Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA (review)

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 is a retrospective exhibition that was seven years in the making, co-curated by Andrea Giunta and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill.¹ It opened in September 2017 at the UCLA Hammer Museum as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Festival: LA/LA programming and will travel in April to the Brooklyn Museum in New York and then to the Pinacoteca in São Paulo. Radical Women has received considerable attention from the press; Annie Buckley, Ben Davis, Paloma Checa-Gismero, and Christopher Knight all wrote reviews. Consisting of works by 120 Latin American and Chicana women artists from fourteen countries and regions, the exhibition is organized into nine overlapping conceptual themes: “Self-Portrait,” “Body Landscape,” “Performing the Body,” “Mapping the Body,” “Resistance and Fear,” “The Power of Words,” “Feminisms,” “Social Places,” and “The Erotic,” distributed throughout the Hammer’s first four galleries.

Entering Gallery 1, I am checked at the door by a large black-and-white wall projection of Victoria Santa Cruz, activist and iconic figure of Afro Peruvian music and dance. Her powerful voice crescendos from a guttural space. Her perfectly round afro, tightly framed by gold earrings, hits the sharp corners of her collar. Between phrases, she claps her hands, marking a complex rhythm over the dull beats of a bass drum. In a line beside her, a group of young black performers returns Santa Cruz’s chants, mirroring her affect. In a declarative tone, she tells the story of her seven-year-old self—walking down the street, unaware of the sad truth behind onlookers’ shouts: Negra! Negra! Negra! Negra! The projection is a clip from Torgeir Wethal’s 1978 documentary Victoria, Black and Woman, a fitting welcome to an unapologetic and unprecedented feminist art historical revision. I turn away from the projection to see my own reflection in a full-length mirror flanked by two fierce-looking Chicanas from different generations in Judy Baca’s life-sized 1978 triptych, Las Tres Marías (The Three Marias). I snap a selfie, of course. I then take a moment with Yolanda Lopez’s famous 1978 Tableaux Vivant series in which she activates the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe through her own embodiment and experimentation with different poses. Moving into the gallery, my gaze is returned by that of Patssi Valdez in a 2 × 3 ft black-and-white portrait by Harry Gamboa Jr., her collaborator in one of the first and most politically active Chicano art collectives of the 1970s, Asco. Giunta and Fajardo-Hill’s texts address some of the difficult decisions of how best to synthesize Chicana works of art into

Figure 1.

Graciela Carnevale (Argentine, born 1942), Acción del encierro (Lock-up action), 1968. Ciclo de Arte Experimental, Rosario, Argentina. Photograph by Carlos Militello. Black-and-white photographs; fifteen sheets: 3⁹⁄₁₆ × 5½ in. (9 × 14 cm) or 5½ × 3⁹⁄₁₆ in. (14 × 9 cm); one sheet: 6⁷⁄₈ × 9 ⁷⁄₁₆ in. (17.5 × 24 cm). Collection of Graciela Carnevale/Archivo Graciela Carnevale.

Copyright Graciela Carnevale.

Figure 2.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, installation view, “Self-Portrait” theme. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, September 15, 2017–December 31, 2017. Photograph by Brian Forrest.

a larger Latin American framework. Their decision to confront the audience with the voices of strong black and Chicana women as an introduction to the rest of the work in the show should be read as a commitment to historical revision and intersectionality and a critique of feminisms that do not recognize the conditions and experiences of women of color.

Figure 3.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, installation view, “Body Landscape” theme. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, September 15, 2017–December...