Invisible Histories: The Feminist Thread of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 and Anna Maria Maiolino

Over the course of the Getty-funded initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, set during the fall of 2017, two exhibitions opened that explored how women artists active throughout Latin America and the United States contributed to contemporary art. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, which opened at the Hammer Museum, UCLA, and Anna Maria Maiolino, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, served to undo the systems of erasure and marginalization which previously allowed these artists to remain hidden and emphasize the critical roles women artists occupied in the development of regional and international conceptual practices. While Radical Women was a large-scale group exhibition organized according to a critical feminist framework, Anna Maria Maiolino was presented as a monographic retrospective of the Brazilian artist. This paper will provide a comparison between Radical Women and Anna Maria Maiolino in order to uncover the nuances of applying feminism as a framework for exhibitions on Latin American women artists. I will address the different curatorial approaches and how feminism is presented within each exhibition, contrasting Radical Women’s thematic model with Anna Maria Maiolino’s chronological layout. Furthermore, my paper will explore how the curators of both exhibitions carefully frame gender as a social construct and destabilize essentialist interpretations of the feminine condition. Ultimately, my paper will argue that the feminist approach within Anna Maria Maiolino is largely de-emphasized in favor of formal interpretations, whereas the strategy of feminism within Radical Women effectively establishes and makes visible a transnational network of women artists.