The exhibition allows us to demonstrate the ambiguous relationship of the Brazilian artistic scene to the feminist agenda, especially when it interpolates issues of race and class.

Vesna Vuković

1975: A Women’s Year in Art in Socialist Yugoslavia Between Anti-Statism and Anti-Elitism

 The UN International Women’s Year of 1975 spawned several conferences and various discussions on the “woman question” in Yugoslavia, but it barely resonated in the art world; indeed, a large representative exhibition that was planned did not take place because of a lack of finance. This paper discusses two events that did happen (both of which were staged in Belgrade): the discussion Women in Art at the Student Cultural Centre and the all-women photo exhibition Žene snimaju [Women photographing] at the Photography Showroom. The first event gathered female artists, art historians, critics, and feminist activists from Western capitalist and Eastern socialist countries. It can be seen as the foundation for the 1978 event Drug-ca žena: Žensko pitanje – novi pristup? [Comrade woman: The women’s question – a new approach?], which is considered to be a landmark of Yugoslavian autonomous and anti-state feminism. The second event, organised under Jovanka Broz’s auspices, featured more than 600 women professional and amateur photographers. It was part of a more than a decade-long tradition of all-women exhibitions that celebrated Women’s Day, within the framework of state gender and cultural politics based on radical democratization. The paper juxtaposes the two events using Nancy Fraser’s conceptualization of the tension between “equal distribution” and “struggle for recognition.” It sees them as two opposed feminist approaches to art and calls for re-evaluating both feminism and art history in socialist Yugoslavia.

Agata Jakubowska

Women Artists among  ‘Women of the Whole World’ (WIDF Magazine)

Among those involved in the global women’s activism that culminated in International Women’s Year was the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), which had been established in 1945 to unite left-wing women’s organizations. One of the ways it attempted to connect women globally was through a journal, Women of the Whole World, which was published in several languages and distributed in member countries. It was a forum for women who had fought to ameliorate their societal, economic, and often political situation in different parts of the world. This paper analyzes the presence of women artists and their work in Women of the Whole World (especially the issues published in 1975) and – more generally – the role women’s art played in women’s organisations and their actions. It shifts attention from exhibitions, discussed in other papers in this panel, to Women of the Whole World – the primary printed medium for international connection between women. In many countries, governmental celebrations of International Women’s Year triggered reactions from women artists who were unsatisfied with how their interests were presented. This paper asks how the magazine and the way it featured women artists reflected tensions around measures undertaken against gender injustice in the arts and society.