Book puts essential female figures on the map for art in Mexico

Little or nothing has been written about the role that some women had in consolidating a taste and forming a canon by managing, opening a market, promoting and making art visible inside and outside the country.writes Rosa Beltrán in the prologue of Cultural agents of the 20th century: Management challenges.

Even less had been written about these protagonists from a panoramic view.points out the writer and coordinator of Cultural Diffusion of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Duck: The works that study women in art in Mexico suffer from the same shortcomings: they focus on certain emblematic figures and study them from the same perspectives. The names are repeated, but so are the roles. The absence of many of them gives the false sensation that women in art have been very few and very unimportant in an artistic discourse dictated rather by male criteria..

The Love, the tireless Pecanins and more

the book Cultural agents of the 20th century, published by UNAM, whose editors are Graciela de la Torre, holder of the Inés Amor International Chair in Cultural Management, as well as coordinator of the project, and researcher Ana Garduño, puts on the map a series of female personalities essential for development of art in Mexico.

Included in the volume are figures such as Carolina and Inés Amor, founders of the Mexican Art Gallery; the collector, patron and gallery owner María Asúnsolo; the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo, at the head of the Contemporary Art Gallery; the tireless Ana María and Teresa Pecanins, responsible for the space that bore their last name, and the art critics Raquel Tibol, Ida Rodríguez Prampolini and Teresa del Conde.

Likewise, Lydia Sada, Margarita Garza Sada de Fernández, Geles Cabrera, Ángeles Espinosa Yglesias Rugarcia, Dolores Olmedo, Carmen Barreda, Helen Escobedo, Sylvia Pandolfi, Graciela de la Torre, Margarita Nelken, Elisa Vargaslugo, Beatriz Ramírez de la Fuente and Juana Gutiérrez You do.

For Beltrán, a second problem consists of having seen some creators as inspiring muses (Frida Kahlo, Lupe Marín, María Antonieta Rivas Mercado and María Asúnsolo), which prevented their work in the promotion, mediation and dissemination of art from being visible; nor could they be studied as creators of a true artistic narrative. This book, fortunately, “corrects many of these deficiencies.

“It is obvious that a first work of this kind cannot be exhaustive. However, it obeys a proposal ruled by the UNAM Aesthetic Research Institute and is complemented by the television series revenge project with which the institution intends to do justice to decades of invisibility of women in all fields of art,” she acknowledges.

Complete the historiography

According to Ana Garduño, “the idea is to begin to fill a gap that exists in Mexican historiography in relation to the study of agent cultures that have left an imprint on the visual arts scene of our country.

To date, there is no biographical compendium that examines in a single volume some of the most prominent cultural managers of modernity.

Thus, “the task of several agent, linking them with the formation of the cultural policies of the time – operating, generally, from outside the political system – and with the development of institutions and spaces for the dissemination, commercialization and management of the artistic.

“In addition, this volume thinks about the management of the artistic from, in and for the country. Given the current scarcity of background work, I do not consider that we are yet in a position to make comparative comparisons between regions or continents. That is a phase of construction of this field of knowledge, and this book aims to contribute to it.

“For now, the idea is to highlight the relationship between the biographies of the selected women – white-mestizo, urban, middle or upper classes and heterosexuals -, the hegemonic cultural policies and the nature of their contributions in the territory of art and culture. culture from the museum, the commercial, philanthropy and criticism, all of them, processes of mediation between producer and viewer, between producer and buyer.”