Text by Bianca Mońa, Associate Curator for Exhibitions and Education
Portrait of Polvo de Gallina Negra: Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante, 1986, Photo by Efraín Parada.
As we prepare for the opening of Artes Visuales:The Latin American Avant-Garde in Print we are considering the explosion of artists, art movement and collectives, and platforms that emerged at the same time as the magazine Artes Visuales (1973-1981), the first bilingual contemporary arts journal in Latin America. Specifically, we are examining the women’s contribution to modern art production in Latin America given Artes Visuales co-founder, Carla Stellweg’s deep commitment to Caribbean and Latin American artists. Stellweg championed trailblazing artists such as Marta Palau, a sculptural textile artist, who included the Naualli, a sorcerer of the Nahuatl Language, as a constant motif. She also used vaginal imagery, from organic materials such as plant fibers and clay, as a symbolic guardian against hegemonic Western aesthetic forms. These artworks fused artistic and ancestral techniques and also raised questions linked to territory, exile and migration. Anna Bella Geiger, a prolific creator spanning from abstract painter to video art, who also explored indigenous land allocation and the sociopolitical happening of Brasil, contributed to the publication.
One of the most profound contributors to the Mexican art landscape and feminist art movement came from Maris Bustamante. Her art practice combined Mexican popular culture and satirical humor to influence mainstream opinions. Her prominence heightened when Bustamante joined forces with artist Mónica Mayer to form Polvo de Gallina Negra (PdGN).
Polvo de Gallina Negra
Often hailed as the pioneers of feminist Mexican art collectives, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder) was a boundless collective dedicated to challenging and criticizing domestic violence, patriarchy, and perceptions of the role of women in Mexican society. As socially engaged performers, they would appear in public squares in Mexico City marching against sexual assault while handing out potions for women to put a spell on the sexual predators.
Image courtesy of Al Día News
Image courtesy of missingwitches.com
In another public performance the PdGN used their bodies to exaggerate the performance of pregnancy. Wearing distinctive boots and aprons covering their visibly advanced pregnancies, the goal was to offer a transformative visual encounter with the pregnant body to subvert diminishing images and social meanings of pregnancy and motherhood in Mexico. Maris said: “Motherhood is a political act, an act of creation, but also one of repression if seen through the lens of patriarchy. We wanted to disrupt that narrative.” In these works, it wouldn’t be unusual to see Bustamante and Mayer wielding a cast iron pot in a simulation of potion making, or iron boards to protest expectations around domestic labor.
Black Hen Powder is a traditional mixture in both Mexican tradition and American South Hoodoo, used to protect, cleanse, and reverse negativity. The PdGN feminist collective was founded with the same intention: to protect, to awaken, and to empower all women. Their projects sought to achieve 3 key goals:
(1) To analyze women’s images 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 women in a patriarchal system, with a feminist perspective and with the goal of transforming the visual world in order to alter reality.
PdGN interventions and casting of spells not only worked towards their collective’s goals, but further allowed for women to work as brujas (witches) in their individual lives. It inspired women to consider notions of who and what a woman could do, be, and achieve. Performances sparked imagination and the accessibility of this work contributed to a collective rethinking about gender and the roles of both men and women. Polvo de Gallina Negra left an undeniable impression on the fabric of Mexican and Latin American culture.
Listen here to learn more about their impact and here to watch a Polvo de Gallina Negra interview.
Marta Palau. Naualli, s/d © MUAC/UNAM. Comodato Julian Varela Gassol. Fibres de blat, jute i llana tenyides, 160 × 85 × 30 cm.
Photo by: Elías Román
Hunter College Art Galleries Spotlight:
Last Art School Fellows
Rebecca Miralrio
Fourth year Art History Masters student
Hometowns: Escondido, California and Temecula, California. Currently based in New York City.
MEMORABLE ART MEMORY…My favorite art memory is from a preschool field trip to the local art museum in Escondido. There was an art installation on view that I remember crawling through. It was the coolest blanket fort I’d ever seen and it was filled with tons of personal items and knick knacks. I remember feeling like I was in someone’s home. This is my first and favorite art memory and it’s interesting to think about how much that experience stuck with me because at the time I was around 5 years old and I didn’t even know what it was or what it could do.
HUNTER ART HISTORY COURSES…I have two favorite Hunter art history courses: Professor Klich’s La Frontera: Visual Culture and the Mexico-US Borderlands which looks at la frontera as a liminal space of cultural production, and Professor Avcioglu’s What is Art History? a research methods course that examined the nature and history of the discipline across different geographies starting from the 18th century to the present.
LISTENING TO…Recently, I’ve been listening to a playlist I made called Perfume. It has a bunch of 80s and 90s songs. Think: George Michael, Sade, Prince, Paula Abdul, etc. I made the playlist for a party I hosted where I asked people to bring a perfume for “smell and tell.”
WATCHING…I’m obsessed with The Pitt on HBO and have been trying to get everyone I know to watch it.
FAVORITE RECENT ART EXPERIENCE…I recently visited EJ Hill’s exhibition at 52 Walker, Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout.
Photo by: Leo Sano
Andee Berberich
First year Art History Masters student
Raised in Buffalo, moved to Washington, D.C., backpacked around the US before finding my way back to Buffalo and then on to Brooklyn this past January!
MEMORABLE ART MEMORY… Gosh it’s not easy to narrow it down but I will never forget “Out of Sight! Art of the Senses” at the Buffalo AKG Museum. I was just at the point of deciding what I wanted to study in college. I remember walking through the rooms, all of these sensorial, experimental works like James Turrell’s Gap from the series Tiny Town, 2001 - a pitch black room with a faint glowing edge that feels like the edge of nothing — and Without Beginning and Without End, by Wolfgang Laib, a large wooden sculpture covered in beeswax. In that moment I felt so much possibility, there was so much to be learned and I think it was exactly what I needed. Hope and a little edge of nothingness.
HUNTER ART HISTORY COURSES… I’m kinda obsessed with art historian and professor Wenshing Chou. She is a truly wonderful human and has a beautiful philosophy on life, teaching and passion about the materials and it creeps out in her classes. I am currently taking “On Jewelness: Buddhist Materiality in Sino-Himalayan Art, 1300-1800s”.
LISTENING TO…I love the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett - It has me thinking about awe and the human experience (I am trying to figure out how to turn this into a thesis); and anything by Karen Dalton but the In My Own Time album is amazing.
WATCHING… I recently finished Étoile on Prime. I’m not sure if it is marketing for the NYC Ballet but if so, it worked on me. I am waiting to purchase my $30 for 30 on September 16th.
FAVORITE RECENT ART EXPERIENCE… Last Art School…. Come check us out!
