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Mónica Mayer's collective art practice, 1978–2018

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Mónica Mayer's collective art practice, 1978–2018

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Content Mónica Mayer’s collective art practice, 1978–2018
by
Amanda Grey Jordan
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
(Comparative Media and Culture)
December 2020
Copyright 2020 Amanda Grey Jordan
ii

As Saint Cyprian says: The things we write demand the
most careful consideration. All that I have wished is to
study in order to be ignorant about less: for, according
to Saint Augustine, one learns some things in order to
do them and others only to know them:
Discimus quaedum, ut sciamus; quaedum, ut faciamus.

–Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Response of the Poet to Sor Filotea” (1691)

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow
Before he became St. Augustine?

–Mary Oliver, Felicity (2015)

iii
Table of contents
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. iv
Preface .............................................................................................................................................. vi
Introduction. Mónica Mayer’s collective art practice ....................................................................... 1
Chapter 1. The artists’ group Black Hen Powder (1983–1993) ........................................................ 23
Chapter 2. The art retrospective When in doubt…ask: A retrocollective exhibit (2016) .................... 69
Chapter 3. The applied conceptual art project I Draw My Line (1989–present) and its archive .. 126
Conclusion. From collectivity to intimacy ..................................................................................... 153
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 166
Appendix A .................................................................................................................................... 180
Appendix B ..................................................................................................................................... 188
Appendix C ..................................................................................................................................... 213
Appendix D .................................................................................................................................... 221

iv
Abstract
This dissertation has studied three projects of the Mexican feminist artist Mónica
Mayer to demonstrate the diverse forms of collectivity operating in each. Mayer is a
prolific artist who has been active since the early 1970s in Mexico City and in national
and transnational contexts. In the 1970s, many artists and feminist activists in Mexico
City had adopted the collective as an organizational form with political ends, and many
maintained that art and gender were unrelated. For art collectives, gender concerns
were outweighed by class concerns. For feminist activists, artistic action had no place
in political action. Despite this resistance, Mayer would eventually bridge these
concerns and cofound Mexico’s longest-running feminist art collective, Black Hen
Powder. This dissertation considers the collective in conjunction with two of Mayer’s
other projects that have prioritized collectivity and related feminist practice to artistic
and political action. In addition to Black Hen Powder, Mayer’s 2016 retrospective
exhibition, If you have doubts…ask, which was officially named a retrocollective, and
the archival project I Draw My Line, which Mayer began in the 1990s with her partner
Víctor Lerma, are examined. Close analysis of each of these projects has revealed not
the dogmatic collectivity that might be found in other areas of collective and artistic
practice or in the ideologically-inflected work of artists, writers, and thinkers who often
engage with similar issues and themes. Instead, these three projects have gestured
toward intimate action, albeit under the name of some collectively associated work,
v
such as the group, the retrocollective, or the archive. This projects suggests that for
Mayer, collectivity in theory and in nomenclature are different than collectivity in
practice.

vi
Preface
“Miel para atrapar moscas”
Mexican artist Mónica Mayer has written many columns for El Universal, the daily
newspaper that first circulated in 1916 to report on the Mexican Revolution and the
Constitution of 1917. One column in particular is notable here. It was published on
October 4, 2004, and I have borrowed its title above –“Honey to trap flies” or “Miel para
atrapar moscas” in the original Spanish. Mayer, who was born in Mexico City in 1954,
begins the piece, “I love to criticize, but some time ago I decided to write primarily
about artistic projects that work well and to try to stop throwing things under the bus
for sport. I’m in search of others with similar strategies.”
1
It appears that Mayer was
forgoing an overtly critical posture for something a bit different. If I were to call this a
strategy, given what the chapters of this dissertation suggest about Mayer’s collective
art practice, I might conclude that it is a strategy of listening, dialogue, or intimacy.
Interestingly, Mayer has referenced her work as a columnist for El Universal as an
important part of her artistic practice as a feminist, noting that “an artist’s work is
more than producing artworks. Doing research on women’s art, writing about them in
my newspaper column in El Universal or publishing books about us, teaching,
protesting, and supporting other women artists is part of my work.”
2
Where to begin,

1
All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
2
Mónica Mayer, “Feminist Artist Statement.”
vii
then, in the writing of a dissertation that examines the work of an artist who views the
artists’ work in such a broad way? Where to begin in the writing of a dissertation that
focuses on an artist whose practice is as complex as it is varied? In the process of
writing this dissertation, I found it to be rooted in the ideas of three people from two
discourses that are upon first glance worlds apart. In the “seventh incursion” of Donald
Preziosi and Claire Farago’s Art Is Not What You Think It Is (2012), they write, “As
archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, or museum personnel we spend years or
even lifetimes disciplining ourselves in the practice of a certain divination, a kind of
intense augury in interpreting events as bearing traces not only of their past but of
some likely future as well.”
3
Yet our divinations often, as Warren Buffett has remarked,
tell us more about the diviners than about the future. In a letter to the Buffett
Partnership, Ltd. shareholders in January of 1965, Buffett explains, “So what can we
expect to achieve? Of course, anything I might say is largely guesswork, and my own
investment philosophy has developed around the theory that prophecy reveals far more
of the frailties of the prophet than it reveals of the future.”
4
Buffett would go on to
admit that he would indeed have to say something, despite the nature of guesswork and
prophecy.
The conclusions that I draw in this project, especially in their forward-thinking
gestures, reveal my own frailties. To be sure, some historical accounts have been

3
Preziosi and Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is, 144.
4
Buffett, Partnership Letter, 8.
viii
brushed over too lightly, and many notable works have not been mentioned. Many
readers may find this project too biographical or too similar to a monograph. Indeed,
some academics and publishing houses have said that the scholarly monograph in the
humanities died with the turn of the century.
5
I am also aware of the inescapable
paradox that I face in attempting to examine the role of collectivity through the
practice of a singular artist. If I have sacrificed any conceptual or theoretical
consideration it is because I have tried to prioritize analytical depth by focusing on
three case studies of Mayer’s practice, as I set out in the following chapters.
At the end of the 2004 column, Mayer considers her titular gesture in more
detail. She addresses the reader: “And what do you think: will more flies be caught with
honey, or is it better to take out the sword? Is confrontation better or is dialogue?”
Mayer, who in her work has again and again emphasized dialogue and collaboration,
may be making a case for honey. Honey can trap flies. Is this so far-fetched? Mayer’s
own relationship with confrontation and dialogue seems to have evolved in her
collective art practice, as the subsequent chapters intend to demonstrate. Indeed,
Mayer’s address to the reader is humorous. And her collective practice engages humor,
through and through. As she suggests in a 1991 column for El Universal, “The last
requirement to be an enlisted feminist is that you have to have a great sense of
humor.”
6

5
Cassuto, “Worried About the Future of the Monograph? So Are Publishers.”
6
Mayer, “¿Cuevas se alinea con las artistas feministas?”
ix
The mention of using honey to trap flies and of having a sense of humor as a
feminist brings to mind the writing of a figure who worked along similar lines, the poet
and thinker whose roots – like Mayer’s – are in Mexico City, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(1648–1695). Sor Juana’s epistolary “Response of the Poet to Sor Filotea de la Cruz”
was written in the seventeenth century and addresses among other things an intimacy
relevant for this discussion here in the twenty-first century. Toward the end of the
second part of the letter, she remarks:
And what could I tell you, señora, about the natural secrets I have
discovered when cooking? Seeing that an egg sets and fries in butter or oil
but falls apart in syrup; seeing that for sugar to remain liquid it is enough
to add a very small amount of water in which a quince or other bitter fruit
has been placed; seeing that the yolk and the white of the same egg are so
different that each can be mixed with sugar but together they cannot. I do
not mean to tire you with inconsequentialities, which I mention only to
give you a complete view of my nature, and which I believe will cause you
to laugh; but, señora, what can we women know but kitchen philosophies? As
Lupercio Leonardo so wisely said, one can philosophize very well and prepare
supper. And seeing these minor details, I say that if Aristotle had cooked, he
would have written a great deal more.
7

At UT Austin’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, where I have conducted
research while completing this dissertation, there is a typescript for Sor Juana: A
Chronicle of Old Mexico, an unpublished novel by Dorothy Schons written during the
1930s. Although unpublished, it was the first English-language volume on Sor Juana’s
life. Moreover, it was Schons who had described Sor Juana in 1925 as “the first feminist
in the New World.”
8
While Schons’ volume is now one of many contemporary accounts

7
de la Cruz, 109–110.
8
Schons, “The First Feminist in the New World,” 11–12.
x
of Sor Juana’s life, her early proposal of Sor Juana as a feminist holds true. In Sor
Juana’s work, we observe a logic similar to what is described in this dissertation. She
reminds her readers that writing is not unlike being in the kitchen, and that being in
the kitchen is intellectual and instructive. Everyone, she might have said, belongs in
the kitchen – that is where the food is.
The bibliography of literature on Sor Juana’s work and life is extensive, and she
is certainly not an understudied figure. So it provides hope if it is any indication of
what the bibliography of literature on contemporary Mexican collective art practice and
feminist art practice might look like in, say, four centuries. As I aim to gesture toward
in the upcoming chapters, Mayer’s philosophy of artistic practice is not unlike Sor
Juana’s. Even with such hope, however, there is a bit of irony. It is a strange time to be
writing about collectivity, and yet Mayer’s collective practice has taught me a few
things about learning to live in the present condition. To begin, these include nurturing
intimacy and humor and not rejecting paradox. I recognize that such discussion
requires much more time and thought, and I hope that in contributing to the
aforementioned body of literature, what follows can provide a step in that direction.

