On Life and Art as a Feminist
Mónica Mayer
On how one day, I suddenly realized that I can not live without feminism.
I joined the ranks of feminism almost at the same time my professional life as an artist began. Even though I was brought up among male siblings in an enlightened family where I was treated as an equal, and during my adolescence I had heard about the important emergence of the women's liberation movement which was spreading like fire all over the world, up until then I had not noticed sexism around me and I felt that it was a worthy cause, though irrelevant at a personal level.
Then one day, in the early seventies, during a seminar at art school at the National School of Art (alias "San Carlos") where I was studying, a fellow student gave a lecture on women artists and to my surprise, at the end of her presentation most of the (male) students agreed that it was because of our biology, we could never be as good artists as them: motherhood took up all of our creativity. Apart from the astonishment I felt that they accepted this highly unscientific concept, particularly as they were artists and intellectuals and therefore generally considered to be progressive, that discussion made me understand that as an artist not only would I have to face such misogynist crap, but that it was up to me to try to do something about it. I understood that even if I produced the best artistic work in the world, the fact that I was a woman would affect the way in which it was received negatively. For the first time I was saddened by the enormous artistic potential humanity had wasted as a result of these stupid prejudices.
On another occasion, I had another big surprise. It was the seventies. The generation of "The Groups", with its political art and its interest in emerging genres such as performance and installation was in full blast. Everyone was a leftist and we still felt the scars of the 1968 student massacre in Tlaltelolco in Mexico City. Neither the internet nor the AIDS epidemic were around yet. We had closed San Carlos down as part of a large student movement struggling to improve educational standards. As I walked into the women's bathroom, I read an enormous sign that read "Women, make love, support the guys in their fight." With one phrase they had managed to erase our participation in the movement, not mention our efforts as young liberated women to control our sexuality. The guys seemed to believe our life should be limited to keeping their beds warm and their paintbrushes clean.
Jumping straight into feminism, or how I tried in vain to form a feminist art group.
In 1975, the Women’s International Year took place in Mexico City and the Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition “LA MUJER COMO CREADORA Y TEMA DEL ARTE” (Woman as Creator and Topic of Art). Ironically, most of the participants were men. Twenty years later, it seems unbelievable that they were unable to find enough women artists to organize a splendid exhibit or that they could not see how contradictory it was to organize a show where women were fundamentally the object of art, at best a muse, as part of a major international feminist event. At least in this aspect, things have more or less changed. At present, the younger generations of women artists are integrated and form over half of the visual artists' population and feminist theory has contributed in making profound changes to the study of art history at an international level and had a fundamental effect both on the visibility of women artists as well as the conception of art itself. Today, it is not necessary for us to fight for an exhibition that shows the work of women artists. On the contrary, there are so many of them that we only want them to exist when there is a specific academic or curatorial reason to have them.
Parallel to this 1975 exhibition, the MAM dedicated an issue of its magazine "Artes Visuales" (1) to the topic of the women artists where an interview with Judy Chicago, the pioneer of the feminist art in United States, was published. In it I found out that there was a feminist art school in Los Angeles. I contacted them and joined a two week workshop where I decided that this was exactly what I needed for my postgraduate studies. Víctor Lerma (my lifelong lover and partner)and I started saving money so we could go to California.
During the two years we were saving money, I joined the feminist movement in Mexico. I felt it was important to begin to understand all this universe before arriving at the Woman´s Building. I began participating in the group "Movimiento Feminista Mexicano" (MFM) with Mireya Toto, Sylvia Pandolfi, Lourdes Arizpe and other women because they produced a publication called "CIHUAT: VOZ DE LA COALICIÓN DE MUJERES" and I felt with them I could integrate my political concerns and the artistic ones. The burning topics were rape and abortion. Lesbianism seemed to scare everyone, so it was hardly mentioned. In those days, the Coalition was integrated by the Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres and the MFM. Shortly after, we were joined by groups such as La Revuelta, Movimiento de Liberación de la Mujer and Colectivo de Mujeres. We moved from Yucatán Street to an apartment at Rio Ebro Street where marathon sessions, violent discussions, radical attitudes, painful recriminations were the norm, all of which were as dense as the cigarette smoke that characterized them. A wonderful memory I have from those days is the demonstration we held in front of the Senators Building in December of 1977 demanding the liberalization of the abortion. The whole movement, all thirty of us, was present. Since my mother was concerned about my safety (the police could get kind of rough at the time), she decided to accompany me. She was so exited about the movement that she later joined one of the groups, Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres. On the sidewalk across the street, my father (who went to take care of my mother) and Victor (who was documenting the protest), cheered along.
