Hidden Realities: Abstract Art from Latin American Women Artists
Women artists from Latin America have recently received a great deal of attention as a result of exhibitions across the hemisphere. A notable example is Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 originally held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2017). The exhibition and its catalogue encompass a wide range of contemporary artistic practices among Latin American women artists, focusing on the ‘politics of the body’ and conceptualist approaches to art. Female abstract artists, however, did not occupy a significant place within this narrative. This panel aims to broaden our understanding of the contribution and role of women artists from Latin America to the development of abstract art in the twentieth century. Though current scholarship has emphasized the years after the Second World War, this panel examines the production of art across the twentieth-century and into the contemporary moment. Despite the inclusion of a few women abstract artists in recent Latin American art history we seek to study the full breadth of the experience of self-identified women within a largely masculine art world and the ways they carved out their creative practices. Moreover, we are looking for papers that address the way gender and sexuality, along with multiple intersecting identities, intervened in the production of abstract art by women artists, as well as with its critical reception and analysis. Abstraction offers a formalist freedom from social conventions therefore hiding possibly radical ways to be a woman artist.
Field of Study:
Caribbean
Latin America
Mexico
South America
United States of America
Chairs:
Mariola V. Alvarez,Temple University - mariolavalvarez@gmail.com
and
Ana M. Franco,Universidad de los Andes, Bogota Colombia - anfranco@uniandes.edu.co