1
Introduction. Mónica Mayer’s collective art practice

Mónica Mayer was born in Mexico City in 1954. She studied visual arts from 1972 to
1976 at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, which was formerly the Academia de
San Carlos. During this time, Mayer became involved in the feminist groups
Movimiento Feminista Mexicano and Colectivo Cine-Mujer, whose activities gained
attention after the International Women’s Year Conference was held in Mexico City in
1975. A few feminist activist groups had taken root in Mexico at the beginning of the
decade, including Mujeres en Acción Solidaria, Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres, and
Movimiento de Liberación de la Mujer. Yet, art was not a focus of these groups. For the
artistic movement known as generación de los grupos (the group generation), however,
which emerged in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, art was
a priority – especially art that was underpinned by social and political ends.
In turn, throughout the 1970s a number of artists’ groups and collectives formed
in Mexico City. These groups were largely committed to social change and aimed to
reflect that in their art practice in more experimental ways than previous generations
of Mexican artists. Mayer completed her first art exhibitions in 1977 and 1978 and
would go on to form Mexico’s first artists’ group committed to a feminist agenda. In
1978, she moved to Los Angeles to study at the Woman’s Building, where in 1976 she
had completed a two-week course at the Feminist Studio Workshop. This time, she
2
began a two-year course of study at the workshop, which gave her an opportunity to
produce a master’s thesis for Goddard College in order to document and analyze her
experience there. When Mayer returned to Mexico City in 1981, she joined Maris
Bustamante in forming Mexico’s longest-running artists’ group dedicated to feminist
issues. They named it Polvo de Gallina Negra, or Black Hen Powder. As such, Mayer is
often considered part of the group generation. Since the 1970s, in addition to her work
for the group, Mayer’s drawings, collages, graphic design, and performances have been
organized and presented in independent and official spaces, public and private,
nationally and internationally.
The goal of this dissertation is to study the collective art practice of Mónica
Mayer over a 40-year period as she traversed three major projects – an artists’ group,
an art retrospective, and an archive. In doing so, “Mónica Mayer’s collective art
practice, 1978–2018” becomes the widest-reaching monographic study of Mayer’s
work. There are numerous ways that a study such as this might have been structured.
After a few false beginnings, I decided upon a loosely chronological structure in which
each chapter examines one of three major projects in the form of a case study. Before
moving forward, however, what is meant by “collective” or “collectivity” should be
explained. This explanation sets the stage for the introduction to Mayer’s collective
practice and the three cases on which this dissertation focuses.
In etymological terms, collective comes from the Middle French collectif, which
is rooted in the Latin collectivus, collectus, and the past participle of colliegere, or
3
“gather together.”
1
In its adjectival form, collective is defined as something being
“formed by collection of individual persons or things; constituting a collection;
gathered into one; taken as a whole; aggregated, collected.”
2
The etymological and
adjectival forms of collective hint at what I mean by “collective practice.” In reference
to Mayer’s art practice, it refers to her work “gathered together,” or the large,
comprehensive set of her work. At the same time, it points to more subtle aspects of
her practice that prioritize the collective state or quality known as collectivity
3
in form,
such as the artists’ group or the archive.
However, an initial paradox emerges here. This dissertation focuses on the
collective art practice of a singular artist. It largely speaks about one subject, Mónica
Mayer, and her position as an artist and creative agent is one of the main forces that
coheres this project. Interestingly, another paradox extends from the latter. The
projects that first appear to be collective gestures, either in name, form, or both, are
revealed to be more intimate than the collective nature of the group, crowd, or public
would suggest. The following chapters reveal that Mayer’s practice largely evolves in
relation with one other collaborator: Maris Bustamante in the artists’ group, Karen
Cordero Reiman in the retrospective art exhibition, and Víctor Lerma – her husband
and artistic collaborator – in the archive. Paradox is defined as “an apparently absurd
or self-contradictory statement or proposition, or a strongly counter-intuitive one,

1
Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Collective,” https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=collective.
2
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Collective.”
3
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Collectivity.”
4
which investigation, analysis, or explanation may nevertheless prove to be well-
founded or true.”
4
In the case of Mayer’s work and this dissertation, paradox is relevant
for more than association. There are two parts of a paradox, and that they both may be
true is what is unsettling, “apparently absurd,” and above all, fascinating. I propose
that through the study of Mayer’s collective art practice we gain insight into the
function of paradox, not resolving it, but learning of its importance and, too, necessity.
With this in mind, the present study of the processes by which these three cases
have developed – the artists’ group during the 1980s, the retrospective exhibit in 2016,
and the ongoing art archive that began in the 1990s – indicates the continuity of
Mayer’s artistic practice while demonstrating diverse forms of collectivity as they relate
to the artist(s) and artistic practice. More specifically, the juxtaposition of these three
cases attempts to demonstrate how collective art practice happens and reveal the
incongruities between collectivism, as described above, in theory and in practice. To be
sure, collectivism in twentieth-century Mexico and into twenty-first-century Mexico
has held different meanings at different times. The projects examined in this
dissertation as well as the contexts of their production highlight significant moments
in the artistic, political, and social fabric of Mexico. This fabric also extends to the
United States and areas of Europe, where Mayer has lived, studied, and participated in
the art world, both inside and outside the art museum.

4
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Paradox (2.a.).”
5
Project structure
As the title of this work indicates, it is bound by the 40-year period between 1978 and
2018. The three case studies that guide the three primary chapters of this dissertation
bookend that period, but not entirely. Black Hen Powder was active for 10 years, from
1983 to 1993. Mayer’s retrospective exhibit was mounted in 2016. Lastly, the archival
project of Pinto mi Raya (I Draw My Line) began in 1991 and is ongoing.
Chapter 1 sketches a loose trajectory of the collective as it relates to art practice
in Mexico City. Most scholarship on the group generation highlights 1968 as a point of
departure for the artists’ collectives that emerged in 1970s Mexico City. While no doubt
an important part of the social and political context out of which the group generation
was born, the social and political context of the collective begins earlier. This is not to
say that 1968 and the tensions surrounding it should be overlooked or ignored.
However, it is to say that a look into the slightly more distant past can provide greater
insight into the many notions of the collective that emerged in Mexico in the early- to
mid-twentieth century. This chapter discusses the history of Black Hen Powder and its
place within the group generation and Mexican art history. In the case of Black Hen
Powder, collectivity takes a different shape than it did for many of the groups. This is in
part due to the influence of feminism and the innovative strategies of Mayer and
Bustamante.
Chapter 2 shifts focus to Mayer’s 2016 retrospective Si tiene dudas…pregunte:
una exposición retrocolectiva (If you have doubts…ask: a retrocollective exhibition) to
6
consider how collectivity functions in the museological approach of what Mayer and
the exhibition’s curator, Karen Cordero, have termed a “retrocollective.” It was Mayer’s
first retrospective, and it documented her 40-years-plus career. Held at the Museo
Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, it provided a notable example of
the innovative strategies that have guided Mayer’s art practice. The exhibition’s
curatorial strategy and retrocollective logic contrast that of a traditional retrospective
and offer a meditation on the nature and function collectivity in Mayer’s practice. The
retrospective exhibition format tends to provide a tightly packaged narrative of an
artist and their career. Thus, the retrocollective sought to offer a presentation of
Mayer’s work that did not compromise the firm roots of her understanding of art
practice. For instance, as she has explained: “[M]y battle has always been waged
through art and in the art world…for me, producing artwork has been as important as
writing, teaching, disseminating, registering, and building archives.”
5
Given the
retrocollective’s attention to collectivity, what its logic suggests about feminism and
art practice, and the fact that it has not been studied at length in the literature, its
examination forms a constitutive and unique part of this dissertation.
Chapter 3 considers the archive of I Draw My Line, the project Mayer has been
developing with Víctor Lerma since the 1990s. In 1989, Mayer and Lerma began I Draw
My Line as a project that would take on many functions in the artworld. It was first an

5
Mayer, “Feminist Art and ‘Artivism’ in Latin America: A Dialogue in Three Voices,” 37.
7
artist-run gallery but has since facilitated numerous publications on contemporary art
in Mexico, developed a television series on Canal 23, organized a radio program,
provided a digital platform for contemporary Mexican art, published a book and blog,
and conducted a performance series. Its most remarkable aspect, and the one that
Mayer has emphasized when discussing the project, is its archive. In 1991, I Draw My
Line took the form of an hemeroteca, or newspaper and periodicals library, to preserve
material related to contemporary Mexican art. It has since functioned more broadly as
an art archive. Thus, this chapter focuses on how the archive functions and how it has
become an active subject through its collective processes. As the I Draw My Line
archive is ongoing, it is an appropriate case study with which to conclude this
dissertation.
The final chapter summarizes the findings from each of the three case studies
and considers the insight that each provides into the general form and function of
collectivity within Mayer’s art practice. This chapter revisits the questions raised in the
introduction and reflects upon them in light of what the three case studies have
revealed. Importantly, it also points to future research that might build upon the
foundation set out here.