One of the most important events for me during this period was the Primer Simposio Mexicano Centroamericano de Investigación sobre la Mujer (First Symposium of Mexican Central American Studies on Women). A parallel women artists exhibition was presented at the Museum de Arte Carrillo Gil (2). Alaíde Foppa, Sylvia Pandolfi and Raquel Tibol curated this exhibition and I helped as an assistant. More than eighty painters, sculptresses, weavers, photographers and ceramists participated in this important exhibition. After years of history of art classes where hardly any women artists were mentioned (and they were invariably dead or had suffered tragic lives), for many of us, as young artists, it was a real surprise to meet so many colleagues.
Later on I joined a film collective run by Rosa Marta Fernández because I could not bring together one for artists and this at least was closer to my own field. This was a very intense learning period for me because I participated in the research for “ROMPIENDO EL SILENCIO” ("Breaking the Silence") a film on rape. I will never forget a doctor that we interviewed at a police station who affirmed that women always provoke rape, even though he had just assisted a senior citizen who had been raped and her husband murdered by some thugs. Undoubtedly, this was my period as a furious feminist: that first moment when one becomes aware of the havocs caused by sexism, and all the myths that one has swallowed start to crumble and one's anger is so intense that you lose your sense of humor and sometimes end up believing that the enemy are men and not the system in which we all participate. Fortunately, for me, this period, although intense, was brief. Several film makers participated in Rosa Marta's group, among them: Laura Rosetti, Ana Victoria Jiménez, Lilian Liberman and Beatríz Mira.
During that time, despite my unsuccessful attempts to form a women artists collective, we were at least able to organize several exhibitions. The first one in which we identified ourselves as feminist artists was “COLLAGE ÍNTIMO” ("Intimate Collage"). It took place in 1977 at the Casa del Lago and Rosalba Huerta, Lucila Santiago and I participated in it. My work in that moment referred to the sexuality (the topic that I certainly was most interested in) and it was full of phalluses and vaginas. Although today these works may even seem funny, at the time they managed to scandalize a lot of people. The following year we organized the "EXPOSICIÓN COLECTIVA DE ARTE FEMINISTA” (“Collective Feminist Show") at the Galería Contraste: Anyone who considered herself a feminist was invited to participate, even if the work itself was not feminist. “LO NORMAL” ("On Normality"), another exhibition, was presented at a Youth Center in a working class neighborhood and it included work with a strong feminist content, even though not all the artists identified themselves as feminist. It seems as though we were trying to define what "feminist art" might mean.
Something that was particularly difficult during that time was that, although artists were trying to open up the debate on feminist art, art critics like Alaíde Foppa, who was an outstanding feminist militant and political activist, thought gender had nothing to do with art. And to this date, although the main theoretical debates of the art in United States and Europe invariably recognize the constant contributions from the feminist theory to the art, few Mexican critics even seem to be aware of it.
The "Woman's Building" in Los Angeles and the bridges with Mexico
In 1978, I finally joined the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles. The educational process in this singular institution was very special because it was based on the small group format, used by the whole feminist movement, and it looked for ways in which to develop creativity and to raise consciousness through group dynamics. We also studied the lives of women artists in the past. Accustomed to a traditional education, it was a surprise for me to be in classes where my personal experience was what was valued.
