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Art as a political tool: the early feminist production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984

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Art as a political tool: the early feminist production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984

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Art as a Political Tool: The Early Feminist Production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984

by

Selene Preciado

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS

December 2015

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to my thesis committee members Amelia Jones, A.L. Steiner, and Karen Tongson
for their patience, dedication, and support. I am truly honored to have had the opportunity to be
guided and encouraged by them in this process. Amelia’s book Body Art/Performing the Subject
was a pivotal point in my formation during my undergraduate studies, when I discovered
performance art through her writings. That book, along with the wisdom and encouragement
from the people who mentored me in those early years opened up the path that led me here. I
thank Steiner for her integrity and for being such an inspiring ally in the final junctures of this
MA.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Betti-Sue Hertz, Carmen Cuenca and Michael Krichman, thank you for
being the very first mentors in my curatorial career, for believing in the abilities and potential of
a quiet girl from Tijuana, and for continuing to be part of my support system after almost ten
years. To this list of mentors I would also like to add Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Idurre Alonso,
whom I am also fortunate to include among my dearest friends. I want to thank Idurre, my
“curatorial partner” for all your insight during the development of this project.

I am also grateful to Rhea Anastas for her endorsement since the beginning of my Master
candidacy, along with John Tain, Noura Weddell, and Irene Tsatsos. Special thanks to
Cuauhtémoc Medina, Suzanne Hudson, and Charlie White for your feedback during the proposal
stage of this thesis. A heartfelt thanks to Bruce Hainley who did not only teach us alternative
ways to read and write theory, but also believed in my writing in a moment when I most needed
it. My cohort has also been a great source of inspiration and support, but I am especially thankful
for the opportunity to have met and worked with two of the most professional and dedicated
colleagues: Samantha Gregg and Daniela Lieja Quintanar. Without your vibrant intelligence,
humor, and sincere friendship, I would have felt lost in this journey.

My deepest gratitude to Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma, who generously opened the doors of
their home and archive, and received me not only with their complete trust but also introduced
me to a magnificent group of feminist artists and curators in Mexico City, who have also been a

great inspiration. I am indebted to historian Karen Cordero Reiman, who I thank for her time and
generosity, as well as to curator and researcher Sol Henaro, who shared her insights and
bibliography. Thanks to the staff at Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC, for facilitating materials on the Feminist Studio Workshop and Summer Art
Program; as well as the librarians at Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad
Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, who kindly allowed me to consult the feminist art archive of
Ana Victoria Jiménez in their care. I am forever grateful to my friends and colleagues Abril
Castro, Felipe Zúñiga, and Julia Antivilo for their advice, motivation, and for welcoming me in
their home during my research trips in Mexico City.

Lastly, to my parents Julio and Sara and my brothers Diego and Hugo: I owe you everything that
I am. Your unconditional love has fueled my courage and humbleness. I hope to continue
making you proud. To my friends and chosen family Magdalena Muñoz, Sarah Espinoza,
Aleyda Acuña, Gabriela Martínez, Philipp Hube, Erin Bartolome, and Summer Smith: thank you
for being the net in which I have safely landed so many times, and for being my role models of
hard work and integrity. To my husband Raymundo: I love you. No words will do justice in
expressing how much I treasure your patience and that you have believed in me in all of those
moments when I have forgotten to believe in myself. This is for you.

DEDICATION

To Raymundo, my strength and my balance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract i
Introduction: Art as a Political Tool:
The Early Feminist Production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984 1
MÓNICA MAYER – AN INTRODUCTION TO HER PRACTICE 12
CASE STUDY 1: EL TENDEDERO 21
CASE STUDY 2: TRANSLATIONS 30
CASE STUDY 3: TLACUILAS Y RETRATERAS 35
Conclusion 37
Bibliography 38

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an analysis of Mexican artist Mónica Mayer’s work as a critical and
“applied” conceptual practice based on collaboration, feminist art pedagogy, and archive
intervention, focusing on the period between 1976, the year that represents the point when
Mayer beings defining herself and her artistic production as “feminist”; the years 1978–1980,
when Mayer moved to Los Angeles to attend the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) with
Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz; until 1984, the year after her return to Mexico City, also her
first year teaching at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP, or San Carlos)
reconfiguring the models of feminist pedagogy she learned at the Feminist Studio Workshop and
the Woman’s Building.

Using three early works by Mayer, this paper will situate the artist as one of the main proponents
and former of feminist artists from younger generations in Mexico, as well as analyze the ways
she navigates two artistic contexts—the Mexican and the American—as a strategy to adapt US
feminist discourse to Mexican art production.
i
1

Copyright 2015 Selene Preciado

Introduction
Art as a Political Tool: The Early Feminist Production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984

The artistic practice of Mónica Mayer (Mexico City, b. 1954) encompasses the
overlapping arenas of performance art, political activism, intervention, critical writing,
pedagogy, and the compilation of an archive of contemporary artists— these aspects of her work
informed by feminist strategies and the search for alternatives that fuse political ideas with art
production. This thesis will analyze Mónica Mayer’s work as part of the feminist conceptual
practices that were developed during the 1970s, dissecting her collaborative-based work as part
of what she calls “applied conceptual art” and “performative pedagogy.”
1

During the mid-1970s, while other important Mexican feminist artists such as Maris
Bustamante or Magali Lara were part of conceptual art collectives in Mexico known as
“Grupos,” Mayer embarked on the mission to move to California to study at the Feminist Studio
Workshop,
2
connected to the Woman’s Building. She has become one of the main proponents of,
and key inspiration for, feminist artists from younger generations who have either studied under
her or have become part of her lineage due to their performance-based art production, such as
Minerva Cuevas, Andrea Ferreyra, Gina y Marcela (Gina Arizpe and Marcela Quiroga), Lorena

1
Mayer describes her artistic practice, particularly after Pinto mi Raya (1989, with Víctor Lerma) as “applied
conceptual art,” and her teaching practice as “performative pedagogy,” departing from an interdisciplinary and self-
critical stance and “small group” techniques.
2
The Feminist Studio Workshop was formed in 1973 by Judy Chicago and a group of women from the Feminist Art
Program at Fresno State Colllege (now California State University Fresno) and CalArts. They concurrently opened
the gallery Womanspace, which was in turn what triggered the creation of the Woman’s Building. See Moira Roth,
“Autobiography, Theater, Mysticism and Politics: Women’s Performance Art in Southern California,” in
Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, ed. Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong, (San
Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1989), 468.
2

Orozco, Elvira Santamaría, Pillar Villela, and Lorena Wolffer . This thesis will focus on the
period between 1976—the year that represents the point when Mayer establishes herself and her
artistic production as “feminist,” including the years 1978–1980 in Los Angeles, where she
moved in order to attend the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie
Labowitz—and 1984, the year after her return to Mexico City. Nineteen eighty four was also her
first year teaching at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP, aka San Carlos), where she
reconfigured the models of feminist pedagogy she learned at the Feminist Studio Workshop and
the Woman’s Building. Given this context, it is crucial to establish the relationship and cross-
histories of artistic production of Mexico and Los Angeles, and to discuss how Mónica Mayer’s
practice is a bridge and translation between both. Although Mayer makes the distinction between
the feminist art produced in each country (or any country, for that matter) to be a direct response
to its context, in her own thesis introduction, she recognized the fact that feminist art production
has a fluid existence that nurtures itself from collaboration, innovation and adaptation, and it is
this understanding which allowed her to aim to “apply” the knowledge acquired in her
experience and studies in Los Angeles to her own context in Mexico City:

It won't be easy, but art can "translate its vision into reality." A
warning: feminist art, as I have seen it in Los Angeles, is directly
connected to the context in which it exists. It is related both to the art
world and the feminist movement of the U.S. I don’t think anyone can
or will claim that this "is" feminist art [.] Feminist art lives in its
specific context and time. The work that feminist artists do in other
countries and times will be different and will respond to their specific
3

situation. Feminist art in Los Angeles also changes constantly with
new input, more experience, and social and political changes.
3

The research and writing of this thesis has coincided with the initial planning for a wave
of exhibitions featuring female artists in Mexico City and Los Angeles, programmed to occur
between 2014 and 2017. These seem to be traversing the delayed aftershock of the phenomenon
which began in the mid-1990s with Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art
History at the Hammer Museum, curated by Amelia Jones; and Inside the Visible: An Elliptical
Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and From the Feminine, curated by Catherine de Zegher at
the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (both 1996),
4
and saw its peak with WACK! Art and
the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, Los Angeles (2007),
curated by Cornelia Butler. These major shows, as well as the many others that have not received
the same exposure, aimed for institutional canonization of feminist art histories; however, this
institutionalization has happened more recently (and more successfully) when in the context of
presenting conceptual art practices as “global,” and inclusive or encompassing of “derivative”
practices such as feminism and/or art from non-US or non-European countries, such as the
cluster known as Latin America, to be discussed below.