1978 to 1983
While Chapter 1 provides a brief discussion of Mexican art history specifically related to
the feminist and collective-oriented context out of which Mayer’s practice emerged, it
8
does not address the gap between 1978 and 1983, the year that Mayer and Bustamante
formed Black Hen Powder. Here I address why this dissertation is bookended, on the
one hand, by 1978.
Given that 1978 was the year that Mayer, in conjunction with Magali Lara and
Pola Weiss, participated in the explicitly feminist art exhibition Salón 77–78 Nuevas
Tendencias at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, it provides a notable point in
Mayer’s trajectory. Moreover, 1978 marks the 10-year anniversary of Mexico City’s
Tlatelolco Massacre as well as the more general 1968 student-popular movement,
which swept worldwide, and many of the artistic and social changes in Mexico City in
the 1970s and 1980s were tied in part to the events of Tlatelolco and 1968. For the 1978
exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mayer presented El tendedero (Clothesline),
the pink clothesline on which small pieces of pink paper are displayed, as if they were
clothes hanging to be dried, with each revealing a handwritten response to the
question, “Como mujer, lo que más detesto de la ciudad es…” (“As a woman, what I
detest most about the city is…”). The responses came from women of various social
classes, ages, and occupations, and many referred to sexual assault on the street or
problems with public service.
6
Since its 1978 debut, Clothesline has had an active life
and is often considered Mayer’s most popular piece. As such, 1978 is further important
for it being Clothesline’s first activation. The piece’s participatory form revealed the

6
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 18.
9
importance of such a structure, one that would continue to influence Mayer’s practice:
“During the time the exhibition was open, a large number of women came and wrote
their responses on whatever blank piece of paper they could find. Since then, I have
staged public actions or interventions more than ‘exhibitions’ because such pieces are
able to influence social processes. I am fascinated by creating structures in which many
voices can be heard.”
7
In this way, 1978 can be considered the year in which the
strategy of participatory art and its ability to engage social practice in Mayer’s local
context – Mexico City – was realized.
A brief discussion of the five-year period between 1978 and 1983 provides a
more detailed introduction to Mayer’s collective art practice, especially as it took shape
during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Between 1978 and 1983, Mayer participated in a
network of artistic and activist exchanges between Mexico City and Los Angeles, where
– as previously mentioned – she participated in the Feminist Studio Workshop and
completed her master’s thesis remotely through Goddard College. In 1978, Mayer
participated in Salón 77-78, as noted in the previous section. She also helped organize
the Muestra Colectiva Feminista at Galería Contraste, which invited feminist artists to
present their work. She exhibited the piece Lo normal at the Casa de la Juventud.
Moreover, this is also the year that Mayer entered a two-year course with the Feminist
Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. There, she worked closely

7
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 18.
10
with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz as part of their group Ariadne: A Social Art
Network. Mayer went on to collaborate with Lacy and Labowitz for Making It Safe. In
Mexico City, she saw a performance by Maris Bustamante that was inaugurated as part
of the artists’ group No-Grupo’s Montaje de momentos plásticos at the Museo de Arte
Moderno. This is also the year that Bustamante patented the taco. This period also
provides a broader transnational exchange that extends beyond the North American
continent. Mayer was part of the Künstlerinnen aus Mexico (Artists from Mexico)
exhibition in West Germany in 1981, and she, Magali Lara, Maris Bustamante, Rowena
Morales, Ilse Gradwohl, and María Brumm also exhibited work there in 1982. At face
value, these transnational networks of engagement and exchange indicate the extent to
which Mayer has worked within and across national boundaries.

Contemporary literature
Many contemporary scholars have been studying and engaging with Mayer’s collective
art practice through various perspectives. Much of this scholarship relates Mayer to
other feminist artists within Mexico. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda in Women Made
Visible: Feminist Art and Media in Post-1968 Mexico City examines Mayer’s work in
conjunction with that of Ana Victoria Jiménez, Rosa Martha Fernández, and Pola Weiss
in order to reveal the ways they created archives – virtual and physical – to allow for
the construction of different histories that intervened in the production of media and
11
visuality.
8
Aceves Sepúlveda discusses Mayer’s work in the artists’ groups as well as her
feminist art practice throughout the 1970s and 1980s, leading up to the formation of I
Draw My Line. The present dissertation engages Aceves’ history of feminist art in
Mexico as a base of departure for its framing, even though Aceves Sepúlveda focuses on
a broader set of artists. Moreover, her discussion of Mayer’s intervention in archival
practice is relevant for the analysis of I Draw My Line’s archive, which is presented in
Chapter 3. However, Aceves Sepúlveda paints a more general picture of feminist art
practice in post-1968 Mexico City, and she focuses on 1968 as a pivot point for the
changes that emerged in its aftermath.
Jamie L. Ratliff’s dissertation, “Visualizing female agency: space and gender in
contemporary women’s art in Mexico,” follows an approach similar to that of Aceves
Sepúlveda in terms of focusing the analysis of feminist art practice in Mexico City.
Ratliff emphasizes the role of space, relying on theoretical work of Henri LeFebrve, for
example, and considers Mayer’s work in Black Hen Powder together with that of Paula
Santiago, Daniella Rossell, Minerva Cuevas, and Teresa Margolles. While the scope of
Ratliff’s analysis is broader than that of the present dissertation, it provides insight
into the context in which Mayer and her colleagues have worked. Furthermore, it offers
deeper theoretical consideration of two aspects of Mayer’s practice that have not been
attended to at length in this project – space and gender. Although Aceves’ analysis

8
Aceves Sepúlveda, 5.
12
provides a more thorough analysis of gender, specifically related to feminism and
feminist art, in Mexico City, Ratliff’s dissertation considers the particular relationship
between various art practices and the space and architecture of Mexico City, which
provides a relevant complement to Aceves’ volume. Nonetheless, Ratliff’s work is
especially helpful for the analysis of Black Hen Powder.
Narrower in its subject matter than Aceves’ volume and Ratliff’s dissertation,
and moving away from the pivot point of 1968, Erin L. McCutcheon’s article “The Third
Face of the Coin: Navigating Mis/Non/Re/Presentation of Women Artists in 1970s
Mexico” considers the complexity of social and art movements during the decade and
examines a range of artistic responses. McCutcheon relates earlier artists such as Frida
Kahlo to Mónica Mayer and Magali Lara. More specifically, she analyzes Mayer’s
drawings and collage work, on which she would contribute essays for the catalogue of
Mayer’s retrocollective in 2016.
9

While Aceves, Ratliff, and McCutcheon have emphasized feminism and feminist
art practice in their analyses of Mexican women artists in the post-1968 decades, Arden
Decker has considered the role of collectivism and Mexico’s art history in her
dissertation “Los Grupos and the Art of Intervention in 1960s and 1970s Mexico.”
Decker examines the work of Black Hen Powder within Mexico City after investigating
the broader history of los grupos and their various, often divergent, strategies and

9
See McCutcheon “Dis/Appearance: Self Portraiture in the Work of Mónica Mayer” and “Drawing Time:
Mónica Mayer’s Two-Dimensional Performance.”
13
interventions. As such, her analysis offers insight into the examination of Black Hen
Powder provided in Chapter 1 while also complementing its historical context of
artists’ groups in 1960s and 1970s Mexico City. Given Decker’s broader account of the
artists’ groups, her analysis is useful for considering the function of collectivity within
the group movement and how it assumed various forms across groups.
The work of Black Hen Powder has been a key focus for Edward J. McCaughan in
Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán. However, McCaughan
also considers Mayer’s and Bustamante’s independent feminist art practices. Together,
they contribute to the set of subject matter that forms his tripartite analysis of art and
social movements in post-1968 Mexico City, Oaxaca, and California. McCaughan’s
volume is distinct from the work of Decker given its focus on social movements, which
in the case of Mayer and Bustamante is related to feminism. It differs from the work of
McCutcheon, Ratliff, and Aceves Sepúlveda due to its narrower scope. Because
McCaughan focuses on fewer artists than the aforementioned scholars, he is able to
provide a more detailed analysis of the art practices of Black Hen Powder, Mayer, and
Bustamante. This analysis largely informs his discussion of art and social movements in
post-1968 Mexico City, which renders it more similar to the framework of the present
dissertation than any scholar mentioned up to this point. Nonetheless, like Aceves
Sepúlveda and Ratliff, McCaughan too uses 1968 as a pivot point for his analysis. In
that way, the present work differs and intends to provide a new perspective.
14
Although Aceves, Ratliff, McCutcheon, Decker, and McCaughan have lived,
worked, and formed themselves as scholars across national borders, Gladys Villegas
Morales is one of the few Mexican scholars who has studied and published at length on
Mayer’s work. In her article “Los grupos de arte feminista en México,” Villegas Morales
has narrowed the approach of McCaughan, focusing exclusively on Black Hen Powder
and the two other feminist artists’ groups that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s in
Mexico City.
Not long after Villegas Morales published her article, Argentinian scholar María
Laura Rosa published an article focusing on Black Hen Powder alone. In “Pródigas
complicidades: El grupo de arte feminista Polvo de Gallina Negra y sus vínculos con el
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil,” Rosa has provided a thorough account of Mayer’s work in
Black Hen Powder and the group’s relationship with a notable Mexico City art
institution. As such, the voices of Villegas Morales and Rosa have been instrumental in
considering the specific context of Mexico City and feminist artists’ groups within
broader art historical narratives such as that of the group movement, contemporary
Mexican art, and contemporary feminist art. However, Rosa’s work is more similar to
the present dissertation in its framework given its specific focus on Black Hen Powder.
The work of Araceli Barbosa Sánchez joins that of Gladys Villegas Morales as she
is a Mexican scholar who has studied and published about Mayer’s work. With a specific
focus on the 1980s, Barbosa Sánchez in Arte feminista en los ochenta en México: Una
perspectiva de género has considered Mayer’s feminist art practice as it relates to
15
feminist art production in Mexico during the decade. In this way, her volume is one of
the few examples of scholarship that examines the breadth of Mayer’s art practice –
from her work with Black Hen Powder, her independent work shown in exhibitions, and
her experience at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles to her collaboration with Víctor
Lerma for I Draw My Line. Moreover, Barbosa Sánchez’s analysis is unique for its
attention to the development of feminist theory in Mexico as well as for its departure
from the pivot point of 1968.
Mayer’s own volume Rosa chillante: Mujeres y performance en México has
provided historical, personal, and theoretical accounts that have informed the work of
many of the above-mentioned scholars. In Rosa chillante, Mayer attends to the gaps
that exist in many accounts of post-1968 Mexican art history. As such, the volume has
functioned as a source for Mexican art history and feminist art history, thus helping
contextualize Mayer’s practice. Interestingly, Rosa chillante – in conjunction with
interviews and archival research – has provided material for a large portion of the
analyses that constitute the only two other works that presently, to my knowledge,
focus in detail on Mayer’s art practice.
Selene Preciado’s thesis “Art as a Political Tool: The Early Feminist Production
of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984” and Alberto McKelligan Hernandez’s dissertation
“Mónica Mayer: Translocality and the Development of Feminist Art in Contemporary
Mexico” have investigated Mayer’s art practice through its feminist orientation and
with a specific focus on the early transnational years of her career. In particular,
16
Preciado studies Mayer’s practice of applied conceptual art as it took shape during her
time as a student at San Carlos, her tenure at the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los
Angeles, and her return to Mexico City, at which point she cofounded Black Hen
Powder. Preciado focuses on the feminist strategies that Mayer engaged during this
period of exchange between Mexico City and Los Angeles. McKelligan’s study has
continued the investigation of exchange that Preciado outlined and expands upon it in
depth. He examines a significant number of Mayer’s projects to gain insight into the
function of artistic and activist engagement between feminists in Mexico City and Los
Angeles, as Mayer’s own feminist art practice as well as feminist art at large in Mexico
began to develop in the 1970s to the present.
10
McKelligan’s analysis is more extensive
and more theoretical than Preciado’s. He elaborates on the concept of “translocal
translation,” which he borrows from Sonia Alvarez’s work in the 2014 volume
Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas,
to read Mayer’s practice as an “artistic and political strategy” that shaped the artistic
circuits within which she participated. He points out that much of the scholarship on
Mayer’s work has emphasized relationships with other Mexican artists – a point which
is certainly not to be overlooked – and, with the exception of the catalogue for Mayer’s
retrocollective, does not examine in detail the influence of her dialogue with feminist
artists from the United States.
11