Besides the two year-old course I was taking, I also worked with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz in their group Ariadne: Social Art Network and their projects which integrated art and politics. One of them was "Making it Safe" whose goal was to reduce the level of violence against women in Ocean Park, a local community, through art. We organized exhibitions, round tables, performances, public speak outs, personal defense workshops and any other thing that raised the public’s consciousness. Something I learned at the time was that if one seeks to make a revolutionary art in political terms, it first has to be revolutionary in artistic terms. We made specific pieces feminist demonstrations (to which, much to my surprise, over 5,000 women would attend) and for the mass media. They were works which are hard to define, and in the best tradition in the conceptual art, went beyond all the limits of what had previously been accepted as "art."
In 1980 I obtained my “mistress of feminist art” degree at the Woman’s Building and my master’s degree in sociology of the art from Goddard College with a thesis titled "Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool" and for my final project I organized a conceptual work of art called "Translations: an international dialogue of women artists." The idea of the project was to come to Mexico with several of my fellow-students from the Woman´s Building to give a series of conferences and workshops about feminist art. They took place at the Carrillo Gil Museum, at the house of Nancy Cárdenas (the outstanding feminist and lesbian theater director) in Cuernavaca and in Oaxaca. The project in Mexico was coordinated by a group which included Ana Victoria Jiménez, Yolanda Andrade, Magali Lara, Yan Castro, Lilia Lucido (my mom) and other women. Once here, we also gathered information to take back to the U.S. where we gave a series of lectures on Mexican women artists. The documentation of this project was presented in the exhibition "Künstlerinnen Aus Mexico" in Berlin, an major show organized by Magali Lara and Ema Cecilia García. This exhibition started at the Goethe Institute and it traveled to several European countries.
One of the Mexican works we documented that impressed me the most was a mother’s day demonstration designed by several artists and Mexican feminists in order to protest against all the women who die from clandestine abortions. In this event, all the feminists marched to the Monument of the Mother dressed in black and they deposited a flower arrangement adorned with the medical instruments, herbs and pills used for abortions.
I also remember the participation of a group of Mexican artists in a piece of Suzanne Lacy in San Francisco. This work was presented at Judy Chicago’s "THE DINNER PARTY”, which is probably one of the best known feminist art exhibitions in this century. Lacy created a parallel piece called "THE INTERNATIONAL DINNER PARTY" in which women from all over the world came together to organize dinner parties to honor one or several important women in their community. In Mexico they celebrated Adelina Zendejas (a journalist), Amalia Castillo Ledón (writer and politician) and Concha Michel (a political activist)s. At the museum in San Francisco, Lacy had an enormous map of the world with small flags in each city from which she had received a telegram informing her about a dinner party.
Returning home and finally getting those feminist art groups going.
Towards the end of 1981, after a five month tour giving lectures on Mexican contemporary political art, feminist art and Mexican artists in several European countries, Victor and I returned to Mexico. My mother had died some months before and Adam, our first child, was on the way. One day I barged into the office of José of Santiago, postgraduate director at San Carlos, and I told him I was interested in giving a course on feminist art. Much to my surprise, he immediately accepted. My students and I started investigating the situation of women artists in Mexico, studying diverse theoretical aspects of the feminist art and developing creative work through the techniques that I learned in the U.S.. After a year we decided that it was important to form a feminist art collective, and in 1984 Tlacuilas and Retrateras was formed.
Our first project was around the “quinceañera” (fifteen year old girl) and the party and celebrations girls this age enjoy (or not). This party is a highly ingrained rite of passage in our society. The group included Ana Victoria Jiménez, Karen Cordero, Patricia Torres, Elizabeth Valenzuela, Lorena Loaiza, Ruth Albores, Nicola, Consuelo Almeida and Marcela Ramírez. The result of our research led to an event called La Fiesta de Quince Años which took place in August of 1984 at San Carlos. At the entrance of the Art School, the replica of the sculpture of the Victory of Samothrace dressed as a typical “quinceañera”, all frilled up and pink, in a misty atmosphere, received the public. That afternoon there was a torrential rain storm and since the roof of San Carlos' patio was being fixed, we had to begin the event amid a chaos that we are never able to overcome: More than 2,000 people arrived and we only expected around 300. As a result, we could not even cross the corridors to manage the few lights that we were allowed to use for the authorities feared we could be electrocuted by the wet cables. The ceremony was conducted by María Eugenia Pulido and Armando de León and was based on a script written by the group, which began with the traditional waltz.
