3 Discussions
Jaspereric
Discussion2_Reply.docxCollapse SubdiscussionJodi Lo
MondayAug 3 at 7:40am
During the 1920 in Mexico,Women have been discriminated in several aspects. Many art work created by women are rarely cited in texts such as names and titles. The article “The First Mexican woman muralist” mentioned, “ Despite the recent interest in female easel painters who worked in Mexico during the early-20th century, the country's female muralists have been virtually ignored (Reyes).” Women have always being assumed as lack of physical strength and power to create art piece, therefore, women have only little interest in public art during the early years of the 20th century. It is hard to deny the fact that Mexican mural have a dominant of men.
In the 1930, women have gained more rights compared to the 1920. Women have participated and involved more political activities and call for woman’s education to construct a new society. However, the article “The First Mexican woman muralist” mentioned, “ women proved themselves capable at tasks previously assigned only to men, including fighting at the front. Still, most of the secular martyrs depicted in the murals during the 1920s and 1930s were male (Reyes).” Although woman’s situation had improved due to sexual equity, but tradition ideas still existed
TuesdayAug 4 at 4pm
The depiction of women changed in Mexican muralism in the 1920s and 1930s via the new subjects of post-revolutionary art and through the expression of a new wave of talented female artists. Antecedently, art was 'closely associated with masculinity in Mexico' but artists such as Frida and Aurora Reyes amongst others challenged this view. These women expressed and negotiated their female identity through their work. For Frida Kahlo, self-portraiture was an essential means to investigate and cement her identity. Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston states: “Kahlo made personal women’s experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries. Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers—men and women—be moved by them.” By showing her pain on her canvas (both physical and emotional) Frida demanded to be seen as a subject of seriously consideration and thought, and, through her expression as a woman, demanded that all women be seen as such.
Previously, women were represented in art as mothers or through glorified motherhood. Even after the Mexican Revolution, the subjects were primarily male revolutionary 'matyrs' and the female subjects were still confined to the paradigm of allegorical images of the “abstract concepts of earth, motherland, democracy, and occasionally, evil. When depicted as real women, they usually appeared faithfully following and providing for the men, but never actively participating in the struggle; as grieving mothers and wives; or as idealized teachers, the only profession considered acceptable for women” (Comisarenco Mirkin 6). This greatly shifted with the works of the first female Mexican muralist: Aurora Reyes. In a famous 1939 lecture at the Congreso Nacional Femenil in Havana, Reyes gave her perspective on the hegemony of male artists in the Mexican School and denounced the oppression and violence committed against Mexican women throughout the 1930s and the preceding decades. For Reyes, “the inequities in Mexican society have more to do with gender oppression than class.” Reyes especially broke a taboo by portraying violence against women in her famous, Attack on the Rural Teacher, the first mural created by a Mexican female artist. In this mural, Reyes shows “that sexual inequality, hierarchy, and oppression are not natural, absolute conditions but products of a culture, a combination of social and psychological practices.” And the best way to re-construct the feminine identity was via socialist educational programs—including that of the murals. Additionally, Reyes' re-orientation of the subject of docile mother as subject to strong active worker showed a genuine reality of the Mexican Revolution: the female revolutionary soldiers. In both Zapata's army as well as in the army of Pancho Villa, women played a key role in the organization of the camps in addition to the actual fighting (as seen in last week's documentary on Pancho Villa). In yet another one of Aurora Reyes Flores pieces, Mujer de la guerra, she explores this duality of the female as both mother and revolutionary. Her subject holds her child and a gun in each arm. Both of these female Mexican artists among others greatly influenced the art scene in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s and changed the view of the female subject forever.