Since the mid-1990s, there have been several efforts to rewrite the history of conceptual
art as inclusive of the experimental practices in regions such as Latin America, whose conceptual
art production has been often referred to as derivative or even lesser due to its political content
(which in turn has also been considered “politically charged” as part of the lineage of Mexican

3
Mónica Mayer, “Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool” (master’s thesis, Goddard College, 1980).
4
See Sue Malvern, “Rethinking Inside the Visible” in Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and
Curatorial Transgressions, ed. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013),
104-119.
4

muralism), in contrast to the self-referential or object-focused modern and postmodern
production in American and European art. This effort has also been possible thanks to the
research of groups and individuals such as La Red de Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern
Conceptualisms Network), which have put forward a relevant contraposition to the trend of
(mainly collection-based) exhibitions on abstract geometric art from Latin America in recent
years.
5
International exhibitions organized outside of Latin America, such as Reconsidering the
Object of Art: 1965–1979 (MOCA, 1995); Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object,
1949–1979 (MOCA, 1998); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950–1980 (Queens
Museum, New York, 1999); or the more recent Subversive Practices: Art under Conditions of
Political Repression 60s–80s (Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2009) and
Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (Brooklyn
Museum, 2012)—which revisits Lippard’s ideas on the convergence between conceptualism and
feminism— have gone geographically beyond the established canon (based largely in New York
and to a lesser degree in other major European and North American cities). This has also been
accomplished by shows that have focused on feminist art, such as the now seminal ovarial
WACK!, and Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (Brooklyn Museum, New
York, 2007), co-curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, which marked the so-called “return
of feminist art”
6
. Other feminist-centric exhibitions which focused on one artist or theme within
these practices were being produced in the 1990s, but did not receive the same attention until as
exhibitions from the early-2000s. This is perhaps because of a present need to look back to the
past and appropriate what can be one of the most “effective mode[s] of political intervention in

5
La Red de Conceptualismos del Sur is an international critical platform founded in 2007 by a group of researchers
focused on conceptual practices in Latin America since 1970. They are affiliated to the Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. See “Museo en red: Southern Conceptualisms Network,” accessed April 1, 2015,
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/southern-conceptualisms-network
6
Amelia Jones, “1970/2007: The Return of Feminist Art,” X-TRA, vol. 10, No. 4 (2008), accessed April 1, 2015,
http://x-traonline.org/article/19702007-the-return-of-feminist-art/
5

the face of global networks of power [… and counter it with their] institutional and visual
strategies: feminism.
7

The exhibitions above mentioned have been followed by surveys such as Arte ≠ Vida:
Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 (El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2008), which
featured four decades of performance art by artists from the “Americas”—that is, Latin
American and Latinos in the United States; and 2012’s Perder la forma humana: Una imagen
sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina [Losing the Human Form: A Seismic Image of
the 1980s in Latin America], organized by La Red de Conceptualismos del Sur at the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
8
Both exhibitions addressed experimentation in
conceptual art, the body as medium, and the historiography of the politization of art which was
brought about by conceptual production in reaction to the tense global sociopolitical context in
the 1960s and 1970s due to the Vietnam War, the civil rights and social justice movements,
inclusive of feminism and queer politics, and oppressive political regimes in Latin American
countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

It is of particular interest as well that in Los Angeles, certain feminist art and Latin
American/Latino histories were revised as part of the series of exhibitions organized in 2011
under the umbrella of the Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945—1980 initiative led by the J.
Paul Getty Research Institute, including Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's
Building (Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design); L.A. XICANO (five related
exhibitions at Autry National Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum

7
Ibid.
8
Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 was curated by Deborah Cullen; Perder la forma
humana: Una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina was curated by Red Conceptualismos del Sur.
6

at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
Library); and finally, MEX/LA: “Mexican” Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930–1985 (Museum
of Latin American Art, Long Beach),
9
which among its long and eclectic list of artists
highlighted the work of Chicana artists such as Barbara Carrasco, Patssi Valdez (former member
of ASCO), and Yolanda López; as well as the work of Mexican artists Graciela Iturbide and
Mónica Mayer, whose contributions were represented by Iturbide’s series of black and white
photographs of a community of deaf Cholas in East LA in the mid-1980s, and Mayer’s series of
graphite and ink drawings of feminist “virgins” made during her time at the Feminist Studio
Workshop in 1978. As a follow-up to these presentations of non-canonical histories, the Getty
will sponsor Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (Los Angeles/Latin America) in 2017, a series of
solo and survey exhibitions examining art from Latin America and in some cases, in connection
with the United States and other diasporas. The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena is
organizing a series of artist residencies from 2015 to 2017, as part of their exhibition Aesthetic
Experiments and Social Agents: Renegade Art and Action in Mexico in the 1990s, and the first
artists in residence will be Pinto mi Raya (I paint my line), the wife-husband artistic duo
comprised of Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma.

Additionally, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta’s curatorial research for the
UCLA/Hammer Museum’s contribution to PST: LA/LA, The Political Body: Radical Women in
Latin American Art 1960–1985 has unleashed—perhaps both directly and indirectly—various

9
Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building was curated by Meg Linton and Sue Maberry; the
L.A. XICANO exhibitions were Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation (Autry National Center);
Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo (Fowler Museum); Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement
(Fowler Museum); and Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza (LACMA) were curated by the team comprised of Chon A.
Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas; Chican@s Collect: The Durón Family Collection (UCLA
Chicano Studies Research Center Library) was curated by Armando Durón. MEX/LA: “Mexican” Modernism(s) in
Los Angeles, 1930–1985 was curated by artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres in association with filmmaker Jesse Lerner.
7

upcoming contemporary exhibitions of female artists in Latin America. In Argentina, for
example, three solo exhibitions of Teresa Burga, Annemarie Heinrich, and Claudia Andújar will
be held at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires in 2015. In Mexico, three related
shows have occurred or are being planned: Pola Weiss: La TV te ve (2014); The Rotating Eye:
Sarah Minter, Images in Movement 1981–2015 (2015); and Mónica Mayer’s retrospective SI
TIENE DUDAS... PREGUNTE: Una retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer [When in doubt… Ask: A
Retrocollective by Mónica Mayer] at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico
City (2016).

The current recognition of feminist artists as part of Mexico’s contemporary art history,
in particular by the curators and cultural agents of institutions such as Museo de Arte Moderno
and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, is a fairly new effort, seemingly
connected to the aftershock of the exhibitions aforementioned. However, it seems to also be
linked to the current political environment in Mexico—a sort or repetition of the sentiments of
hope and change in the periods of 1968 and the early 1990s. Major exhibitions such as La Era de
la Discrepancia (The Age of Discrepancies), and its extensive bilingual catalogue, organized by
Cuauhtemoc Medina, Olivier Debroise with a group of researchers, was the first major show to
review the history between 1968 and the nineties.
10
Since then, curator and researcher Sol
Henaro has taken the duty to review different chapters of conceptual art production in this
period, organizing exhibitions on No-Grupo (2010), artist Melquiades Herrera (2004) and group
shows such as Antes de la Resaca (2011), and No Objetualismos Mexicanos (2008). Following
Jones’ assertions on the possible reasons for these recent “revivals” of feminist and conceptual

10
Claudia Álvarez Arozqueta, Irene Barajas, Verónica Gil, Vania Macías, Erika Madrigal Hernández, Gabriel
Monroy, Lourdes Morales, Alejandro Navarrete, Santiago Pérez Garci. Essay authors: Irene Barajas, Olivier
Debroise, Tatiana Falcón, Pilar García de Germenos, Vania Macías, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Gabriel Monroy, Lourdes
Morales, Alejandro Navarrete Cortés, James Oles, Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón.
8

art exhibitions, it is hopeful to think of this wave of exhibitions produced in Mexico as a search
of a revival of the strategies that blurred art and politics in the late 1960s, as an aim to raise
critical and political awareness in the Mexican art context from within the institutions
themselves, and with the goal to infect the public consciousness. The parallelism between
political environments in Mexico and the United States, as well as their intersection in the art
arena, seems telling. Movements such as Occupy (2011) in the US, Yo Soy 132 (2012) and
“Todos Somos Ayotzinapa” (2014) in Mexico, invite a reconsideration of artistic strategies as
political tools.