The maids of honor were artists who had designed their own dresses: one brought a chastity belt and dressed in a crinoline with hands printed all over. As part of the project we asked diverse members of the community to be our godparents, just as there are for the real fifteen year old parties. Art critic Raquel Tibol, for example, was book godmother; Sanborn's (the restaurant) donated us an enormous cake in the shape of Cinderella’s slipper; musician Eric Zeolla composed the "Sopa Inglesa" waltz specially for the occasion and artist José Luis Cuevas was the father of the birthday girl, although unfortunately he arrived late and the multitudes prevented us from noticing his presence.
Besides the party, there were several performances, an exhibition including the work of nearly 30 women artists and Nahum B. Zenil, whom we invited as the token man so that we weren’t accused of being sexist. Fanny Rabel, Yolanda Andrade, Magali Lara and Leticia Ocharán (the late artist who wrote extensively on women artists in Mexico) were among the participants. Apart from turning the spotlights onto this popular and highly significant puberty ritual, this exhibition was important because it opened up the door to all sorts of artistic proposals based on kitsch aesthetics, which are so trendy at present. We also had poetry readings by Patricia Vega and Magali Tercero and the presentation of Carmen Boullosa’s play PARA COCINAR HOMBRES (COOKING MEN). Among the performances that were presented that night was "Nacida entre Mujeres" of the feminist art collective Bio-art, which included Nunik Sauret, Roselle Faure, Rose Van Lengen, Guadalupe García and Laita. Their group proposal was to carry out works that had to do with the woman's biological cycles and that evening they modeled some beautiful plastic quinceañera dresses. Robin Luccini, Eloy Tarcicio and María Guerra also participated in a controversial performance where they dressed up in meat. On the other hand, Patricia Torres and Elizabeth Valenzuela performed a piece called "Mirror-mirror", which was very intimate and got lost in the tumult and chaos. It abruptly came to an end when Raquel Tibol's (like a nasty quinceañera mother) started banging the floor the floor with her umbrella, ordering them to hurry up.
Polvo de Gallina Negra, a feminist art group to which I will refer to in detail later, made a performance for the event with Rubén Valencia and Víctor Lerma called “LAS ILUSIONES Y LAS PERVERSIONES” ("Illusions and Perversions"). While Victor and I kissed passionately in front of an enormous crocheted heart shaped cushion, Maris Bustamente wore a dress with a female sex on the outside which Rubén tore, leaving a trail of blood. Then he grabbed a syringe of “semen” and started squirting the public. At the closing event of “La Fiesta de Quince Años” we also performed “TRES RECETAS DEL GRUPO POLVO DE GALLINA NEGRA” in which we analyzed the event of "Tlacuilas and Retrateras" and acted out several group dynamics showing us how to accept criticism, without chickening out.
Criticism, by the way, was vicious. Today I reread their texts and I understand that although I am aware there were many technical flaws in this very ambitious independent project with hardly any sponsorship or institutional support, and that the critics and the journalists didn’t have a clue of the type of work we were doing. They dismissed us because we were not good actresses, and didn’t even know the terms performance or live art, which required other parameters, existed. We could hardly expect them to understand. Exhaustion after the event, the critics' attitudes and the fact that my course in San Carlos had come to an end, made the group disintegrate not long after.
