Women Artists

Flavia Frigeri

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780500774663
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Focusing on fifty diverse women artists, from Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi through Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta and the Guerrilla Girls to Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Louise Bourgeois, this book equips the reader with a general understanding of the history of art by women, as well as an appreciation of its most outstanding figures. Traditionally women have been among arts favoured objects of representation, while their contributions as art producers have been subordinated to those of men. This book documents women artists in context to offer readers an accessible but rich understanding of key female artists from the Baroque to the present day.

CONTEMPORARY VIEWS

artists born between 1942 and 1985

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I am a feminist, was a feminist, and will continue to be a feminist, and . . . I consider that even in works that are not explicitly engaged with questions of gender politics, the work is produced from the standpoint of a feminist

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Martha Rosler, 2014

ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

b.1942

Anna Maria Maiolino

ANNA, 1967

Woodcut, 47.6 × 66.4 cm (16¾ × 26⅛ in.)

Hauser & Wirth

ANNA is a self-portrait, in which the artist’s name is substituted for her image. Acting as a palindrome, ANNA simultaneously addresses the joys of birth as well as the sorrows of death. The two figures perched over the sepulchre could represent Maiolino’s parents.

Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Italy. In 1954 she moved to Venezuela with her family and in 1960 she relocated to Brazil to enrol at the newly created printmaking department of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. There she developed an interest in woodcuts and began to work on many of the recurring themes in her art. The political situation in Latin America became increasingly fraught and in 1964 a military coup in Brazil led to the drastic suppression of democratic institutions by a dictatorship. In protest, together with her future husband, Rubens Gerchman, and fellow students Antônio Dias and Carlos Vergara, the artist developed the style Nova Figuração (New Figuration), creating politically charged figurative works reminiscent of Pop Art. Her work stands out for the way Maiolino comments on the specificities of the Brazilian political situation, while also addressing broader themes such as cultural and geographical displacement.

In 1968 Maiolino travelled to New York with her husband and remained there for three years. During this time she made a series of pen drawings titled Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) and two etchings, Escape Point and Escape Angel, in 1971. Back in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1970s, Maiolino turned her attention to film and performance. In In-Out (Antropofagia) (1973) the focus is on the mouths of a man and a woman, which take up the entire screen. The camera alternates between the two mouths, which have been forced shut with tape first and then unbound, emphasizing how censorship has curtailed freedom of speech. While the political situation remained a central concern in Maiolino’s work, the body and bodily matter took on a prominent role, too.

Since the 1970s her production has explored different media including drawing and the manipulation of paper, which she sewed, cut and tore to create works that she calls ‘drawing objects’. Her oeuvre includes photography, film, installations and moulded sculptures. Since 1989 Maiolino has been experimenting with the material and physical properties of clay with its ‘multi-form possibilities’, as she pointed out when she started her exploration of the material. Maiolino lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

KEY EVENT

1967 – Maiolino takes part in the seminal exhibition ‘Nova Objetividade Brasileira’ (New Brazilian Objectivity) at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro.

Anna Maria Maiolino

Entrevidas (Between Lives), from the series Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction), 1981

Gelatin silver prints, each 144 × 92 cm (56¾ × 36¼ in.)

Hauser & Wirth

Entrevidas ponders the experiences of tension and fear suffered during dictatorships. Built around a series of analogies, which see the eggs as the repressed subjects and the feet as the oppressive dictators, Entrevidas emphasizes the vulnerability of the eggs as the feet walk through them.

GRACIELA ITURBIDE

b.1943

Graciela Iturbide

Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, México, 1979

Gelatin silver print, 53.3 × 43.2 cm (21 × 17 in.)

ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica

This photograph, which shows a woman with a crown made out of live iguanas, has acquired a legendary status. When Iturbide was invited to Japan to receive an award, this image was reproduced in place of her portrait on the invitation. When she arrived, the museum director was pleasantly surprised that Iturbide had come without an iguana.

Graciela Iturbide is one of Mexico’s foremost living photographers. Born in Mexico City, Iturbide first came to photography as a means of overcoming the loss of her six-year-old daughter in 1969. That year she enrolled in the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos in Mexico City, where she studied film directing and photography. Around the same time Iturbide worked as an assistant to Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of Mexico’s best known photographers; this experience was instrumental in making her see things differently. She credits her ability to capture on camera the spontaneity of an instant to her brief apprenticeship with the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Iturbide mostly works with black-and-white photography, as this medium provided the sense of detachment she sought with her portraits, which combine austerity with beauty. In terms of subject matter, the photographer’s work has primarily dealt with the documentation of the indigenous people of Mexico. In 1978 Iturbide was commissioned by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista to record the waning indigenous world by taking photographs of the Seri people in the Sonoran Desert in the north of Mexico.

In 1979 the Oaxaca-based painter Francisco Toledo invited Iturbide to the town of Juchitán where he was born and, through Toledo, the photographer became acquainted with the indigenous Zapotec people. Renowned for their matriarchal structure, the Zapotec entrust women with the organization of public life, the household as well as finances and politics, while men work in the fields. For a period of ten years Iturbide lived in Juchitán, where she produced some of her most iconic photographs, including Nuestra Señora de las Iguana (Our Lady of the Iguanas; 1979; opposite). An explanation for its success rests in its ability to capture the power of the indigenous world with its myths and legends. Also, as Iturbide has explained, a mythical image of this kind becomes a site for projection, allowing viewers to variously interpret it. Tellingly, Iturbide describes the genesis of this image:

If anyone looked at the contact sheet I had for The Iguana Women (and it might be interesting to publish it some day) they would see how the woman is laughing, that the iguanas were dropping their heads down. It was a miracle I got to snap a frame in which they were resting placidly for a moment. I never imagined it would become a photo that might really interest the Zapotec people themselves

Graciela Iturbide

Mujer Ángel, desierto de Sonora, México, 1979

Silver gelatin print, 40.3 × 56.8 cm (15⅞ × 22⅜ in.)

ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica

This photograph, translated as Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, captures the tension between modernity and tradition, exemplified by the indigenous woman wearing a traditional costume and marching through the desert with a tape recorder in hand. The picture appeared in the book Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Introduction
• Breaking Ground (born between 1550 and 1850)
• Pioneers of the Avant-Garde (born between 1860 and 1899)
• Triumphs and Tribulations (born between 1900 and 1925)
• Challenging Stereotypes (born between 1926 and 1940)
• Contemporary Views (born between 1942 and 1985)
• Timeline
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index of artists
• Picture acknowledgements
• Copyright