Amidst this aim to look back, it is essential to consider the production Monica Mayer,
which is not only part of these past histories in Mexican art, but continues to be a present
investigation of the intersection between art and politics. Mayer’s production has existed in a
liminal space between visibility and invisibility. Even though recently there has been attention
paid internationally to her work, particularly in relation to exhibitions focusing on Latin
American conceptual and performance art as illustrated above, her work remains somewhat
marginalized within the Mexican art scene and fairly unknown internationally, in relation to
artists from a previous generation working in figuration or abstraction, such as José Luis Cuevas,
Francisco Toledo or Manuel Felguérez; or to the generation of artists that after the 1990s reached
an international exposure, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, and Abraham Cruzvillegas, among
others. There are various factors to this end: without favoring one reason over another, one could
argue that the panorama of Mexican art production during the late 1970s and 1980s is both a
symptom and consequence of the intersecting politics of the art and ideological systems. During
this period, art from Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, for example) for
the most part was rooted in the different political situations of each country (all had dictatorships
9

and/or repressive political systems). In Mexico, the sense for collectivity that came about with
the student movement of the 1960s carried through the emergence of the era dominated by Los
Grupos (The Groups), in which many artist collectives were active between 1977–1983,
11
such
as El Colectivo Tetraedro (1976), Fotógrafos Independientes (1976), Germinal (1977), Março
(1978), Mira (1977), No-Grupo (1977–83), Peyote y la Compañía (1973–75), Proceso Pentágono
(1976), Suma (1976), Taller de Arte e Ideología (TAI, 1974), Taller de Arte y Comunicación
(TACO, 1974), Taller de Investigación Plástica (TIP, 1974–76), and Tepito Arte Acá (1973),
among others.
12
They were fluid in their duration and membership; many of them were
comprised of art students from visual and graphic art programs from La Esmeralda, San Carlos
or Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Xochimilco and produced conceptual art that
related to current global issues, Latin American political systems of repression and systematic
torture, as well as very local problems such as criticality towards the Mexican government, the
artistic system or class issues.

Women had a marginal role in most of these collectives. Although extremely critical of
the politics of their time, the majority of them were either mainly comprised of male artists or the
female members had less prominence or visibility as main members, with the exception of artists
such as Maris Bustamante from No-Grupo and Magali Lara from Março. Both identified
themselves as feminist artists, but they and others such as Rowena Morales and Martha Hellión,
were mostly identified with the label of “artist wife” and were not taken as seriously as their

11
Many of these collectives have been loosely active until today, however, 1976–83 is the recognized official date
of the groups, especially since as noted by Maris Bustamante in her essay “Non-objective arts in Mexico, 1963–83,”
1983 marked a period of integration of these groups into the Museum system, becoming part of collections and
“[their] desire to be, or to be recognized took hold.” See Coco Fusco, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the
Americas, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 233.
12
Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, “Los Grupos: A Reconsideration,” in La Era de la Discrepancia, ed. Olivier Debroise
et al. (Mexico City: Turner/UNAM, 2007), 197.
10

male counterparts. Mayer recalls in her 1998 text “De la vida y el arte como feminista”
(translated to English as “A Personal History of Feminist Art Activism in Mexico”) that as an art
student at Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, she found in the women’s bathroom sign that
read “Women: make love, support the guys in their fight,” which opened her eyes to her reality
as a woman artist and her erasure from activist participation as a woman.
13
Mayer’s
revolutionary feminist position did not find a space within this context at the time, and she was
set out to make a space for herself and other artists like her, even if she had to find it outside of
Mexico.

The tensions in the Mexican collectives replicated the tensions in mainstream (US-
dominated) contemporary art narratives, with an opposition posed between terms such as
conceptual art and feminist art; in both cases terms are opposed (male/female artist in Mexican
collectives; male conceptual artists/female artists in the Euro-American art scene) and seen as
separate and not part of the same field of practice even though in the US case, feminist artists
and conceptual artists operated in a similarly self-critical way, questioning art’s systems of
legitimization.
14
Based on activism, and non-object-oriented practices Mayer’s work also
attempts to bring forth issues of invisibility of women artists in the Mexican art system, as well
as to present alternatives to the issue of ephemerality, display, and collection of non-objectual or
dematerialized work, performance art, and activist based art, referencing writings by Latin

13
Mónica Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” in Crítica feminista en la teoría e historia del arte. (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), 402. Translated by Mónica Mayer and the editors of Paradoxa, online
issue. No. 8 and No. 9, November 1998 and February 1999.
14
See Introduction in Cristina Freire, Arte conceitual (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2006).
11

American art theorist Juan Acha,
15
and Mayer’s own 1980 MA thesis “Feminist Art: An
Effective Political Tool.”
16

Mayer’s work has been discussed primarily in the context of early exhibitions in which
she participated, such as what is considered to be the first feminist exhibition in Mexico, Collage
íntimo, organized by a group of artists in 1977 at Casa del Lago in Mexico City;
17
and the Museo
de Arte Moderno (MAM)’s Salón 77-78 Nuevas tendencias: Pintura, escultura, video,
audiovisual, fotografía, conceptualismo (New Tendencies Salon, 1977–78: Painting, sculpture,
video, audiovisual, photography, conceptualism), in Mexico City; as well as in the context of her
participation in Mexican performance art through her membership in the collective Polvo de
Gallina Negra (Black Hen’s Powder; 1983–1991, in Mexico City), along with Maris
Bustamante.
18
She is recognized as one of the pioneers of feminist art in Mexico,
19
and her
participation in the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles is often mentioned among her
accomplishments. Despite the superficial awareness of her work, the scholarship on her
production is very limited due to the many tensions embedded in it: the tension between being a
woman-artist and a mother-housewife; the tension between her use of humor or satire and the
seriousness of her political commitment; the tension between her performance art practice and
her activism; the tension between her collaborative actions and her individual practice; the
tension between her position in “high-culture” (due to her upper-middle class family origins, but
also as an artist, writer, and professor) and her resistance to be associated with it; the tensions

15
Juan Acha. (1916-1995) was a Peruvian art theorist and critic who lived in Mexico from 1971 until his death, and
is considered the main theoretician of Latin American art.
16
Mónica Mayer, “Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool” (master’s thesis, Goddard College, 1980).
17
Participating artists: Rosalba Huerta, Mónica Mayer, and Lucila Santiago.
18
Herminia Dosal was another founder of the collective at the beginning but withdrew shortly after their formation.
19
Josefina Alcázar, Josefina and Fernando Fuentes. Performance y arte acción en América Latina. (Mexico City:
eXTERESA/Ediciones sin nombre, 2005), 147-180.
12

existing in relation to her cross-cultural identifications in terms of language, education, and class;
and the tension between Mexican feminism and feminism in the United States, specifically in
Southern California. Mayer has described the feminist movement in Mexico, led during the
1970s by artist Ana Victoria Jiménez, as being focused on political-sociological language while
Jo Goodwin and Suzanne Lacy, important feminist art proponents in Southern California, opted
for a feminist language that functioned mainly within the psychological-political realm.
20

No art historian or feminist theorist has, to date, examined Mayer’s merging of political
feminism and artistic feminism within a cross-cultural position. Such an investigation is
extremely important not only in terms of Mayer’s own career—giving a context so as to facilitate
an understanding of her referents; it is also crucial to produce a richer comprehension of the
complexities of the feminist art movement both in Southern California and in Mexico, allowing
us to explore how Mayer has not only developed a community that transcends borders, but also
how the political and artistic context of her country made it necessary for her to seek new
models. Her voyage north, in search of expanding her identity as a feminist artist, was followed
by a trajectory back to Mexico wherein she translated the models learned at the Feminist Studio
Workshop. This period expanded space for herself and other artists to develop and produce new
forms of feminist art in Mexico.