More or less at the same dates, the Museum of Fine Arts of Toluca asked me to organize an exhibition of women artists. In 1984, "Mujeres Artistas/Artistas Mujeres" brought together almost a hundred participants, including painters, sculptresses and performance artists and photographers, and, although their concept was not very different to that of the exhibition of the Carrillo Gil, I personally learned a lot by meeting them all, particularly the women artists who identified with feminism, among them Elena Villaseñor, Herlinda Sánchez Laurel, Susana Campos, Carla Rippey, Noemí Ramírez, Fanny Rabel, Leticia Ocharán. During this time Nilda Peraza, a Puerto Rican curator living in New York came to Mexico to put together an exhibition of women artists sponsored by Avon. "NEW ROADS: MEXICAN PAINTERS" was presented in Washington and New York, and concluded its tour at the Foro de Arte Contemporáneo in México City.
The moment of glory of feminist art in Mexico was in the beginning of the eighties, so much so, that the feminist art magazine FEM (3) dedicated an issue to women artists. For me, it was a very important moment because something I’ve always been worried about is the lack of communication between political or academic feminism and the feminist art. I am convinced that one of the big weaknesses of the Mexican feminist art has been that we have not been able to find our natural public among feminists. Either we have not been able to respond to their needs, or they have not understood that we are not only interested in politics. Art is our main concern.
Towards the end of 1983, we began to meet with several artists with the purpose of starting a group. We had already participated in a series of collaborations, like the collective installation at the Festival de Oposición (Opposition Festival) in December 1982, where Magali Lara, Moral Rowena, Maris Bustamante, Adriana Slemenson and I made bed installations in order to deal with women’s traditional sexual roles. At the beginning of 1983, Magali, Silvia Orozco, Carmen Boullosa and I produced a series of videos for Rowena Morales’ exhibition "Cartas a esa monja" at the Museo Carrillo Gil. When the idea of starting a feminist art group came up, most of them chickened out. Some argued that it was a too radical and others worried they would lose their boyfriends. In the end the group was formed by Maris Bustamante, Herminia Dosal and I. When Herminia realized she did not share our aesthetic ideas, Maris and I were left as the only members of Polvo de Gallina Negra (PGN).
The objectives of PGN were: 1) to analyze the woman's image in art and in the media 2) to study and to promote the participation of women in art and 3) to create images based on our experience as woman in a patriarchal system, with a feminist perspective and with the goal of transforming the visual world in order to alter reality. This made it easy for us to select the name of the group: we believed that if in this world it is difficult to be an artist, all the more so to be woman artist and it is almost impossible to be a feminist artist, so we selected the name “Polvo de Gallina Negra” (Black Hen Powder) which is a remedy against the evil eye. Our name itself was a protection. Our first event was the performance "EL RESPETO AL DERECHO AL CUERPO AJENO ES LA PAZ” and it took place during the demonstration against violence against women on October 7, 1983, at the Juárez Monument. Our performance was to prepare a potion which would cause rapists the evil eye. We read a texts in which ingredients were things such as: 10 hairs of a strong feminist, a sprinkle of supportive legislators, etc. Later on we distributed envelopes of our special potion/medicine. The recipe (which is actually very humorous, though critical of a system which clearly promotes rape) was published in several magazines and feminist calendars, and it has even appeared once or twice on television.
In 1984, we participated with the performance "MUJERES ARTISTAS O SE SOLICITA ESPOSA” (Women artists or, we are looking for a wife) at the Biblioteca Mexico and in “LA FIESTA DE QUINCE AÑOS” which I have already mentioned. However, our great event that year was a tour of 30 lectures at different educational institutions in the State of Mexico with a performance/lecture called "MUJERES ARTISTAS O SE SOLICITA ESPOSA”. After talking briefly about sexist images in art, we mentioned some of the most important women artists through history, including those in Mexico focusing on younger artists. However, our goal was not to promote our colleagues, but to speak of feminist issues based on their images. This way, Lourdes Grobet's photographs of women wrestlers allowed us to speak about battered women, Magali Lara’s childhood journals started us off on the education of little girls, the work of Maris was used for us to speak about eroticism, my own work to refer to rape and that of Ana Victoria Jiménez to deal with domestic work. I should mention that at the time I was six months pregnant, and Maris was in her third month and we stressed our condition by wearing aprons made our tummies bulge even more. In many of the schools we visited we started heated debates.
