Mulheres artistas: as pioneiras (1880-1930)
Curated by Ana Paula Simioni and Elaine Dias, accompanied by Fernanda Pitta, from Pinacoteca’s team of curatros, the exhibition Mulheres artistas: as pioneiras (1880-1930) [Women artists: the pioneers] shows the insertion of women in the Brazilian artistic system, emphasizing the education processes to which she had access and their placement as professional artists. Against dominant discourses of their time, that reduced them to the condition of “natural amateurs” by restricting them to the domestic environment, several women painters and sculptors created historically relevant works. This exhibition is a fundamental occasion to see their production, which, in many cases, was never exhibited to a broad audience, and never in such a relational context.
The show comprises works created between 1880 and 1930, a choice that was guided by two historical facts. In 1884, Abigail de Andrade (1864, Rio de Janeiro – 1890, Paris) was awarded at the 26th General Fine Arts exhibition, and in the 1930s and the establishment of Modernism in Brazil, women had assured a definite relevant position within Brazilian art.
The works occupy two rooms. In the first, the visitor can see the academic practices that formed their artistic education, specially the drawing of male and female nudes between the 19th and early 20th century, and the imitation of the old masters’ models. In the second room, a variety of artistic genres that women explored throughout the same period can be seen, demonstrating how they assimilated and transformed the rules, values and methods of the academic education they received. The quality of many of these works is an unequivocal contestation of the “amateur” label they received.
The curators expect, thus, both to show artists and works that are practically unknown today, and also question the reasons for such ignorance and to which extent this is the result of a historiography of art whose criteria for inclusion and exclusion are pervaded by gender issues and, by consequence, power.