MÓNICA MAYER – AN INTRODUCTION TO HER PRACTICE
There are three works by Mayer at the beginning of her production, developed within the
timeframe of this paper, 1976–1984, which represent the point of departure for three central

20
Andrea Giunta, “Feminist Disruptions in Mexican Art, 1975-1987,” Artlogie: Recherches sur les arts, le
patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique Latine. No. 5 (2013), accessed January 2014,
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article271
13

aspects in her work up to this day: the archive (El tendedero, 1978); “the personal is political”
(Translations, 1980); and research-based performance (La fiesta de XV años, 1984). These three
projects will serve as the framework to analyze different aspects of Mayer’s practice, including
the parallel histories of the feminist movement in Los Angeles and Mexico in the mid-1970s; the
Mexican art scene in the 1970s and early 1980s, with the incursion of the Los Grupos that were
born out of the political context in Mexico; and Mayer’s ongoing dialogue with her peers at the
Woman’s Building and with later generations of artists working within this political arena, and in
relation to other artists connected to the legacy of the “feminist art school” format that dissipated
after the closure of the Woman’s Building in 1991.

In the mid to late 1960s, the student movement around the world coalesced with other
rights movements to establish a critical opposition to the Vietnam War and a general anti-
military/anti-imperialist sentiment. Nineteen sixty eight was a dark year as it saw the Prague
Spring, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, various coups d’état in
Latin American countries (including Panama and Peru) and the student demonstrations in
France, Italy, Japan, and Mexico. In the latter case of Mexico, a protest ending in the massacre of
students in Tlatelolco at the hands of the military was an event that shook the entire country and
defined an ensuing period of political repression and perception of defeat within various
sociopolitical movements and their change agents. This disillusionment would culminate with
the fleeting sense of hope brought about by the Zapatista movement in the early 1990s.

Civil and student protests in and outside the United States during the 1960s gained
international attention while, simultaneously, “happenings” and performative actions moved
back and forth between the political and artistic arenas. Collectives such as Tucumán Arde in
14

Argentina (1968) and Dzi Croquettes in Brazil (1973) produced actions that blurred the
boundaries between protest and performance. Art and politics were also tightly intertwined in
instances where artists joined in solidarity, for example, to the boycott of the 10
th
São Paulo
Biennial in 1969, when international artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark joined Brazilian artists
Lygia Clark, Willys de Castro, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Nelson Leirner Hélio Oiticica,
Carlos Vergara and Mary Vieira, among others, to protest the biennial due to Emílio Garrastazu
Médici’s military dictatorship in Brazil, and the government’s double agenda for repression and
censorship while launching a campaign of internationalization of Brazilian art.
21

In 1968 in Mexico City, artists participating in the exhibition Obra 68 at Salón de Plástica
Mexicana, which was part of the cultural program of the 1968 Olympic Games, engaged in an
indirect form of protest. Their works included signs with phrases and slogans in support of the
student movement, such as “We Support the Students,” “I cannot express myself under
repression. I cannot remain silent in the face of aggression,” or “Long live the struggle for
democracy! Long live a free Mexico! Say yes to culture!”
22
Also in 1968, artists organized the
first Salón Independiente (Independent Salon) at Centro Cultural Isidro Fabela, Mexico City, two
weeks after the Tlatelolco massacre as an act of visibility and solidarity amongst art students and
artists. This salon included artists such as José Luis Cuevas, Roberto Donís, Francisco Icaza,
Jorge Manuel, Benito Messeguer, Adolfo Mexiac, Guillermo Meza, Mario Orozco Rivera, Fanny
Rabel, Ricardo Rocha, and Manuel Felguérez, among others. They produced an ephemeral mural
(Mural efímero) at Ciudad Universitaria (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM)

21
See Isobel Whitelegg, “The Bienal de São Paulo: Unseen/Undone (1969–1981),” Afterall (Online Journal), No. 22
(Autum/Winter 2009), accessed January 2014,
http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.22/the.bienal.de.so.paulo.unseenundone.19691981
22
La Era de la Discrepancia, ed. Olivier Debroise et al. (Mexico City: Turner/UNAM, 2007), 38.
15

which contained images in support of the student movement.
23
The creation of the Salones
Independientes (1968–1971) opened up the possibility for collective projects outside of
institutions.
24

It has been noted that 1968 was an epic year in Mexico for the crystallization of an activist
mentality among practicing artists. In his essay “Visualizing 1968,” Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón
concludes:
The experience of living through 1968 was a turning point for many
visual artists who had participated in the Student Movement. There
were profound changes, ranging from an increased interest in
collective work and technical innovation–such as neographics– to a
growing preoccupation with political events, all of which influenced
thematic and stylistic shifts. In some instances, a mistrust of State
funding increased and they sought to follow the anti-official lead of
the Salón Independiente. Indeed, those students who later joined the
Grupos of the 1970s felt that their experiences in 1968 were crucial in
allowing them to make a personal break with the idea of the artist as
individual, turning them to the production of specific works through
collective action.
25

23
Rodrigo Alonso, Sistemas, acciones y procesos, 1965–1975. Exh. Cat. (Buenos Aires: PROA), 232.
24
Pilar García de Germenos, “The Salón Independiente: A New Reading,” in La Era de la Discrepancia, ed. Olivier
Debroise et al. (Mexico City: Turner/UNAM, 2007), p. 55.
25
Joëlle Roriven, Ricardo Vinós, and James Oles, trans. La Era de la Discrepancia, ed. Olivier Debroise et al.
(Mexico City: Turner/UNAM, 2007), 36-39.
16

Young artists in Mexico did not only seek places of visibility as part of the student
movement, but also as spaces outside of institutions (i.e., schools of art and museums). In 1968
Hersúa, Sebastián, Eduardo Garduño, and Luis Aguilar created Arte Otro, a collective in
opposition to what they considered anachronistic art teaching methods used in most art schools at
the time, which did not offer critical discourse and were rooted in the painting school
methodologies of the early 19
th
century, with a hierarchical relation of master-pupil. These artists
created environments that audiences could activate through movement and interaction. For their
first show at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP), they questioned hierarchical
political systems by incorporating interactive and participatory elements, challenging the
Mexican art system which still was very invested in the didactic power of hegemonic structures
of early 20
th
century nation-building and notions beholden to an art for the masses, stating: “what
is shown here has a completely subversive character; it overthrows established aesthetic values
within the Mexican State and as such it opposes the prevailing social and political system.”
26

California Institute of the Arts (CALARTS) and the Feminist Art Program
The planning for the project Womanhouse began during the first semester that the
Feminist Art Program was held at the California Institute of the Arts, and opened in the early
spring of 1973. It was spearheaded by teachers Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Schapiro
emphasized that the project was a “team-teaching experiment” – a teaching collaboration
between herself and Chicago, and a collaboration with the students since the “flow of power
from teacher to student [worked] unilaterally”. This attempt to eliminate hierarchy encouraged

26
Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, La Era de la Discrepancia, ed. Olivier Debroise et al. (Mexico City: Turner/UNAM,
2007), 74.
17

students to work freely.
27
The primary method of teaching was called “Group Operation”, which
consisted of classes that functioned as meetings; the primary concern or goal was to provide a
“nourishing environment for growth.”
28
Twenty-one women artists joined the all-female class. In
the article, “The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse,” Schapiro describes how
they would sit in a circle and talk about a previously selected topic—“in the classical Women’s
Liberation technique, the personal becomes the political.
29
The purpose of this was to search for
a subject matter and reverse the laws of formal art-making, instead working with materials that
were trivial or had no supposed formal or aesthetic value. In conclusion, Schapiro states that
their conviction and experience as feminists allowed Chicago and herself to have a context for
the teaching experiment, how the symbolism of (re)constructing the idea of home was a vehicle
for teaching and learning collectively.