PGN’s most ambitious project, MADRES! (MOTHERS!), took place in 1987. Although today it could be classified as process art, we coined the term Visual Project to define this type of work we were doing, which aimed at integrating politics, eliminating traditional definitions of art and creating pieces which were carried out over several months. We thought of MADRES! as a way of integrating life and art, particularly at a time when motherhood was the most important part of our experience. Thus, we presented ourselves as the only group that had gotten pregnant as part of an art project. Naturally, we had had the help of our husbands. As artists themselves, they understood our intentions perfectly. Obviously, as feminists, we gave birth to daughters and, to prove our scientific accuracy, Yuruen and Andrea were born with only 3 months difference in 1985, the year of the earthquake.
MADRES! had several sub-projects. In the first place it was an art mail project where we sent several pieces to the artistic community and the press on different aspects of motherhood which ranged from our own relationships to our moms, to an imaginary event in the future in which our descendants are able to destroy the archetype of the MOTHER. We also organized "LETTER TO MY MOTHER", a competition, where we summoned the general public to write a letter with everything they every wanted to tell their mothers but had not dared. We received 70 answers and there was an award ceremony in which we gave a work of art to the winner and we raffled another work amongst all the participants. Another event was a poetry reading where Carmen Boullosa and Perla Schwartz, amongst others read their poems on motherhood.
As part of "MADRES!", Maris and I carried out a series of performances at the Museo Carrillo Gil, the Esmeralda art school, etc.. Surprisingly, the last one, at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana where Maris sawed a plastic tummy off me, took place the day before her daughter was born. As of that moment, we became a totally endogamous group and the only way any one can join us is if they are our direct female descendants. Only our daughters or granddaughters will be entitled to become members of POLVO DE GALLINA NEGRA!.
Besides the live audiences performances, we made a couple of them specifically for the media. One of them took place at the news program “Nuestro Mundo” with anchorman Guillermo Ochoa, which at the time had a very high rating. Dressed with our enormous paunches with aprons (which made us look very pregnant) and a ventriloquist's doll that had an eyepatch like Catalina Creel's, the infamous mother in a very famous soap opera running in those days, we dressed him up as a pregnant woman and named him "Mother for one Day." Ochoa really joined in the fun and performed beautifully with us. He swallowed the pills we gave him to make him feel morning sickness and proudly wore his crown as queen of the home. The public immediately responded: the men were deeply offended but it fascinated many women. Nine months later, a member of the public called Ochoa to ask if he had had a girl or boy.
The project "MADRES! / MOTHERS!" concluded with my exhibition "NOVELA ROSA O ME AGARRO EL ARQUETIPO” at the Carrillo Gil Museum. Later on we participated sporadically in diverse conferences and a few performances. In 1993, after 10 years, we decided to bring the cycle to a close.
The Feminist Art in the Nineties
I don't know if it was exhaustion after so many years working collectively, but towards the end of the eighties I was ready to work alone. Unlike feminist art groups in the U.S. and Europe who were able to link the work of people in the theoretical and the practical fields of art (historians, critics, and artists etc.), in Mexico this did not happen. Thus, in 1988 when I had the opportunity to collaborate in El Universal, one of the major newspapers in the country, I decided to write about the issues I love: women artists and cutting-edge art.
