Liliana Porter among others

HERland: Women Artists in the MOLAA Collection

by Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA Chief Curator

This exhibition was intended to be on view at MOLAA during the Spring of 2020.
Upon the Museum’s reopening to the public, we will present the exhibition in the galleries.

Originally, Herland is the title of a novel published in 1915 by the American feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who tells the story about an utopian paradise where only women live in a sort of communitarian society.

More than a century later, in a world where the discussion about women empowering, race, class, and equity is more relevant (and necessary) than ever before, we present here our subjective version of that Herland. In this case not as an utopia but as a clear attempt to create an imaginary territory where female artists, with different approaches and even different ways of looking, define a new powerful land with new meanings.

This selection of women artists that we present today is part of the MOLAA Permanent Collection, and by sharing them with our public we begin a new approach to our history as an institution, in addition to broadening our perspective and delving into those works that speak of certain topics, many times invisible in the history of art, such as the creation of female artists. Because art is knowledge and experience, at the same time we discuss our heritage, we focus on Latina and Latin American artists possessing a unique poetic style, who continued a path started at the beginning of the 20th century linked to a dreamlike and surrealist, representation, imagination, boundaries and distortions, exploring possible worlds in connection with the female unconscious and personal ideology.

Thus we approach an infinite imaginarium of ideas and concepts, where each of these artists explores their creations, through impressive figurative and symbolic paintings, photographs, and drawings, the depths of fantasy, mystery, illusion, the dream from a clear singular view where the work functions as a matrix to be deciphered.

Hand in hand with artists such as Leonora Carrington, Raquel Forner, Jackelyn Barajas, Doris Salcedo, Patssi Valdez, Liliana Porter, Raquel Paiewonsky, Amalia Caputo, Maria Bonomi, and Tania Bruguera, we assist the feminine search through art as a constant and current interpellation where questions can be glimpsed in each portrait, scene, object, strangeness, generated by the dialogue with the surreal inventory in the modern and contemporary scene.

This is our Herland, a poetic map full of beauty but also of persistence and self confidence. A journey that enables us to connect with the matrix of female creation with outstanding artists of our time.