Museo de Arte Moderno and 1975’s International Women’s Day in Mexico
In 1975, Fernando Gamboa, the director at the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in
Mexico City organized an exhibition titled La mujer como creadora y tema del arte (“Woman as
creator and subject in art”), parallel to a major international conference on International
Women’s Day that took place in Mexico City. The exhibition featured works by a majority of
male artists; as Mayer herself complained, these works portrayed “women as muses” or rather, as
“objects;”
30
to say the least, the exhibition failed to present the women artists who were working
with conceptual and feminist languages. Nevertheless, published as a supplement to the
exhibition, MAM also dedicated the January-March 1976 issue of its quarterly arts magazine

27
Miriam Schapiro, “The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse,” Art Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3,
(Spring 1972), pp. 268-270.
28
Ibid, 268.
29
Ibid, 268.
30
Mónica Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” in Crítica feminista en la teoría e historia del arte. (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), 402.
18

Artes Visuales (Visual arts), directed by Carla Stellweg, to the theme of women in art. The issue
included transcribed interviews from a seminar organized with fifteen women artists and critics
on questions brought forth by American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 article
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
31
The issue also included the essays “Why
Separate Women’s Art?” by Lucy R. Lippard (1976);
32
“The Inner and Outer World of the
Women’s Art Movement,” by art historian Charlotte Moser (1976); and an interview with Judy
Chicago and Arlene Raven by Los Angeles gallerist Zora Sweet Pinney. According to Mayer,
this latter interview was the catalyst that drove her to inquire to Stellweg about the Feminist
Studio Workshop, spurring her to contact Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven in Los Angeles about
applying and then to start saving money for two years so she could move with her husband to
California.
33
During this time, she transformed her artistic direction by merging her political and
artistic concerns, and “took matters into her own hands” by joining the nascent feminist
movement in Mexico so she could educate herself about the movement before her participation
in the Feminist Studio Workshop.
34

The various groups she joined during this two-year period included Movimiento
Feminista Mexicano (Mexican Feminist Movement) and their publication Cihuat: Voz de la
Coalición de Mujeres (Voice of the Women’s Coalition), La Revuelta (The Revolt), Movimiento
de Liberación de la Mujer (Women’s Liberation Movement), and Colectivo de Mujeres
(Women’s Collective). During Mayer’s active participation in Mexico’s Women Coalition
alongside Ana Victoria Jiménez, her mother Mrs. Lilia Lucido de Mayer’s worried that her

31
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays,
ed. Linda Nochlin, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988), 147-158.
32
Essay published in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, (New York: Dutton, 1976), 44.
33
Mónica Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” in Crítica feminista en la teoría e historia del arte. (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), 402.
34
Ibid.
19

daughter would attend protests on her own, given the antecedent of tragic events such as had
occurred at the student protest of 1968; thus, she attended the protest organized in 1977 with her
daughter, outside of the Senate building, to demand the legalization of abortion. Jiménez
documented the demonstration with photographs that are now part of her feminist archive at the
Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and Mrs. Lilia Lucido later joined one of the
feminist groups, Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres (Women’s National Movement).
35
The same
year, Mayer participated in an exhibition titled Collage íntimo (Intimate Collage) at La Casa del
Lago in Mexico City, and her work addressed sexuality and sexual iconography, themes that
were more aggressive in this period of her production, and which she has explored more recently
through interventions and demonstrations relating to issues of gender equity and maternity.

Attending to Mayer’s activist participation is important not only in understanding her
activist artistic strategies and the blurring of art and politics in her work, but also in writing the
broader history of conceptual and performance art, which is still closely connected to these
strategies today. Studying the intersection between protest-manifestation in the 1960s and the
consolidation of performance art employing the same type of poetic actions – and perhaps a
shared origin – is a different approach from the current tendency to view the histories of
conceptual practices and politics in Latin America, the US, and Europe as opposite sides of a
spectrum; that is, the US is seen as having been dominated by self-reflexive conceptual art with
art from Latin America viewed as defined by political content and by a critique of the
marginalization of Latin American art in the mainstream canon. As Mayer stated in her 1998
essay “A Personal History of Feminist Art Activism in Mexico,” “If I confirmed anything in that

35
Mónica Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” in Crítica feminista en la teoría e historia del arte. (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), 402.
20

moment [during the Feminist Studio Workshop] it was that if one pretends to make revolutionary
art in political terms, one must do it first in artistic terms.”
36

Concurrent to Mayer’s early artistic production, and after various failed attempts to form
a feminist art collective, she and Ana Victoria Jiménez became active collaborators in the group
“Colectivo Cine-Mujer” (1975–1981), led by filmmakers Rosa Martha Fernández and Beatriz
Mira. Fernández had studied psychology in Paris in the early 1970s and, upon her return to
Mexico City in 1975, she actively denounced sexism in the advertising systems in Mexico and
became engaged with feminist groups, creating Colectivo Cine-Mujer.
37
Short films produced by
the collective on issues such as abortion and rape were screened and used as “didactic tools”
38

during meetings of the Women’s’ Coalition. Although theorists such as Susan Sontag had argued
in the early 1970s that film was not an effective political tool, other feminist artist made
extensive use of film, such as American artist Mary Kelly, whose practice was formulated abroad
within a feminist critique of film studies.
39
She moved to London in 1968 to study at the St.
Martin’s School of Art, where she got involved with the Berwick Street Film Collective,
collaborating on the film Nightcleaners (1970–75), and met feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey
while they were members of the women’s reading group called the “History Group.”
40
These
encounters and her experience seeing Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s film Othon in
1971, prompted her desire to think of her art production by way of “installation[s] as a series of

36
“Si algo confirmé en ese momento es que si uno pretende hacer un arte revolucionario en términos políticos,
primero tiene que serlo en términos artísticos” in Mónica Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” in Crítica
feminista en la teoría e historia del arte. (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), 402.
37
Gabriela Aceves, “ "¿Cosas de Mujeres ?" : Feminist Networks of Collaboration in 1970s Mexico,” Artlogie:
Recherches sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique Latine. No. 5 (2013), accessed January 2014,
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article230
38
Ibid.
39
Newspaper clipping, from a conversation between Susan Sontag and young Mexican filmmakers in 1971, in La
Era de la Discrepancia, ed. Olivier Debroise et al. (Mexico City: Turner/UNAM, 2007), 87.
40
“Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey in Conversation,” in Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996),
31.
21

stills”
41
as in a film, developing a conceptual strategy in order to trigger a critical reading from
the viewer. Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79), is a work that illustrates the parallelism
between her artistic practice and her writing structure, and can also be discussed in relation to
Mayer’s feminist practice during the 1970s and 1980s, in the latter decade those relating to
maternity, as well as to her own critical writing, which is an experimental hybrid between
rigorous theory and an anecdotal vernacular.

CASE STUDY 1: EL TENDEDERO

In 1977, the First Symposium of Mexican-Central American Studies on Women (Primer
Simposio Mexicano Centroamericano de Investigación Sobre la Mujer) was organized, along
with the parallel exhibition Pintoras/Escultoras/Grabadoras/Fotógrafas/Tejedoras/Ceramistas
(Painters/Sculptors/Printmakers/Photographers/Knitters/Ceramists), at Museo de Arte Carrillo
Gil, organized by Alaíde Foppa, Sylvia Pandolfi, and Raquel Tibol, with Mayer working as their
assistant.