10
McKelligan, iv.
11
McKelligan, 5.
17
The present dissertation builds upon the work of Preciado and McKelligan by
continuing to focus on Mayer’s art practice. Moreover, it relies upon Mayer’s work as
primary and secondary sources by consulting her articles, blog posts, interviews, and
publications. Preciadio and McKelligan have provided valuable contributions to the
scholarship on Mayer’s art practice and have filled research gaps by considering the
transnational nature of her formation, career, and practice. In this way, however, the
present dissertation differs. While it discusses that relationship, that is not its primary
focus. Furthermore, the present dissertation is especially distinguished from that of
McKelligan given that it does not seek to develop and name a new concept through
which to view Mayer’s work. Instead, this project focuses on an already deployed
concept – that of collectivity – and aims to understand how it functions in Mayer’s art
practice.
Despite the discrepancies and differences among the contemporary scholarship
on Mayer’s art practice and the ways in which it contrasts with the present study, I am
fortunate to have been able to engage with such scholars and to have an opportunity to
add to the discourse that they are shaping. Yet, the contribution of this study is
particular. While many scholars who have engaged with Mayer’s collective practice
study Black Hen Powder, fewer have focused on the efforts of the I Draw My Line
archive. Even still, fewer have mentioned Mayer’s 2016 retrospective. Most scholars
place Mayer within a larger framework of contemporary Mexican art practice such as
that of the artists’ groups; of contemporary feminist art practice, such as the
18
transnational exchanges considered by Preciado and McKelligan; or of contemporary
Mexican feminist art practice, such as the analysis of Aceves, for example. These
studies provide a foundational context out of which the present study emerges
distinctly with a focus on Mayer’s collective art practice. Thus, in an attempt to extend
previous considerations of her work and bridge gaps in research, this dissertation offers
a monographic study of the collective art practice of Mónica Mayer, from 1978 to 2018.
It considers the feminist artists’ group Black Hen Powder, the retrospective exhibit
When in doubt, ask: a retrocollective exhibit that sought to examine her oeuvre in a
dynamic curatorial setting organized by Karen Cordero Reiman, and lastly, the archive
that she has maintained together with Víctor Lerma as part of the applied conceptual
art project I Draw My Line. Based on a literature review, archival research, and
published interviews, “Mónica Mayer’s collective art practice, 1978–2018” seeks to
shed light on how the often mentioned concept of collectivity – in form and function
– has influenced Mayer’s practice while contextualizing her art practice within its local,
national, and transnational contexts.

Contemporary exhibitions
In 2017, shortly after Mayer’s retrospective closed in Mexico City, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
and Andrea Giunta inaugurated the exhibition that they had been laboring over as
curators for nearly a decade – Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. It was
shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from September to December, 2017. In
19
the spring of 2018, it travelled to the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and in the fall it
went to Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil. At the Hammer Museum, it was part of the
Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which in a span of five months
mounted art exhibitions at over 70 cultural institutions across Los Angeles. Mayer, as a
prominent Mexican feminist artist, was featured in the Radical Women exhibition. It
presented a reactivation of Clothesline, the mixed-media canvas A veces me espantan
mis propios sentimientos, mis fantasías (Sometimes I’m frightened by my own feelings, my
fantasies), the series of postcards Lo normal (The normal), and a photograph of Boda de
Mónica Mayer y Víctor Lerma (The wedding of Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma). Mayer
was one of more than 120 artists who had ties to Latin America and contributed work to
the exhibition. The artists and art collectives included in the exhibition were active in
Latin America and the United States between 1960 and 1985. Some considered
themselves Chicanas, working exclusively in Southern California, while others
considered themselves Latinas and worked across borders. Still others, however, as
Latin Americans, were more firmly rooted in a national identity from Argentina, Brazil,
Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, or Mexico, for instance.
Another expansive exhibition on feminist art that included Mayer’s work
– notably her documentation of various iterations of Clothesline – is WACK! Art and the
Feminist Revolution (2007). WACK! was curated by Connie Butler and held at the Geffen
Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Like Radical Women,
it included the work of nearly 120 artists, although the reach was wider than Latin
20
America. The artists came from 21 countries across the globe. Both Radical Women and
WACK! are considered to the be among the first exhibitions of their kind. The former
was the first to focus at a large scale on Latin American and Latina women artists over
this time period with an emphasis on artistic experimentation, and the latter was the
first institutional exhibition to consider the global legacy of feminist art.
In public response to these exhibitions, the adjective “groundbreaking” was
often mentioned, and so too in scholarly responses to it. Even with their nuances in
context – and with Radical Women being narrower in scope than WACK! – such
framework might inspire the anxiety that Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman have noted
arises when certain seemingly radical moments become part of art history through
entry into the museum in a large-scale survey: “there is a fear that feminism becomes
historicised, marketised, and institutionalised to fit a tidy timeframe.”
12
Or, in other
words, “there, perhaps [is] a final irony: that it is in the nature of such ‘blockbuster’
exhibitions to close debates, rather than open them – because mainstream institutions
assume that these issues have now, once and for all, been addressed.”
13
In fact, Mayer
herself has addressed this irony:
Like the nationalist artists who believed that, through their work, they were
contributing to a social revolution and yet, with time, succumbed to the
economic and political interests of the power groups that were using their
portrayals to their own benefit, I see the same thing happening with feminist art.
I recognize these dangers, and I know that one cannot give up working for such

12
Day and Gluckman, 322.
13
Barnett, 76.
21
reasons, but now such radical and romantic terms as ‘revolution’ bring out a cold
sweat in me.
14

While she recognizes the risk of historicizing, marketizing, and institutionalizing
feminism and art practice, as well as the more general risk of romanticizing revolution,
Mayer’s participation in such exhibitions, among others, has contributed to her status
as “the clearest and most consistent reference in Mexican feminist art since the
1970s.”
15
Such risks pose as a double edged sword and contribute to the paradoxical
conundrum that emerges from the discussion of the subsequent chapters. Nevertheless,
I propose that Mayer’s most radical, innovative practice is outside of such exhibitions.
Her retrospective – inaugurated in Mexico City, 2016 – is arguably more
groundbreaking as an exhibition than the extensive surveys mentioned above, as
Chapter 2 reveals. Yet, each of the aforementioned exhibitions has its place in the
development of local and international art histories.
Mayer’s participation in such exhibitions, in addition to her innovative
retrospective exhibit, suggests something about her approach to art practice,
institutions, and institutional critique. As she has explained in conversation with Pablo
Helguera, “It might seem paradoxical that works that were controversial in their time,
whether formally, thematically, or in their forms of distribution, are now in the

14
Mayer, “The Revolution of the Comadres,” 38.
15
Cordero, “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica Mayer’s Artistic Project,” 33.
22
museum, but to me this means that they fulfilled their mission to open new ideas, and
now they have to be preserved in order to understand the processes of art.”
16

In the subsequent chapters, this willingness to face paradox and work with art
institutions becomes more apparent as an integral aspect of Mayer’s collective practice.
Chapter by chapter, it indicates how collectivity takes shape in her practice and
provides insight into the strategies that permeate her artwork.

Lines of inquiry
This discussion of Mayer’s art practice begins to indicate the extent to which her work
has assumed diverse forms that have been and continue to be collective in nature. The
following three chapters proceed case study by case study and respond to a set of
questions: 1) what is the function of collectivity in Mayer’s art practice? 2) does
collectivity in theory differ from collectivity in practice? 3) how do these
understandings of collectivity compare to those of Mexican art history and political or
social history?
At the same time, it is my hope that by the end of this dissertation I can suggest
to readers what Mayer’s art practice might teach us about collectivity and feminism as
well as – perhaps – about the function of an artist and living with paradox.

