“[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in dialogue”: Absences and erasures in art collections in Mexico

INTRODUCTION

 The exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue” is being presented at the Kaluz Museum in Mexico City from October 15, 2022, to April 24, 2023 and has been curated by art historian Karen Cordero Reiman. The exhibition invites us to reflect on the absence of women, both in the narratives of art history and in collections and galleries. Through the union of artwork made by women from different artistic periods, she builds a narrative that subverts hierarchies and generates new narrative possibilities that involve corporality and subjectivity.

In this sense, one of the issues that the exhibition seeks is to make visible the low presence of women artists in the collections and galleries of Mexico. For these reasons, this text will present the proposals of the exhibition, while at the same time analyze the problems of the absence of women artists in various collections.

Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

TO START… A BIT OF THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition was based on artworks made by women that were in the Kaluz Museum Collection and, at the same time, established links with the collections of other galleries and museums. The curator states that the exhibition has been inspired by the text of the art historian Griselda Pollock from 2017 Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space, and the Archive, (Cordero K, 2022, p.16). This text poses a subversive rearrangement of ways of narrating and telling stories from the senses (Pollock, 2007). Thus, following this proposal, the exhibition re-articulates new forms to generate meaning in the history of art from the production of women.

The exhibition is divided into three sections: Bodies, Environments, and Imaginaries which, as Karen Cordero states, are the artistic genres that represent the work done by women in the Kaluz Museum (Cordero K, 2022, p.17). The section Bodies presents us with an analysis of corporality, raising the questions: How women look at women? And, how is the body a place of self-representation? At the same time, the curator exposes how women look at others and how they represent childhood and masculinity?

Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of a Lady, 1795, oil on canvas, Collection National Museum of San Carlos, part of the Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Section I Bodies, Section I.A Women looking at women, The body as a site of self-reflection, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

In the Environments section, the exhibition confronts us with artworks made by women of different temporalities and spaces. These artworks evoke a materiality, that invites us to recognize our connection with the natural environment, with the built environment and with domestic environments. On this section, I would like to comment on the work Project Library of the Earth (2008 to date), conceptualized by Marianna Dellekamp. To carry out this work, the artist called for people to donate soil from various parts of the world to place in transparent containers like books. When we get closer to these earth books, we can see the different textures, sizes, and colors of the earth. It is a living collective project that continues to be built (Museum of art of Zapopan, 2019).

In this section, I also want to comment on the work Own Stories from Home, by Lorena Wolffer. This work consists of a cultural intervention that brings together the stories of women and girls during the COVID-19 pandemic (Wolffer, 2020). Through collaborative work, we can learn about the stories of women who lived at home during a period of confinement that prevented them from going out into the streets.

Marianna Dellekamp, ​​Earth Library Project, 2008 to date, Earth, leaves, organic material and acrylic boxes, Collection of the artist, part of the Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Nucleus II Environments, Nucleus II.A Natural Environment, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

Lorena Wolffer, Own Stories from Home, 2020 to date, Videos and reference books, Collection of the artist, part of the Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Nucleus II Environments, Nucleus II.C Domestic environment, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

Finally, the Imaginaries section includes artworks that seek a new way of distinguishing reality from other logical concepts. In this section, I would like to comment on the work Sé-nos, Chichis grandes (2017), that was produced at the Lactejiendo Workshop in the José Vasconcelos Library, and Modular wall panel (2022), both realized and conceptualized by Lana Desastre Collective. This collective of weavers seeks to promote and disseminate weaving as a subversive medium capable of building new narratives.

Lana Desaste Collective, Sé-Nos, 2020 to date, Videos and reference books, Collection of the artist, part of the Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Nucleus III Imaginaries, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

The display of these works is interspersed with didactic modules that are shown as key questions: Where are the woman artists in art collections in Mexico? How does art history change when it is seen through the work of women artists? How have women become artists at different times in Mexico’s history? These questions work as a device that links viewers through questions that encourage critical reflection.

Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

ABSENCE, INVISIBILITY AND ERASURES

One of the questions that the exhibition invites us to reflect on is the lack of women artists in the collections of museums and galleries. This problem has been a reason for reflection since the seventies, Linda Nochlin analyzed this in her iconic text: Why have there not been great women artists? the circumstances that conditioned the systematic erasure of women in the narratives but also their absence in the collections and galleries (Nochlin, 1971).

Years later, in 1989, the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls placed in protest the poster Do you have to be naked to get into the museum? in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artwork consisted of a reproduction of the Odalisque by Ingres, which implied a criticism of the stereotypes of women as objects of desire; however, this Odalisque was angry with these impositions, so she put on a gorilla mask. Additionally, the artwork was complemented with information that showed the low participation of women in the museum’s collections.

Guerilla Girls Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum, 1989, Extracted from https://www.mujeresenred.net/spip.php?article1566

Following this line of protest, the exhibition asks the following question: Where are the women artists in the art collections in Mexico? This is accompanied by extensive research on the amount of women’s artwork in different museums in Mexico, revealing that in the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) only 25% of the artists in its collections are women, in the Jumex Museum 20.18%, the Museum of Modern Art 16.65%, the Kaluz Museum 15.12%, in the Museum Tamayo 15.12%, the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art 11.95%, the National Museum of Art 9.70% and the National Museum of San Carlos only 1.17%. 

Exhibition “[Re] Generating… Narratives and Imaginaries Women in Dialogue”, Kaluz Museum Mexico City, 2022, Photography Cecilia Noriega

These show the problem that exists in relation to the low presence of women in art collections. It is also important to note that museums dedicated to contemporary art, such as the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC-UNAM), have a greater presence of women than collections dedicated to previous periods. This makes evident the scanty information that is available on the artistic production carried out by women during New Spain period and Mexican art produced during 19th century.

The scant participation of women in the collections comes from patriarchal policies that promote systematic erasure, not only in the sense of impeding the artistic development of women but also in the historiographical erasure. These have profound implications when we study artistic periods and artworks, because it depends on existing collections and archives and, in general, on what has been preserved to re-construct the history of art. In this sense, making a history of feminist art implies working from these invisible spaces, searching with a detective’s gaze to discover hidden treasures, and through them rewrite another story, another way of seeing the world.

Finally, this exhibition makes these silences visible and brings together artworks produced by women from different periods and from different collections to open a critical space, where the viewer can generate new constructions of meaning, new relationships, new questions that contribute to a reflection on the history of feminist art.

By: Cecilia Noriega

REFERENCE SOURCES

• Cordero. K (2022) How does the history of art change if we see it through women artists?, in (Re)generating… Narratives and Imaginaries. Women in dialogue, Kaluz Museum, Mexico, p. 13-28
• Lorena W. (2020) Own stories from home Consulted in http://www.lorenawolffer.net/01obra/55desdecasa/desdecasa_frames.html
• Museum of Art of Zapopan (2019) Library of the Earth, Consulted in https://maz.zapopan.gob.mx/portfolio_page/biblioteca-de-la-tierra/
• Nochlin L. (1971) “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?  Art News 69, n.9
• Pollock G.  (2007) Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive, Routledge, London and New York