MAM, under the direction of Fernando Gamboa, organized yet another crucial exhibition
in 1978, Salón 77-78 Nuevas tendencias: Pintura, escultura, video, audiovisual, fotografía,
conceptualismo (New Tendencies Salon, 1977–78: Painting, sculpture, video, audiovisual,
photography, conceptualism), exploring for the first time after a long history of presenting
abstraction and other non-figurative art, practices related to process and non-traditional formats
and aiming to become a new type of Mexican biennial. Nuevas tendencias was completely

41
As told to artist and curator Ian White, “The Body Politic,” Frieze Magazine, No. 107 (May 2007). accessed
January 2014, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_body_politic/
22

organized by the participating artists who presented “the city” as a critical theme and as a point
of departure for the development of their work, specifically created for the exhibition. The artists
also produced a limited edition catalogue in the form of an artist book, and were themselves in
charge of the public promotion of the show.
42
Nuevas tendencias included the work of Mayer
and other important women artists such as Magali Lara and Mexican video art pioneer Pola
Weiss. Mayer’s contribution to the exhibition was the installation El tendedero (the clothesline);
one of Mayer’s first experiments in displaying an archive as an artwork, as noted by Gabriela
Aceves in her article “¿Cosas de mujeres?: Feminist Networks of Collaboration in 1970s
Mexico.” According to Aceves, the piece “works as a kind of archive. […] Formally, El
tendedero resembles one of the most ancient practices of filing important things.”
43
This work
consisted of a compilation of responses from the public, who completed the following
phrase/question: “As a woman what I dislike the most in the city, is…” The survey was done
originally with 800 women from different ages and backgrounds in Mexico City, whose
responses ranged from “¡A los hombres! Y principalmente a los cebollitas! (rabos verdes)”
(Men! Especially spring onions! [green stalks
44
]), to longer accounts of harassment from men in
the street.
The installation of the survey results at Salón 77-78 Nuevas tendencias consisted of the
arrangement of the original 800 small pink cardstock cards with the survey question printed in
cursive letters and the handwritten answers, hung with clothespins on a pink metal structure. The
piece was open, inviting the exhibition visitors to add new responses in the course of the
exhibition. This installation, in the form of a sociological study or continuous archive, is an

42
La máquina visual. Una revisión de las exposiciones del Museo de Arte Moderno 1964–1988, (Mexico City:
Museo de Arte Moderno, 2011) 154-171.
43
Gabriela Aceves, “ "¿Cosas de Mujeres ?" : Feminist Networks of Collaboration in 1970s Mexico,” Artlogie:
Recherches sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique Latine. No. 5 (2013), accessed January 2014,
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article230
44
In Mexico, the expression “rabo verde” loosely means “dirty old man looking for younger women.”
23

example not only of the participatory aspect of feminist art production but also a challenge to
scientific formats, information systems, and artistic methods by utilizing “the poetry of
household order instead, [this way] the object of domination was subverted in order to back up a
liberating collective message of protest,” as described by art historian Andrea Giunta.
45
Through
sociological tools, Mayer’s piece was able to bring public voices (those of the women
participating in the survey in the streets) into the private institutional space of the museum, as
well as referring back to the private space of the domestic sphere, drawing on imagery identified
as “feminine” in our social subconscious such as the structure of the clothesline, the color pink
and even the use of the index cards which are often used by homemakers to collect recipes.

The use of the card format in different iterations of conceptual practices—index cards,
archival cards, library catalogue cards—has been a common strategy since the seventies. In the
same year El tendedero was produced, for example, Mexican artist Ulises Carrión (b. 1941,
Veracruz, Mexico), a peer of Mayer, made an artwork-artist book called In Alphabetical Order,
which was an intervention to his own Rolodex files, categorizing all his contacts in sections such
as "People I've Met;” “Artists;” “Non-Artists;” “My best Friends - People I Love;” “People I
Admire;” and “There Has Been A Change in Our Relationship of Late." The cards were
presented in wooden boxes with the alphabetizing label in the front of each one. In addition,
Quiero hacer el amor (I Want to Make Love), another work by Mayer from 1978, was included
in the exhibition Lo Normal, at Casa de la Juventud in Guadalupe Tepeyac, Mexico City. With a
postcard-size format, the piece incorporated the idea of surveying ten emotions and reactions in
response to the phrase: “I want to make love…” and the options included “with my father,”

45
Andrea Giunta, “Feminist Disruptions in Mexican Art, 1975-1987,” Artlogie: Recherches sur les arts, le
patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique Latine. No. 5 (2013), accessed January 2014,
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article271
24

“with myself,” “to get paid,” among others, to which the participants had to match one of the ten
facial expressions (Mayer’s face) to each response. Even though these works are more related to
Mail Art, both practices are connected and I would like to propose that both are feminist in the
way they subvert systems, categories, and hierarchies through the use of the materials and the
processes of cataloguing and archiving, as well as precursors to what today is known as social
practice, due to their incorporation of public interaction and response as part of the piece.

El tendedero was one of Mayer’s last projects in Mexico City before leaving for Los
Angeles in 1978 to attend the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW). During her stay in Los
Angeles, she worked as assistant to Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz on their project Ariadne:
A Social Art Network, attended Goddard College to obtain an MA in Sociology, and organized
the Summer Art Program at the FSW in 1979. She participated in Suzanne Lacy’s Making it Safe
project at the Ocean Park Branch Library in Santa Monica, California in 1979, recreating a
revised version of El tendedero.
46
. With the translated title Clothesline, on the index cards
Mayer asked women passers-by in Ocean Park the following questions:

Do you feel safe in Ocean Park?
Where do you feel safer?
What would make you feel safer?

46
Communitas, a community organizing group in Ocean Park in Santa Monica, had commissioned Lacy to raise
awareness on violence against women in the area. She and her group of collaborators distributed leaflets, organized
events, and among other things they also curated an art exhibition that was displayed in thirty commercial windows.
See Suzanne Lacy’s website: http://www.suzannelacy.com/making-it-safe-1979/ (accessed July 2014).
25

This iteration of Clothesline made Mayer aware of the different elements of the project
that brought up questions of reception, art legitimization, and a new model for the redefinition of
what Mayer called “art as a political tool.”
47
In a letter to Suzanne Lacy in 1980, Mayer
described the structure of the project and reflects on its successes and faults:

I believe Making It Safe although fragmented, has an inner structure, a
congruence that unifies the pieces. We can separate the context we
created from the art. Our project was formed by different areas and each
can be conceived differently. The educational and political events (slide
presentations, speak-out, Main Street exhibition, self-defense
workshops, poetry readings, films, and video) created the context for the
art work. The first acquainted the audience with feminist issues. These
events were a large part of the project and the strongest. The second part
is made up of the art event: Athena's Chain Dinner Parties (including all
the potluck dinners we had), the clothesline piece, and the photo booth.
The dinner parties were particularly interesting to me as they were a
connecting art element throughout the project. The other two,
unfortunately, were not as strong.
48

An interesting conceptual dialogue was generated with this letter exchange, as Lacy in her reply
to Mayer raises questions of the effectiveness of combining feminist pedagogy and activism:

47
Mónica Mayer, “Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool” (master’s thesis, Goddard College, 1980).
48
Mónica Mayer, “Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool” (master’s thesis, Goddard College, 1980).
26

What was personally difficult for me was not only the lack of direct
aesthetic feedback that comes from making images, but the fact that I was
struggling with the outer most area of functionalism in the work. How was
it different from community organizing? [O]r feminist education? What
happened when you moved a form (the structure) developed over several
years, kept always within the art world reference, squarely into the world
of political accountability? My own struggle was "Could I (we) do
everything?" It was a struggle with effectiveness. The onus, once more
reminiscent for me of my work in the Woman's Building, was draining,
exhausting. It created a need for its dialectic, the focus on personal
exploration disconnected from need or function.
49

Mayer saw the lack of images problematic in translating this kind of activist work
to artistic language, nevertheless, the idea or representation of the female body is
present in Mayer’s Clothesline project, not only indexically, but narratively
through the handwritten responses from the participants of the survey and in the
way in which the work approaches issues of gender and how the women speak
about the experiences of their own bodies in public space. Mayer applies social
scientific research methods such as the application of case studies, interviews,
surveys, observation, social network studies, statistics, and model building as
strategies to reinterpret meaning and subjectivity, and the presence of the body
(there is no visual image of the body but the body is present through narration,
participation, and the handwritten element) to “refuse the literal figuration of the

49
Ibid.
27

woman’s body, creating significance out of its absence,”

to cite Mary Kelly when
speaking about her own feminist practice.
50
The presence of the body in this case
is not a matter of indexicality (which could be illustrated, for example, by Ana
Mendieta’s Siluetas) but a point of tension that locates the body as a place where
quantification of difference can occur in order to make meaning subverting the
same method of objectification—through numbers, statistics, measurements—that
the body has been subject to in order to state its “otherness.”

It can be argued that these social science methodologies resonate as ones that have been
applied to implement colonialism and patriarchy, however, artists who have used sociological
and anthropological systems of recording and cataloguing such as Mayer, Kelly, Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler, and Teresa Burga, do so in order to defy the structures of the
systems themselves. Thus, their use of the document and of research in the form of diagrams,
charts, studies, displays, questionnaires, and other visual modes, is a conceptual strategy taken
beyond the conceptualism, with its standard resistance towards the use of materials or objects—
towards feminism. This conceptual/feminist strategy, it could be argued, is also the genesis and
core of what has become known as institutional critique: the strategy works from within the
institutional parameters of the art system in order to critique it and present alternative ways of
understanding. The document at work in conceptual art constitutes the basis for what is
understood as the archive, since the document is undeniably an artifact or fetish that is produced
for collection and display, and if the body is the primary material, as it was for so many feminist
artists in the 1970s, I propose to analyze the body as document or archive of many “presences”
and “absences” that define it, such as the identifications of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, class.