16
Mayer, “Weaving Ties of Mutual Understanding, Shaping Publics,” 175.
23
Chapter 1. The artists’ group Black Hen Powder (1983–1993)

Introduction
This chapter examines the art practice of Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder),
Mexico’s longest-running artists’ group or collective devoted to feminism. It was the
second of three feminist artists’ groups formed in Mexico City in 1983. Tlacuilas y
Retrateras (Women Scribes and Portraitists) began in May, Black Hen Powder in June,
and Bio-Arte (Bioart) in November. Although these three pioneering groups had many
of the same members, it was Mónica Mayer, Maris Bustamante, and Herminia Dosal
who formed Black Hen Powder. This occurred just 30 years after women in Mexico were
afforded the right to vote, during Mexico’s second wave of feminism, and toward the
end of the art movement now known as la generación de los grupos (the group
generation). When the group generation is discussed by artists, critics, and historians,
the terms grupo and colectivo are often used interchangeably to refer to individual
groups within the movement. For the purpose of this work, as the terms are translated
to group and collective, respectively, I have preserved the use of “group” in reference to
Black Hen Powder and the other grupos that emerged in Mexico City in the 1970s and
early 1980s. Semantics aside, the notion of the collective and the weight that an
attention to collectivism carried within the art practices of these decades, in Mexico
and internationally, plays an important role within any examination of the group
24
generation and the ways in which feminist artists such as Mayer and Bustamante
intervened within it. However, the choice to refer to the group as a group and not as a
collective should not undermine the role of collectivism and its influence on the artists’
groups that emerged in Mexico in the second half of the twentieth-century. In fact, this
tension and the attention to language that it encourages are a point of discussion with
regard to the study of Black Hen Powder and to Mayer’s collective artistic practice.
When Black Hen Powder formed as an artists’ group in 1983, it followed many of the
impulses of its predecessors from the 1970s. Yet Mayer and Bustamante’s group
distinguished itself from the broader set of groups through its unique relationship to
collectivism and its emphasis on feminism.
To consider Black Hen Powder within the context of Mexico’s collectively-
oriented group generation, the significance of collectively-oriented art practice during
the early- to mid-twentieth-century must first be addressed. In the early-twentieth-
century, collectivist art practice and artists’ collectives were burgeoning in Mexico City
and many areas across the world. Although the art-making process has hardly ever
been an individual one, as demonstrated by, for example, the ceramics of ancient
civilizations, the first photographs of the nineteenth century, and the media art of the
twenty-first century, the study of artists’ collectives and collectivist art practice reveals
that the influence of collectivism in art practice is tied to a set of specific historical
moments. Moreover, the ways in which the tension between the individual and the
group, as it relates to the art-making process, has been narrated in art history is also
25
tied to a set of specific historical moments. Meredith Brown and Michelle Millar Fisher
have explained, “historically the preference has been to trace singular trajectories, thus
erasing, ignoring, or glossing over moments when individuals engaged in collaborate
work or collective efforts led to individual gain.”
17
These singular trajectories have been
fueled by the notion of the individual artist-genius who labors alone in his studio, a
point which is important for a group such as Black Hen Powder, which especially
sought to intervene in the ways in which those singular trajectories have been narrated.
The set of historical moments from which collaborative practices such as those
of the nominal art collective emerged during the early- to mid-twentieth-century
begins in the aftermath of the social revolutions that were observed in Mexico and then
the Soviet Union and China, among other places, in the face of fascist governments
taking control across Europe and in response to the fallout and subsequent surge of
capitalism in the Americas. The wave of art collectives that appeared in the early 1920s
and 1930s referred to themselves as collectives to indicate not only that they were
artists working in group settings but also, and importantly, that their ideological
orientations were tied to collectivism, which was usually tied to communism.
In Mexico, the extent to which notions of collectivism influenced the arts can be
partly understood as an outgrowth of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the
constitution of 1917, which was established in response to the early years of the

17
Brown and Fisher, 12.
26
Revolution. The constitution of 1917 called for collectivism at political and social
levels: it proposed free, secular education for its citizens; it protected social utility over
private property; it stipulated national ownership of natural resources and proposed
land-reform programs; and it mandated social welfare policies such as guaranteed
minimum wages, the right to organize, and social security. After the constitution was
ratified, artists were commissioned by national cultural programs to represent the
Revolution and its influence on Mexican history, thereby informing the development of
national aesthetic values and a sense of the art of the state. Many of the early collective
movements of the 1920s, including muralism and stridentism, have become identifiable
outcomes of collectivism’s influence in the arts and of such programs, although not all
artists who participated in collective art production subscribed to the same ideological
principles, nor did they agree about how art should function in relation to their
principles or to the state. Even still, collective production was generally viewed as the
route through which artists should produce art as part of their responsibility to society.
In turn, the art practices that emerged in Mexico during the early- to mid-twentieth-
century called for collectivism in methodology and, more often than not, ideology. This
also encouraged a reconsideration of what it meant to be an artist in Mexico.
This collectivism and the reconsideration of the artist’s role in society that it
prompted are especially evident in muralism and the trajectories of the so-called tres
grandes, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the latter of
27
whom plays a role in the later work of Mónica Mayer.
18
Interestingly, Siqueiros, became
increasingly critical of Rivera, not only for his hierarchical collective approach to mural
production, but also for the manifesto he signed in conjunction with André Breton and
Leon Trotsky. In 1938, Breton travelled to Mexico and met with Trotsky, who arrived
there under exile the year before. Trotsky was welcomed by President Lázaro Cárdenas,
and he and his wife initially lived with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in their house in
Mexico City’s Coyoacan neighborhood. Rivera was responsible for arranging the
encounter between Breton and Trotsky. As a result of the encounter, Breton and Rivera
published the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.” Historians have
suggested that the manifesto was co-authored by Trotsky, although his name was not
officially signed with Breton’s and Rivera’s. The manifesto outlines how artists should
identify themselves and live within an ideal social society. As Pierre Taminiaux has
explained, “the purpose of [their manifesto] was to define the particular conditions
under which, from a revolutionary viewpoint, art and literature could participate in the
collective struggle of the people for their freedom while remaining entirely
independent of external pressures.”
19
The belief that art under socialist policy should
be ideologically free and independent of external concerns was not held by Siqueiros
who, on the other hand, was committed to collectivism within every facet of art and its
production.

18
See the project Siqueiros a Tres Voces (2002), which is explained in more detail in Chapter 2.
19
Taminiaux, 57.
28
Despite these discrepancies among approaches to collectivism and the extent of
its influence in artistic practice within Mexico at the time, many collectives were
formed in Mexico during the post-revolution years. For example, the collective known
as the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios was founded in 1933 and
emphasized collectivist principles based in communist ideology, although it was not
wholly united with the strict social realism mandated by Soviet art policy. Mexico’s
longest-running art collective, Taller de Gráficas Populares (The People’s Print
Workshop), formed in 1937. To further encourage mural production, collectives such as
the International Team of Plastic Artists were formed.
While collectives across a spectrum of political commitment referred to
themselves as collectives and were adamant about their respective ideological
commitments, collectivism in theory often differed from collectivism in practice. This
incongruity has been a long-standing point of art historical and cultural criticism. In
her study of art collectives that were active in Mexico City during the 1930s and 1940s,
Jennifer Jolly has suggested that most art collectives’ production was neither inherently
communist nor, as some critics suggested, entirely capitalist, and as such, collectivism
was usually compromised in some way or another.
20
The tension that Jolly’s account
points to would become a place of departure for Mexican artists of subsequent decades,

20
Jolly, 149.
29
for those who abandoned overtly collective approaches and for those who reengaged
collectivism as a mode of production in the 1970s under the name of los grupos.
This brief sketch of how collectivism has influenced art practice within Mexico is
belabored to emphasize the trajectory of “collective” from the early- to mid-twentieth-
century, at which point it was reengaged at a historical moment quite different from
the one in which it previously emerged. The emergence of the artists’ groups known as
los grupos in Mexico City occurs in the aftermath of the global student and workers’
protests and the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. This emergence is also tied to Mexico’s
urban center, Mexico City.
Mayer has suggested that the collective aspect of art practices in 1970s Mexico
City was not their most radical gesture. According to Mayer, “the most accepted and
visible aspect [which is collectivism]…is the least provocative.”
21
At first glance, her
proposition hints at a distaste for dogma and ideological posture. The distinction
between a group and its collectivity suggests a distance – in Mayer’s case – from the
collectivist and communist ethos that was prevalent in the decades after the
Revolution. However, her proposition also encourages a turn of attention to what the
artistic innovation of the groups made possible, which may not be fully attributable to
their collectivism. It points to the potential gap between the formal constraints of the
groups, such as their collectivism, and their actual practices. Interestingly, throughout

21
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 12.
30
her career Mayer has maintained an affinity for collectivism. Her first retrospective was
held in 2016 at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and intended to replace
“retrospective logic” with “retrocollective logic,” as the show’s subtitle makes clear, If
you have doubts…ask: a retrocollective exhibition.
22
This chapter unfolds from that
general tension, which is to say that it begins with the assumption that collectivism
holds some form of value for Mayer and, in this case, Black Hen Powder.
By examining Black Hen Powder’s formation, projects, and strategies, this
chapter brings to light some of the outcomes of collective art practice, understood here
through collectivism, especially as they relate to the social history of the period. If
collectivism has a specific semantic history in Mexico given its ideological ties to the
post-Revolution years, it has a separate semantic history related the feminist art
practices that Mayer became acquainted with between 1978 and 1980, when she studied
at the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, as well as those that Mayer and
Bustamante became familiar with during Mexico’s new wave, or second-wave, of
feminism. This chapter thus considers what collective practice has made possible in the
context of feminism and art practice within Mexico City. Furthermore, it attempts to
respond to the tension that Mayer herself has raised – if the artists’ groups apparent
collectivism is not their most provocative aspect, what is? And what is Black Hen
Powder’s most provocative gesture? Additionally, this chapter alludes to a larger

22
This exhibition is the focus of Chapter 2.
31
discussion regarding collectivism and art by considering what is at stake in the
historical ties between collectivism and art practice and how Black Hen Powder has
addressed those ties.