For me, the most important thing about writing is that little by little, I have gathered a collection of articles on Mexican artists which has allowed me to analyze the changes in our situation over the past 20 years. The first thing I would have to underline is that, at present, there are a great number of excellent young artists (in their late twenties and early thirties) such as Mónica Castillo, Sofía Taboas, Yolanda Paulsen, Laura Anderson, Patricia Soriano, Isabel Leñero, Rosario García Crespo and Elvira Santamaría. Their work, even if they do not necessarily accept it, has been thoroughly influenced, directly or indirectly by feminist art. There are also other excellent artists whose concerns have nothing to do with women’s issues such as Estrella Carmona, Doris Steinbichler or Lorena Orozco. Amongst their generation, at least 50% of students at the art schools are women. As far as the grants awarded by our National Fund for Culture and Arts (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) and awards given at the National Competition of Young Art (Encuentro Nacional de Arte Joven) are concerned, women students do as well or better than young male artists. However, in collective exhibitions as well as solo shows, the presence of women artists continues being weaker and for each 10 critical texts written of them, only one alone is dedicated to a woman.
In spite of the advances that we have seen and the fact that when I speak to younger artists they tell me that everything has changed and that they no longer perceive sexism in our profession as a relevant issue (although those that have started having children are quickly changing their minds), I still worry about everything we are lacking. There are hardly any books on women artists, and even fewer with a feminist perspective. At the different women’s studies centers at various universities, art is not an issue studied. There are, however, a couple of women doing their postgraduate studies in this field. There isn’t one single day care center for artist’s children, which means a heavier load on women, but neither do we have an women artists' organization working to improve our professional conditions. On the other hand, 20 years after the exhibitions of women artists I mentioned earlier, whose main objective was to make our presence felt and which I thought were part of history, I recently found out that the UNAM, our most important national university, was organizing an exhibition of 100 artists whose exclusive curatorial criteria was the artist's gender, disregarding political or artistic tendencies, ages, media and even the quality of the work. Today, organizing an exhibition of “women” artists is as ridiculous as organizing an exhibition of “Mexican” artists that would bring together the work of outstanding artists such as Francisco Toledo, students and amateur paintings. Maybe, like the Mexican song says, we tend to take "one step forward, and then twenty-four backwards."
Recently, in Mexico city a couple of women artist groups have appeared, although their objectives are very different to what ours were. LINEA ABIERTA is a group where Cecilia Sánchez Duarte, Erika Bulle and Tania de Léon, among others, participate. They have organized exhibitions with the purpose of promoting themselves professionally. They don’t necessarily share aesthetic or political ideas. Cecilia has also organized several exhibitions inviting Mexican and Chicana artists. Another group is COYOLXAUHQUI ARTICULADA. Lilia Valencia, Ema Sosa and Yan Castro, among others, participate in it. I must say I nearly fell on my caboose when, in 1996, I found out they presented themselves as the first feminist art group in Mexico. I must admit, however, that they are the first lesbian feminist art group I know of in Mexico.
I would like to mention, even if it is at the end, that for me the hardest feminist struggle has been the one I fight against my own upbringing every day. Although I have read thousands of pages on feminism, participated in tons of demonstrations, worked in groups, organized exhibitions and written hundreds of articles, I must admit that my heart was formed within the fierce machismo that surrounds us. Changing these behaviour patterns so that my kids grow up with a different experience, or so that my own expectations as a woman and an artist are different, has been quite difficult. Having the enemy within oneself makes it hard to overcome all the contradictions. This is why, when I think on how ambitious the feminist project is (or the hundreds of feminist projects are), when I realize we are trying to change the essence of society itself... I realize we still have a long long way to go.
Notes
1. ARTES VISUALES. Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. 1976, Num. 9 Catalog: EXHIBITION
2. PINTORAS/ESCULTORAS/GRABADORAS/FOTOGRAFAS/TEJEDORAS/CERAMISTAS Museo of Arte Alvar and Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil. November of 1977. Presentation text by Alaíde Foppa.
3. LA MUJER EN EL ARTE. FEM. VOL IX NO.33 April-May 1984.
Copyright © : Mónica Mayer, February, 1999. Trans. Author/Editor, 1999.
Any comments, please contact Mónica Mayer, email pmiraya@dsi.com.mx
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 9, 1999