50
Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 85-100.
28

According to cultural anthropologist Néstor García Canclini, the appropriation of social
scientific methods in the arts in the 1960s and 1970s—particularly in Latin America—provoked
a heated debate among artists, art historians and theorists, and social scientists since the Marxist
sociological study of art could not be reconciled with the fact that artists were using these same
structures to deconstruct them.
51
The problem of the body continued to be addressed through
performance, for example, but there has not been an analysis so far that explores the body as a
container of data—as an archive—which is constructed (or put together) via internal and external
structures of power. Works such as El tendedero/Clothesline deconstruct structures of power by
addressing the collective bodies of females in the streets, and inserting their collective voice as
data, as archive, inside the Museum.

In relating conceptual/feminist art practices to the idea of the archive I am attempting to
circle back to a proto-institutional critique of structures of power—from patriarchy to the public
space to the system of art production and reception—which were the concern of Mayer and other
artists mentioned above. It is no coincidence Mayer herself has, since the late 1980s, taken up the
endeavor of constructing multi-faceted archives (compilations of newspaper clippings, books,
periodicals, articles, etc.) on contemporary Mexican artists, in particularly of women, who are
still often overlooked in art history and exhibition making. In recent years, Mayer has also
incorporated into her work the strategy of intervening in archives (museum collections, or other

51
Nestor García Canclini, La producción simbólica: teoría y método en sociología del arte, (Argentina, Madrid,
Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1979/2006).

29

archives of artists and cultural producers such as the late critic Olivier Debroise), employing
performance and also critiquing her own archive.

It is this idea that connected the use of the archive and of her own body with the practices
of the other artists who are mentioned throughout this text, simultaneously aiming to connect it
to the Derridean critique of the “archive fever.” A more recent article by Suely Rolnik updated
and adapted this idea of the archive fever within the context of the Latin American art circuit, as
an effect of colonialism, and globalization, and the politics invested in the production, display,
and acquisition of art. By intervening in archives from institutions, other artists’ or her own,
Mayer intervenes their histories and their contexts— with all the conceptual and ethical
implications of producing a critique that ultimately (or principally) is made for display and
collection in one of the institutions that these works also try to structurally deconstruct. Thus,
this is a proposition to reconsider the body as an archive and vice versa to include the issue of the
archive and the art system, not only in terms of a male-dominated system but also or especially
in terms of production and the contemporary art market, as discussed by Andrea Fraser, in which
criticality is part of feminist discourse and should be part of the overall art historical
discussions.
52

52
Andrea Fraser, “There Is No Place like Home,” in eds. Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, Whitney
Biennial 2012, Exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012), 30–31.
30

CASE STUDY 2: TRANSLATIONS

Clothesline was also the piece that triggered the need in Mayer to connect with women’s
communities in Los Angeles and Mexico City, which then led her to produce the ambitious
transnational project Traducciones: un diálogo internacional de mujeres artistas (Translations:
An international Dialogue of Women Artists), in 1980.

A precedent to the international exchange staged in important projects such as Suzanne
Lacy’s International Dinner Party (organized in parallel to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party,
1979) and Mayer’s own Translations: An International Dialogue of Women Artists (1980) was
Marta Minujín’s happening Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity). This
was part of “Three Country Happening,” a proposal for a live telecommunications happening by
Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín, and Wolf Vostell in the spring of 1966, organized to take place
simultaneously in New York, Buenos Aires and Berlin (due to missed encounters,
miscommunication, and technical difficulties, it was only successfully realized through the
events organized by Minujín in Buenos Aires).
53
Simultaneidad en simultaneidad although not
directly referenced by Mayer, undoubtedly can be thought of as a model of international
collaboration stemming from Latin America. This type of cross-geographical artistic exchange
certainly has historical precedents dating back to Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus, but true cross-
cultural exchange among artists was born from conceptual practices. It is no coincidence that,
while in Argentina, American feminist art critic and curator Lucy Lippard became aware of the
connection between conceptual practices and the international political environment of this

53
Marta Minujín, “Simultaneity in Simultaneity,” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the
Avant-garde, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 237-241.
31

time
54
and this period is thought to be the trigger for her political stance applied to her practices
as peer and collaborator to the conceptual artists of her generation.
55
Thus, this political
awareness signifies also a precedent to what Mayer calls “applied conceptual art practices,” in
the collaborative and critical spirit of Lippard and the exhibitions she organized in the early
seventies.

Cross-border collaborations, even in present day, put forward the issue of translation—
literal and cultural, especially in discussing Latin American art as a bundle or whole from a
region that is not heterogeneous. Mayer’s Translations was an experiment in collaboration,
exchange, and understanding across countries, as well as an investigation on becoming bilingual
and having a bilingual or cross-cultural artistic practice, a conceptual dialogue with Feminist art
figures such as Suzanne Lacy, and an aesthetic conversation with other artists from Los Angeles
who used iconography from Mexican popular culture, which had been deconstructed and
reappropriated on the other side of the border, especially by Chican@ artists. In the lineage of
“applied conceptual arts” from Lucy Lippard to Suzanne Lacy, there is also a more recent
example of “small group” dialogue in the Kitchen Table Talks organized by Eugenia Butler in
the early nineties. Mayer was one of the three Mexican artists participating in this exchange
alongside Felipe Ehrenberg and Mónica Castillo. These conversations, part of the programming
for the art fair ART/LA at the Los Angeles Convention Center in 1993, were had over a meal .
56

Mayer’s presence in Los Angeles is not the only instance of an artistic exchange between
Mexico and the United States after the seventies beyond artist personal relations, travels, and

54
Rodrigo Alonso, Sistemas, acciones y procesos, 1965–1975. Exh. Cat. (Buenos Aires: PROA).
55
Cornelia Butler, et. al. From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Number Shows, 1969–74, (London:
Afterall Books, 2012).
56
About Kitchen Table Talks. Accessed May 2015. http://www.eugeniapbutler.com/aboutkt.html
32

aesthetic dialogues. There are previous and concurrent artistic exchanges between Mexico and
the United States, for instance, Arnulfo Aquino and Melecio Galván
57
worked in the early 1970s
with Chicano artists in California. Angeleno Photographers Louis Carlos Bernal, Harry Gamboa
Jr., Luis Garza, Roberto Gil de Montes, John Valadez, and Kathy Vargas, among others,
participated in Hecho en Latinoamérica: primera muestra de la fotografía latinoamericana
contemporánea at the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía in Mexico City, in 1978, as well as in the
Second Colloquium of Photography at Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City in 1981.
58
Mexico
City-born Guillermo Gómez-Peña moved to the United States the same year as Mayer (1978) to
study at the California Institute of the Arts; Gómez-Peña’s work has been conceptually
associated with strategies used by Los Grupos in Mexico and LA-Chicano artists such ASCO.
He later founded the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) in the border
region of Tijuana-San Diego (1985–1989). Mexican artists such as Adolfo Patiño and Graciela
Iturbide were also connected to Los Angeles during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
59

Translations, included the following participants from Mexico City: Lilia Lucido de
Mayer (Mónica’s mother), Ana Victoria Jiménez, Yan Castro, Mónica Kubli, Ester Zavala,
Marcela Olabarrieta, Yolanda Andrade, Ana Cristina Zubilaga, and Magali Lara, one of Mayer’s
most important collaborators. The US participants were: Jo Goodwin, Denise Yarfitz, and
Florence Rosen. The activities were inaugurated with a Mexican breakfast at Lilia Lucido’s
house, some visits to local museums (the National Museum of Anthropology amongst them), and
the Basílica de Guadalupe. The US artists brought gifts, books, and posters for the Mexican

