‘Radical Women’ and Anna Maria Maiolino
The Hammer Museum's exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, gives visibility to the artistic practices of women artists working in Latin America and US-born women artists of Latino heritage between 1960 and 1985.
"She sits at the peak of a sand dune, curls in her legs to create a tight ball, grasps her feet and thrusts forward to somersault down the steep slope. Eventually slowing, she pulls in tighter for a few last, clunky turns; then stops, stands and climbs back up to begin again. Mexican artist Silvia Gruner’s harrowing, Sisyphean exercise in the grainy Super-8 silent film Arena (Sand, 1986) is an apt metaphor for the socio-political struggles represented in ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985’ at the Hammer Museum. This survey of experimental practices by women artists working in Latin America and the US in the late 20th century will certainly be remembered as the most crucial and ambitious exhibition of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty’s sweeping, multi-venue biennial initiative. I expect its relevance to endure well beyond the present, much the way ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’ (2007) at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) has remained a touchstone for artists and curators alike.
Building on seven years of research, curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta have included 120 artists from 15 countries, accompanied by a day-long symposium, 400-page catalogue and extended wall texts in both English and Spanish. This marathon viewing experience is enhanced by the substantial amount of video, typical of experimental practices at that time. Well-known figures such as Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta, Lygia Pape and Liliana Porter are shown alongside artists whose work is largely unknown outside of their local context – part of the curators’ stated aim to correct the art-historical record to include female artists marginalized by the Western canon.
‘Radical Women’ explores the concept of the political body, and the ways women artists resisted the systemic sexism and repressive governments that prevailed across Latin America in the late 20th century. Although the works on view share a feminist commitment to address gender stereotypes and dismantle patriarchal structures, many of the artists here did or do not consider themselves feminists, due in part to their mistrust of Euro-American theory and the racial exclusionism of second-wave feminism."— Summer Guthery, Oct. 27, 2017
Read the full article at the Frieze website.