Graduate Student, Spanish & Latin American Studies
Thesis Title: Self-definition and the Spheres of Cultural Production: Women Artists in Early 20th-Century Latin America
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Dr Maria del Pilar Blanco
Dr Claire Lindsay |
About
This project proposes that the practices of women artists in early 20th-century Latin America be read as a process of negotiating space. By analysing the works of eight contemporaneous women–four writers and four plastic artists–the study will highlight the manner in which women constructed and conceived of their identities as artists through distinctly spatial tactics. I propose that these women's artworks both announce presence and serve a reflexive role whereby the artist confirms her own subjectivity to herself. To declare and thereby expand one’s social presence through art is very much a matter of negotiating a relationship with, and position in, space. The Latin etymology of the words ‘portrait’ and ‘portray’–protrahere–itself means ‘to draw forward, to reveal, to extend, to prolong’ (OED), emphasising that the act of artistic creation is also a spatial act. In offering us a portrait of female identity–and more specifically a portrait of the woman artist–in 20th-century Latin America, the figures studied in this project reveal the spatiality inherent to portraiture itself.
This multidisciplinary, comparative study will shed new light on the works of well-known figures such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, whilst bringing to the fore artists that have remained marginalized within academic studies, such as Argentine printmaker Norah Borges and Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado. In addition, it will examine the works of Argentine writers Norah Lange and Victoria Ocampo, Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal, and Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo. The study will combine close readings of artistic works with analyses of archival materials such as letters, diaries and interviews, and be complemented with an interrogation of the critical reception of women artists during their own time. This methodology aims to offer a balance between interpretative (often metaphorical) readings and inquiry into the material experience of the woman artist. The project proposes a new way of reading women’s artistic practices; its multidisciplinary nature will highlight how different mediums function spatially in terms of form and content, production and consumption, and how these differences affect the spatial negotiations and self-articulation of their female creators. Born between 1889 and 1910, the eight women to be examined in this study share a common–though varied–historical context. They forged their careers during a period in which both the physical and ideological landscapes of the region were dramatically changing. Paying close attention to this rich historical context, the project will offer an analysis of the distinct spatiality of Latin American modernity.
