“Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as the person seen crossing the street or washing her face. Nor exactly the same as the person living his (or her) own life and experience, for he (or she) cannot remain innocent. Who then is the person loved? A mystery, whose identity is confirmed by nobody except the lover. How well Dostoevsky saw this. Love is solitary even though it joins. The person loved is the being who continues when the person’s own actions and egocentricity have been dissolved. Love recognises a person before the act and the same person after it. It invests this person with a value which is untranslatable into virtue.”
— John Berger, “Between Two Colmars,” in About Looking
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons–but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean it is a similar experience to the two people involved. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So he must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world–a world intense and strange, complete in himself.”
— Carson McCullers. from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
“[W]hat nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.”
If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring Latinx artists from our collection, some of whom are included in our upcoming exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985which explores the groundbreaking contributions to contemporary art of Latin American and Latina women artists during a period of extraordinary conceptual and aesthetic experimentation. The show will be on view April 13-July 22, 2018.
Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.
Returning to Cuba from the United States in 1980 and 1981, Ana Mendieta began carving fertility figures into the caves and cliffs of her native land, which she called Rupestrian Sculptures. Many of these, such “Untitled (Guanaroca [First Woman]),” were named after indigenous goddesses, simultaneously serving as political and personal assertions of Mendieta’s presence and identity, as well as reminders of ancient traditions of goddess worship.
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