57
Founders of grupo Mira in Mexico City (1977); formerly known as Grupo 65 (1965), in La Era de la
Discrepancia, ed. Olivier Debroise et al. (Mexico City: Turner/UNAM, 2007), 199.
58
Rubén Ortiz-Torres, “The Present-Day Pachuco Refuses to Die!” in MEX/LA: “Mexican” Modernism(s) in Los
Angeles, 1930–1985. Exh. cat. (Zeppelinstraße: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 29.
59
Rubén Ortiz-Torres, “The Present-Day Pachuco Refuses to Die!” in MEX/LA: “Mexican” Modernism(s) in Los
Angeles, 1930–1985. Exh. cat. (Zeppelinstraße: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 31.
33

participants. The project also included discussions and two day-long roundtable workshops that
took place at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, Nancy Cárdenas’ home in Cuernavaca,

60
and in the city of Oaxaca. Five audio-visual presentations were made by both groups of artists.
This structure of open roundtable discussions was imported from the Feminist Studio Workshop,
but Mayer emphasized that the purpose of this exchange was to familiarize the US artists with
feminists from Mexico City, and to develop a “trans-border community based on new
friendships,” applying the feminist concept of “the personal is political.”
61
Mexican art critic
Alaide Foppa broadcasted a radio program in Radio Universidad about the experience and
reception of Translations in Mexico.
62

In 1980, as part of an off-site MA program that allowed her to stay in Los Angeles,
Mayer obtained an MA in Sociology from Goddard College with the thesis “Feminist Art: An
Effective Political Tool.”
63
Chapters of her thesis include a detailed account of the artwork
Traducciones: un diálogo internacional de mujeres artistas and a section of correspondence
between Mayer and some of her close collaborators, such as Suzanne Lacy, Ana Victoria
Jiménez, Jo Goodwin, Denise Yarfitz, and her mother, Lilia Lucido de Mayer, among others. Her
thesis illustrates the issue of translating not only language but also culture, based on her own
translation of her learning experiences and lived practices when trying to adapt methods and

60
Nancy Cárdenas (1934–1994) was a poet, journalist, director, activist, and a pioneer in the Mexican gay
movement. She hosted the first group of “foreign” lesbians in Mexico during the First World Conference for
Women in the International Women’s Year (Mexico, 1975), and as the “lesbian movement moved closer to the
feminist movement,” she hosted the first meeting of lesbians and feminists in 1978 in her Cuernavaca home. See
Norma Mogrovejo, “Sexual Preference, the Ugly Duckling of Feminist Demands: The Lesbian Movement in
Mexico,” in Female Desires: Same-sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures, eds. Evelyn
Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 308-322.
61
Phrase coined from Carol Hanisch’s essay “The Personal is Political,” in Notes From the Second Year: Women's
Liberation. Major Writings of the Radical Feminists, (1970).
62
Broadcast on December 15, 1979. See Andrea Giunta, “Feminist Disruptions in Mexican Art, 1975-1987,”
Artlogie: Recherches sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique Latine. No. 5 (2013), accessed
January 2014, http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article271
63
Coco Fusco, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 236.
34

strategies to the Mexican context and vice-versa. In a letter to Nancy Angelo and Vanalyne
Green dated April 9, 1980, included in the thesis, Mayer expresses her preoccupation of going
back to Mexico City and how she feels the responsibility to fight the invisibility of women artists
in Mexico:
Although I don't want it to take up all my energy, I will probably have
to teach in an existing male art institution when I go back to Mexico.
In Los Angeles I have found different models for women working
together [.] I don't know how we will adapt this information in
Mexico, but autonomy is a basic element. I am curious if either of
you have taught in mixed sex groups and what problems you see in
that situation. One of the first things I need to start doing in Mexico is
to fight against the erasure we have suffered as women artists. The
research on women's art I've seen in the U.S. has given me a sense of
myself as an artist and of how art and the history of art are used
against us. We have to do a lot of research on Mexican women artists
and share available information on European and American women
artists. There are women in Mexico doing research on matriarchies
and on women artistic, and I hope to work with them. We must
influence an audience that is very aware of class issues in art but
totally ignorant of sexism.
64

Documentation of the exchange was presented in an exhibition in March 1981 at the
Woman’s Building, including images, and a book with texts, in English and Spanish, about their

64
Mónica Mayer, “Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool” (master’s thesis, Goddard College, 1980).
35

experience, presented as a script that combined images from pre-Hispanic Mexican goddesses
such as the Coyolxauhqui, with information and a timeline of feminist movements in Mexico, an
explanation of general Mexican culture including celebrations and religious practices, the social
role of women and their relation with labor, and education.”
65

CASE STUDY 3: TLACUILAS Y RETRATERAS
Upon her return to Mexico in 1983, Mayer created “Grupo de arte feminista de San
Carlos” (San Carlos’ Feminist Art Group), a weekly seminar-workshop at the ENAP, which she
developed from her experience at the FSW, following the format of “pequeño grupo” (small
group), with intimate discussions among the women artists. Mayer implemented this format so
other women could open up about personal and professional concerns. Three feminist collectives
originated from this workshop: Bio-Arte, including Nunik Sauret, Guadalupe García, Rose van
Lengen, Rosell Faure, and Laita, all of whom were committed to create art derived from their
biological experience as women; Polvo de Gallina Negra with Maris Bustamante, making public
interventions on the streets and in national television on themes concerning female identity, such
as rape and maternity, which they navigated and negotiated themselves, investigating their own
pregnancies as a further exploration of the role of women in Mexican culture.

Tlacuilas y Retrateras (Scribes and Portratists) was formed by a group of artists, writers,
and art historians consisting of Ana Victoria Jiménez, Karen Cordero, Patricia Torres, Elizabeth
Valenzuela, Lorena Loaiza, Ruth Albores, Nicola Coleby, Consuelo Almeda and Marcela
Ramírez. Tlacuilas y Retrateras’ first collaboration was the performance or action-based event
La fiesta de XV años (Quinceañera Party), a project that began as a research-based work in which

65
Ibid.
36

they led workshops, conducted interviews and surveys about the tradition of the coming of age
ritual for girls when they reach 15 years—in Mexican culture, a presentation of the young
woman to society also seen as a public introduction announcing her sexual availability. The
quinceañera parties are usually very elaborate, similar to or more extravagant than a wedding
party, as the families spare no expense for their production. As the result of the research, the
artists organized an artistic event, consisting of an exhibition of paintings, drawings,
installations, and photography, as well as four performances that involved artists’ collectives, the
public (about 3000 attendees), and some personalities from the Latin American art world such as
critic Raquel Tibol. The event challenged traditional gender roles, the representation of women,
and the place of women not only in Mexican society but also in Mexican art by looking critically
at a tradition that is sexist and reiterates the biological role of women as sexual objects and
vessels of motherhood after puberty. After Tlacuilas y Retrateras and Polvo de Gallina Negra,
Mayer and her husband, artist Víctor Lerma created Pinto mi Raya, which functioned first as an
alternative gallery space for emerging artists, to become a collective and archive since 1989. The
activities of Pinto mi Raya include artistic production, curatorial work, lectures and workshops,
and performances, but their main focus is the compilation of an archive and library of
contemporary visual artists from Mexico.

37

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this essay is to review Mónica Mayer’s early work as pioneering
conceptual feminist practice in Mexico, as well as to reinsert her into art-historical Los Angeles,
acknowledging the process of exchange, exportation and adaptation of pedagogical feminist
models experienced in both Mexico City and Los Angeles. In this particular moment, when
blockbuster exhibitions are being produced on both sides of the border and internationally, there
is, simultaneously, a sense of censorship regarding retrospectives focused on female-identified
artists such as Mayer. The production of scholarship in reference to artists such as Mayer is a
critical imperative.

38

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Asset Metadata

Creator Preciado, Selene (author)

Core Title Art as a political tool: the early feminist production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 11/06/2015

Defense Date 11/06/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag El tendedero,feminism,feminist,Feminist Studio Workshop,Mexican women artists,Mónica Mayer,OAI-PMH Harvest,Tlacuilas y Retrateras,woman artist,Woman’s Building

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jones, Amelia G. (committee chair), Steiner, A. L. (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email selene.preciado@gmail.com,spreciad@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-197195

Unique identifier UC11277361

Identifier etd-PreciadoSe-4019.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-197195 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PreciadoSe-4019.pdf

Dmrecord 197195

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Preciado, Selene

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA