How Mexico's súper rudas 'Radical Women' are rewriting the history of Latin American art
They are women who turned stories of sexual assault into installation art. They made drawings that gave sexuality a distinctly feminine point of view. They delivered art history lectures wearing aprons and crafted a quinceañera gown out of beef — years before Lady Gaga was even a glint in her parents’ eyes. And they helped transform the face of art over the span of a continent.
They are women — some well known in Latin American art circles, others far less so — who will collectively get their due at the Hammer Museum’s “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985,” one of dozens of Southern California exhibitions to open this fall as part of Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles / Latin America. No other PST: LA/LA exhibition promises to rewrite history quite like “Radical Women,” which documents the transformative work of U.S. Latinas and Latin American women artists who have all too often been ignored by major art institutions.
“I never set out to be a radical artist,” says Maris Bustamante, a pioneering conceptual artist from Mexico City, who among her various playful actions patented the taco and created a face mask with a phallus for a nose as a wry comment on Freud’s concept of penis envy. “It was the context that shaped us.”
That context was the Latin America of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s — a turbulent period beginning just seven years after women in Mexico were granted the right to vote in national elections in 1953. It was an era when painting ruled — and men ruled painting.