Context
Art collectives in Mexico
Throughout the 1920s, most murals were produced collaboratively, even if they were
not recognized as collective works. Into the 1930s, the collective structure of the
talleres or workshops was more outwardly collaborative than previous models of artistic
production. During the 1950s and 60s, the period referred to as la ruptura (the rupture)
effected a break with the muralism and workshops of the earlier generations. Artists
such as Lilia Carrillo, José Luis Cuevas, Manuel Felguérez, and Fernando García Ponce
took up modern and abstract painting and often promulgated the mythic power of the
individual artist. In the 1970s, however, the generation of artists who began to
distinguish themselves from the modern and abstract artists of the 1950s and 1960s
largely abandoned the artworld of the earlier decades. In part, the artistic proposition
of Mexico’s grupos movement was a direct affront to the artists of the ruptura, who
were viewed by the artists’ groups as apolitical, elitist, and commercially minded.
23

Here, it is important to note that most of this artistic activity was located within

23
Villegas Morales, 45.
32
Mexico City. The focus on Mexico City and the difference of environment between the
city and the largely rural Mexican states would become a point of contention between
artists working from Mexico City and artists who lived elsewhere in the country.
Nonetheless, the artists’ groups that emerged during the 1970s tended to seek
political and social ends, even if these ends were rooted in concerns driven by their
experience as members of the more or less urban, more or less educated, and more or
less elite in Mexico City. Their collective orientation, while not upheld as strictly in
nomenclature or dogma as the post-Revolution era art collectives, would become a
defining characteristic of their work. In his study of the period, Rubén Gallo has
elucidated three points to define the artists’ groups of Mexico City: that the artists were
concerned with politics, that their work blurred boundaries between art and activism,
and that they viewed collectivism as a step in the process of creating a socialist
society.
24
Gallo concedes that among the groups, “dynamics, working methods and
artistic production varied considerably,” even though he remains focused on their
overarching political militancy as bound with socialist goals and systems of operation
outside and against state institutions.
25
While that was not altogether the case for
Mayer, Bustamante, and Black Hen Powder, it was for most other groups.
Groups such as Taller de Arte e Ideología (The Art and Ideology Workshop),
which formed in 1974, developed alternative pedagogical experiences and set a

24
Gallo, “The Mexican Pentagon,” 167.
25
Gallo, “The Mexican Pentagon,” 167.
33
foundation in Mexico City for inter- and multidisciplinary education in the liberal
arts.
26
The workshop was led by Alberto Híjar, the philosopher, art critic, and professor
who organized the group’s Marxist agenda with regard to discussing aesthetics and
later becoming a platform for staging theater and contributing to social movements.
Grupo Germinal formed in 1976 and focused their work on social causes, such as
developing large banners for student and labor movements. Proceso Pentágono also
formed in 1976, and similar to groups such as Mira – which formed the following year
and specifically emphasized the issue of violence in Mexico City – Proceso Pentágono
created work to denounce what was then common practice in Mexico and in Latin
America: dictatorships, repression, and disappearances. The work of Proceso
Pentágono and Grupo Mira largely relied on non-objectual means such as public
performances.
27
Proceso Pentágono notably organized the public action El secuestro
(The Kidnapping) in 1973 to denounce state violence. However, El secuestro, as with the
majority of the work from these groups, did not extend concern about state violence to
include concern about gendered violence.
Other groups focused on rejecting the art market and questioning traditional
modes of artistic production, distribution, and consumption. While these impulses
were present in some of the more politically oriented groups mentioned above, they did
not take the forefront there as they do here. For example, the street muralists of Grupo

26
Bustamante, “Conditions, Roads, and Genealogies of Mexican Conceptualism, 1921–1993,” 142.
27
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 12.
34
Suma, which formed in 1976, inserted their paintings into urban public life and
experimented with style, from abstraction to figurative realism. Their murals were
collectively conceptualized by group members who painted their own sections in the
murals.
28
No-Grupo, which was active from 1977 to 1983, attempted to adopt a format
without leaders or hierarchies. Members, among them Maris Bustamante, who helped
found the group, worked independently but toward similar artistic proposals. No-
Grupo’s work tended to criticize the politics of the art system, including traditional
concepts of art history, representation, sexual identity, and national identity.
29
No-
Grupo has been instrumental in the continuation of non-objectual work in Mexico
given that many of its members continued performance and action-based art after the
1970s, such as Maris Bustamante and Melquidades Herrera.
30
Grupo Março began in
1978 and performed text-based, participatory public actions using what they referred to
as topographical poems.
31
Despite the range of issues addressed by these groups, and
even though No-Grupo began to hint at a feminist agenda through their attention to
sexual identity, none of the artists’ groups would explicitly address feminist issues or
discuss feminist goals until June of 1983, when Mayer and Bustamante – together with
Herminia Dosal, who left the group shortly after it began – formed Black Hen Powder.

28
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 13.
29
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 13.
30
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 12.
31
Bustamante, “Conditions, Roads, and Genealogies of Mexican Conceptualism, 1921–1993,” 145.
35
Mexico’s first feminist artists’ groups
Black Hen Powder arose from the context in which the group generation was born as
well as from that of a transformation in the ways that women’s rights and women’s
bodies were being represented, politicized, and conceptualized through legal reform
and intellectual debate. Legislation implemented by President Echeverría would grant
equality to women in Mexico, but only on paper. In 1975, the United Nations hosted the
First World Conference for the International Women’s Year in Mexico City. Like
Echeverría’s legislation, the conference seemed to operate according to a superficial
logic that was effectively regressive. In conjunction with the conference, the exhibition
La mujer como creadora y tema del arte (Woman as creator and theme of art) was held at
the Museo de Arte Moderno. While the exhibition included works by artists such as
Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Lilia Carrillo, Helen Escobedo, and
María Lagunes, these were only among the work of 13 women whose paintings were
exhibited under the theme of “woman as creator.” The work that occupied the majority
of the exhibition was that of 36 men whose paintings were presented under the
umbrella “woman as theme.”
32
Similar exhibitions were mounted throughout the city,
such as La mujer en la plástica at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and Pintoras y escultoras en
México at the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros. Yet none aligned with the platforms to
which Mayer, Bustamante, and other feminists in Mexico City were devoted. Critical of

32
Museo de Arte Moderno, La mujer como creadora y tema del arte.
36
these exhibitions and the logic of the International Women’s Year, Mayer has
remarked, “[T]hey could not even organize an exhibition of women artists alone, nor
did it occur to them that it was incongruous with the goal to propose an exhibition in
which women were still the muse or object.”
33

In 1981 Mayer had returned from Los Angeles, where she studied at Woman’s
Building and participated in the Feminist Studio Workshop. In turn, she brought to
Black Hen Powder a transnational understanding of feminism. As an extension of her
experience in Los Angeles, Mayer led a feminist art workshop at the Escuela Nacional
de Artes Plásticas (Academia San Carlos), and the group Women Scribes and
Portraitists formed out of that workshop. However, the form and content of the
workshop was also something that Mayer helped nurture in Black Hen Powder.
Bustamante brought her experience from No-Grupo, which was still active at the time
that Black Hen Powder formed. Thus, in view of their personal experiences and of the
political, cultural, and artistic shifts in Mexico City during the 1970s and early 1980s,
which rode the tailwind of the events of 1968 and its reverberations in each of those
spheres, Mayer and Bustamante sought to provide an alternative engagement with
feminism: an art collective consisting of two women who set out to engage feminist
strategies and make feminist art. In Mayer’s words, the goals of Black Hen Powder were
“to analyze the image of women in the arts and the media, to study and promote the

33
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 20.
37
participation of women in art, and to create images based upon the experience of being
a woman in a patriarchal system.”
34
To this end, Black Hen Powder conducted
performances in, among other spaces, urban public settings, art institutions, and public
channels of communication. In view of the two other feminist artists’ groups that arose
from the same context and in the same year, Black Hen Powder was active for the
longest period of time. The analysis in this chapter examines Black Hen Powder’s name
and three of its most notable projects. In doing so, it reveals the nuanced approaches
assumed by the group and the unique approach to collectivity that it engaged to
achieve its goals.

The group
Black Hen Powder’s name
What is polvo de gallina negra, exactly? Black hen’s powder, or powder made from the
eggshell of a black hen, is similar to cascarilla, a powder often made from crushed
eggshells, usually from eggs laid by a black hen. Bustamante has explained that in
general it refers to “the herbs and powders sold in small packets by medicine women in
traditional Mexican markets and promis[ing] absolute protection from the ‘evil eye’.”
35

Evil eye, or mal de ojo, is linked to sixteenth-century Spain and the colonization of the
Americas as a cultural belief handed down by Spanish colonists and families in Latin

34
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 38.
35
Bustamante, “Conditions, Roads, and Genealogies of Mexican Conceptualism, 1921–1993,” 146.
38
America, which explains some of its prominence in Latin American culture. In many
cases, however, the “malignant power” of evil eye is said to be older and more
widespread.
36
Evil eye is largely based on the concept that “one can cause harm to
another, either intentionally or unintentionally, by expressing or thinking about praise
or jealousy,” and often, “mal de ojo has a social dimension and can be caused by
someone who has been more familiar than social and cultural norms permit.”
37

As such, the use of black hen powder is tied to the practice of healing and
witchcraft. Today, one can visit Mexico City’s Mercado de Sonora, which opened in
1957, to purchase their own black hen powder, among other items related to herbalism,
magical tradition, and the occult. Thus, more generally, the group’s name becomes an
ironic reference to the historical practice of condemning women for being witches, a
practice especially notable in colonial Europe and the Americas. During the 1970s and
1980s, many feminists reformulated the identities that had been historically cast upon
them by patriarchal culture, the witch included. In Justyna Sempruch’s analysis of
feminist formulations of the witch, she examines second wave feminist evocations of
witchcraft as “a dimension of (feminist) fantasy that, retrospectively, needs to be seen
as a therapeutic attempt both to break through the silence and invisibility of female

36
Berger, 1099. After citing ancient Hebrew commentary from the second century, Berger explains, “The
evil eye is a very ancient superstition characterized by the belief that certain individuals may, by virtue
of their gaze, cause another person, animal plant, or other property to become ill, die, or otherwise
suffer grievous harm.”
37
Weller et al., 175–176.
39
history and to elevate the notion of female alterity.”
38
By naming their group “Black
Hen Powder,” Mayer and Bustamante bring this history to light in an attempt to, in
Sempruch’s words, “break through the silence and invisibility.” This is especially
evident in the group’s first performance, which builds upon the historical witch
narrative as it casts a spell to give rapists the evil eye. Therefore, the group’s evocation
of black hen powder allows its work to gain strength and efficacy. Often, this occurs
through a bitter and ironic humor that moves between past and present social realities,
or as Mayer has emphasized: Black Hen Powder was created to protect themselves in a
world where it was difficult to be an artist, especially a female artist, and especially a
female artist making feminist art, and especially a female artist making feminist art in
Mexico City.
39

Black Hen Powder in three studies
Peace means respecting the rights of others’ bodies (1983)
A few months after Black Hen Powder formed, the group organized its first
performance, El respeto al derecho del cuerpo ajeno es la paz (Peace means respecting the
rights of others’ bodies). The performance took place on October 7, 1983, at the Juárez
Hemicycle in Mexico City’s Alameda Park for the occasion of a large-scale march
against violence toward women that was organized by the Red Nacional de Mujeres

38
Sempruch, 113.
39
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 58.
40
(National Network of Women), which – as a result of the efforts of the Michoacán-
based feminist group VenSeremos (1982) – was a network that brought together 21
women’s organizations from across Mexico.
40
At the march, Black Hen Powder gathered
to conjure a potion that would “give the evil eye to rapists.”
Earlier in 1983, monumental abortion legislation had nearly been passed by the
Mexican government. In the early 1970s, most Mexican states criminalized abortion,
except in in the case of protecting the mother’s life or in the case of rape, through
nearly identical policies that were adopted after the Mexican Revolution.
41
Beginning in
1979, however, approximately half of the Mexican states relaxed their abortion
legislation such that abortion, while remaining technically illegal, was not subject to
prosecution in all cases. Prior to those changes, in 1974 President Echeverría had
amended the constitution to include legal equality between women and men and to
legalize contraception. Many of these changes were stipulated under the General Law
on Population, which was intended to slow population growth.
42
This period of
liberalization coincided with what is considered to be a period of decentralization and
so-called democratization of the Mexican government, which was ruled by the
authoritarian system of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
43
During this

40
Barbosa, 102; Ludec, 89–90.
41
Beer, 49.
42
Beer, 50.
43
From 1929 to 2000, Mexico was governed by the PRI, which won nearly every election during this
period. Despite its loss in the 2000 presidential election, the PRI has continued to survive. It was voted
back to presidency in 2012 with Enrique Peña Nieto, who served until 2018, upon the election of Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, who represents Juntos Haremos Historia (Together We Will Make History). For
detailed accounts of the PRI’s one-party rule and its effects on Mexican democracy, see for example Joy
41
period, the PRI implemented market-oriented measures that resulted in a new
economic reality, turning the Mexican economy into an open export model. Despite
criticism in the face of these measures, the PRI ultimately managed to control elections
and maintain power.
This glimpse of democratization and so-called liberalization fueled activism, and
especially feminist activism, as the government began to express support for certain
policies. Many groups were incited to act and promote their platforms and then to act
and promote their platforms as their opponents began to further act and promote their
respective platforms. In the face of ongoing economic crisis during 1982, President
López Portillo had encouraged states to liberalize abortion, yet he did little to enforce
any reform. López Portillo’s successor, de la Madrid, followed a similar path. He only
quietly supported abortion legislation, and reforms did not receive government
attention and thus had no significant effect.
44
It has been suggested that the
government maintained a calm front regarding abortion legislation, failing to act in
favor of anti-abortion activists or of pro-abortion activists, to maintain a semblance of
a coherent party and therefore extend the one-party PRI rule for as long as possible.
45

During this period, Mexico saw the formation of groups such as Acción Popular de
Integración Social, Equipo de Mujeres en Acción Solidaria, and Grupo de Educación

Langston, Democratization and Authoritarian Party Survival: Mexico’s PRI (2017) and Gustavo Flores-
Macías, “Mexico’s PRI” (2018).
44
Beer, 51.
45
Bartra, 450.
42
Popular con Mujeres. The National Network of Women also formed, in part, as a
response to this. In early October of 1983, the women’s march was thus an opportunity
for the National Network of Women to mobilize women’s organizations in Mexico City
and make a statement in response to abortion legislation, women’s participation in
politics, and violence toward women across fronts.
At the march, Black Hen Powder’s performance began when Mayer, Bustamante,
and Dosal convened around a cauldron in front of the Juárez Hemicycle to concoct their
potion. As the recipe stipulates, the potion called for two dozen eyes and hearts of
women who “accept themselves as they are,” 20 kilos of lightning form women who
“get angry when they are assaulted,” and one ton of steel muscles from women who
“demand respect for their bodies.” The remaining ingredients range in sensibility: the
required hairs of a strong feminist, tusks from the militant opposition, and a bit of
spontaneity and curiosity. These ingredients, while following a facetious tone, are
outnumbered by those of a darker tone: three tongues of women who “never submit
themselves,” one packet of spinach-flavored gelatin to comfort a woman who was
violated, and thirty grams of dust from voices that demystify rape. Moreover, the final
ingredients suggest a wider expanse of social change by pointing to potential actors
who could help further promote it: the bits of men who support the fight against
violence toward women, a sprinkle of supportive legislators who are interested in social
change, a few tablespoons of families and schools that no longer promote traditional
gender roles, and three dozen messages from responsible media communicators in
43
support of not producing images that promote violence toward women. The recipe
explains that when these ingredients are combined in the called for order, an
“explosive mix” will be produced. This mix will “surprise and catch” violators and
rapists, “the shy and the aggressive, the passive and the active.”
46
At the end of the
performance, Mayer and Bustamante distributed envelopes of the “potion” that they
had conjured.
It is no coincidence that Black Hen Powder chose to title their performance as
they did or that they organized it in front of the Juárez Hemicycle, the neoclassical
monument build to commemorate Benito Juárez, the 26
th
president of Mexico who
oversaw the execution of Maximilian I of Mexico and the expulsion of the French from
Mexico, leading to the collapse of the Second Mexican Empire and the restoration of
the Mexican Republic. The title of their performance plays on the well-known phrase
uttered by Juárez in celebration of Mexico’s victory over the French during his 1867
proclamation “The Triumph of the Republic,” that is: “Entre los individuos, como entre
las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz” (“Among individuals as among
nations, peace means respect for the rights of others”).
47
The phrase is viewed as a
celebration of the nation’s restoration after foreign occupation, of Juárez’s ability to
reconcile the nation amid divisive political parties, and of bitter irony. Under Juárez’s
leadership (1867–1872), the Mexican economy grew and the nation became more

46
Grupo Polvo de Gallina Negra, “Receta del Grupo Polvo de Gallina Negra,” 53.
47
Riva Palacio, 303.
44
stable. Yet, the “formidable Juarista Liberal political machine” also grew and became
more stable, which paved the way for Mexico’s “quintessential order and progress
caudillo,” Porfirio Díaz, who served as president for 31 years (1877–1880, 1884–1911)
across seven terms.
48

The group’s performance emphasized the sense of bitter irony that, in hindsight,
engulfs Juárez’s utterance. Without Juárez, Mexico would not be Mexico. However,
Juárez was the precursor to the Díaz regime, under which Porfirio Díaz effectively
implemented Mexico’s longest-lasting dictatorship since “the advent of
Independence.”
49
For Black Hen Powder to title their performance, and the recipe
concocted during the performance, with such nuanced attention to Juárez and national
history reveals the tension of Juárez’s phrase and, furthermore, points to the tension of
the phrase’s revision in 1983 as it related to the situation of women in Mexico. While
women in Mexico had gained the right to vote in 1953, and in 1974 legal equality
between women and men was written into the constitution, there remained much
ground to be covered in terms of women’s rights and the enforcement of such
legislation. Gathered in front of the Juárez Hemicycle, a monument to the figure who
helped lead the nation to its feet, out from under formal colonial rule, Bustamante,
Dosal, and Mayer propose that if peace means respect for others, as Juárez proclaimed,
that respect includes respect for others’ bodies. Given the underwhelming nature of the

48
Joseph and Henderson, 270.
49
Katz, 81.
45
1975 International Women’s Year and the aforementioned political climate in Mexico
surrounding abortion during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the group’s action further
suggests that any people or nation must recognize such a basic human right. More
precisely, it suggests that Mexico’s people and government must recognize such a basic
human right.
Meanwhile, it is also no coincidence that Black Hen Powder, whose name already
points toward the history of spirituality and witchcraft as it relates to women’s
experiences, as discussed earlier, chose to conjure a potion or cast a spell as its first
political-artistic action. During the Inquisition and the consequent three-hundred-year
reign of New Spain, crimes against the Catholic faith included those of heresy,
blasphemy, bigamy, among other acts deemed immoral by Tribunal order.
50
Witchcraft,
popular among these crimes, was considered a form of heresy and was practiced
exclusively by non-Spaniard women. Of course, the persecution of witchcraft is not
unique to colonial Mexico, as historians of Europe, the Americas, and Western religion
are keen to point out. The medieval church condemned witchcraft as pagan
superstition, and the persecution of witches in Europe lasted into the late-eighteenth-
century.
51
The persecution of witchcraft as it related to the status and lives of women
has been framed across land and time by patriarchal religious and political doctrine.
Indeed, this theme is one that Black Hen Powder’s first performance tuned in to: three

50
Chuchiak IV, 11–12.
51
Henningsen, 58.
46
women gather around a cauldron in a public space before a crowd largely made up of
women, recite a recipe for a potion as they put the potion ingredients in the cauldron,
appear to engage in ritual while the potion brews, and then distribute the resulting
“magic powder” to the crowd (Figure A1).
52

By invoking this form in their performance, Black Hen Powder points to a
specific bitter irony, one rooted in historical precedent and that extended to the time of
the group’s performance. The persecution of witches in colonial Mexico was carried out
by the Council of the Spanish Inquisition, which in 1526 had revised its method for
handling cases of alleged witchcraft. The revisions further complicated how the alleged
crimes were to be handled to the extent that during the mid- to late-1500s, few cases
ended in execution.
53
Yet, the Council failed to prevent cases being handled outside of
the law. In 1610, for example, six witches were sentenced to death by burning in the
Basque territory of Spain. Although this case occurred outside of the land that is known
today as Mexico, it had many effects in New Spain. The Council admitted that the
burning held in 1610 was a misstep and sought to abandon the death penalty, which
was to take effect in New Spain. One of the most bitter ironies is that after the mistake
was acknowledged and the policy was largely upheld, although the death penalty was
effectively abandoned, more witch trials were held through the Spanish Inquisition
after 1610 than before.
54
Black Hen Powder’s performance brings this history into view

52
All figures referred to in the text are located in the corresponding appendix at the end of this work.
53
Henningsen, 58.
54
Henningsen, 59.
47
and builds upon it. The public display of creating a “magic powder” that would “give
the evil eye to rapists” suggests that while women have gained ground in contemporary
Mexico, there remained much work left to be done. The invocation of magic, while tied
to the wrongful persecution of women through witch trials, is made ironic in the way
that the title of the group has often been presented as an ironic, humorous gesture.
Black Hen Powder’s performance suggests that the situation of women in Mexico in
1983 was such that a mystical, magical powder imbued with supernatural power is the
only option available for women to protect themselves from the violence of their
reality. The farce of this suggestion reminds viewers that the reality was one to be
changed. On the day of the march, the onlookers of Mayer, Bustamante, and Dosal’s
witchcraft were surely already sympathetic with this cause.
The performativity of Black Hen Powder’s suggestion adds to this irony. Mayer,
Bustamante, and Dosal were conjuring the potion as artists. They performed as artists
as witches, which allowed them to bring to light a bitter history and reality. It was their
art, not their witchcraft, that was intended to change the traditional image of the
woman, analyze and criticize sexist stereotypes, and produce new images of women. At
the performance, they told journalist Eduardo Camacho that “art is the best vehicle for
address these concerns, above all because through aesthetic experience it invites the
viewer to consider its proposition and look for solutions.”
55
The performative aspect of

55
Camacho, n.p.
48
Black Hen Powder’s action, in conjunction with its political-artistic nature, separates it
from other contemporary rituals that may appear similar at first glance.
Around the time of the group’s performance, Tanice Foltz was writing about her
experience with Dianic Witchcraft, which builds upon radical feminist, political, and
separatist traditions. In “Women’s Spirituality Research,” Foltz has described her
experience during the early 1980s with witches who practice Dianic Witchcraft in San
Diego. She has explained that this particular coven of witches studied the literature of
Starhawk (Miriam Simos), a psychologist and “political witch,” used collective
processes, affirmed womanhood, and “denounce[d] injustices done to women in the
name of patriarchy.”
56
Black Hen Powder also used collective processes, denounced
injustices done to women, and criticized patriarchy. Yet its adoption of witchcraft,
unlike that of the contemporary witches who Foltz studied in San Diego, emphasized
the historical concept of witchcraft. Its adoption of witchcraft was an instance of
conceptual art being applied outside of the art world. Mayer, Bustamante, and Dosal
could have visited Mercado de Sonora and requested the necessary ingredients to give
someone evil eye. They could have contacted a witch, Dianic or otherwise, or perhaps
started their own coven. Instead, and importantly, they performed as witches. This
method suggests the importance of conceptualism within the group’s performative
practice, and it foreshadows the broader significance of applied conceptual art within

56
Foltz, 410.
49
Mayer’s collective practice. It might also suggest something about the efficacy of
witchcraft, but insofar as it does, it seems to be to point to the power of the concept or
idea.
This conceptualism refers less to the art historical movement of conceptual art,
which is generally described as occurring between 1966 and 1972, and more to the
inclusive notion of conceptualism or conceptual art, as it appeared with Marcel
Duchamp, for example. The conceptual invocation of witchcraft and the historical
persecution of witches has been observed in earlier forms of feminist and artistic
activism. As Alberto McKelligan has noted, Black Hen Powder’s public performance is
similar to forms of activism conducted by the political organization known as
W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), which was active in
New York during the late 1960s.
57

After October 7, 1983, the performance of Peace means respecting the rights of
other bodies would live on through the circulation of the recipe that Black Hen Powder
followed during the event.
58
The recipe (Figure A2) – “Receta del grupo Polvo de Gallina
Negra, para hacerle el mal de ojo a los violadores, o el respecto al derecho del cuerpo
ajeno es la paz” (“Black Hen Powder’s recipe for giving evil eye to rapists, or peace
means respecting the rights of others’ bodies”) – would be published in feminist
magazines such as the ninth volume of Fem, a feminist publication that began in 1976

57
McKelligan, 174.
58
Black Hen Powder would publish two other recipes in 1984, and Mayer would also use a recipe to frame
her 2016 retrospective in Mexico City. For more information on the former, see Barbosa, 117.
50
and whose directors included Alaíde Foppa, Margarita García Flores, Elena
Poniatowska, and Marta Lamas, among others.
59
Fem is one of three feminist magazines
based in Mexico City, the other two being debate feminista (1990) and La Correa
Feminista (1994), which was founded with the goal of providing feminist thought and
critique through independent publication.
60
With the recipe’s publication, Black Hen
Powder was able to share the bitter irony of their performance with viewers who may
not have been among the thousand participants at the march. Fem’s goals involved:
providing information about women and how to achieve social change;
reconstructing the history of feminism, particularly in Mexico, and then in Latin
America, including feminist literary pieces, written both by women and men,
maintaining its own political and institutional independence; and arguing that
women’s struggles cannot be understood as independent of that of all oppressed
peoples to make a better world.
61

Thus, the recipe’s inclusion in their publication allowed Mayer and Bustamante to
begin bridging feminist activism and artistic practice, or – more broadly – feminism
and art, which would become a recurrent theme in their work through Black Hen
Powder, not to mention in Mayer’s own practice. As the following two discussions
indicate, the practice of creating public and easily circulated documents or aspects of
artwork and performances would become an integral part of Black Hen Powder’s work.

59
Barbosa, 116.
60
Biron, 151.
61
Biron, 154.
51
Women artists, or we’re looking for a wife (1984)
In 1984, Mayer and Bustamante organized two projects under the title Las mujeres
artistas o se solicita esposa (Women artists, or we’re looking for a wife). The first took
place at the Biblioteca de México and included an installation and performance that
dealt with the theme of domestic work. However, this first project is not the one of
focus here. Later in 1984, Mayer and Bustamante gave a tour of 36 lectures at
educational institutions across Mexico. The lecture/performances, as they have been
named, were also presented with the name Women artists, or we’re looking for a wife.
62

They were sponsored by the Dirección General de Promoción Cultural of the Secretaría
de Educación Pública as a “series of formative talks to be given by artists on a circuit in
various Mexican states.”
63
Little did the state know that Mayer and Bustamante, who
were selected to conduct the series, would analyze how images of women were used in
media and art, would reconsider the art history canon to better understand
contemporary Mexico, and would introduce the work of emerging artists who were
tackling these issues through their art practice.
The 36 lectures that they gave in just over a month revealed how they artists
who they discussed handled feminist issues. For example, they introduced the
photographs of women wrestlers by Lourdes Grobet to discuss violence against women
(Figure A3). Drawings from Magali Lara’s childhood diaries were presented to talk

62
Barbosa, 117.
63
Giunta, “Feminisms and Emancipation: Mónica Mayer,” 96.
52
about identity formation (Figure A4). They showed Bustamante’s work to segue into
notions of eroticism, and they presented images by Yolanda Andrade to discuss
sexuality and lesbianism. Mayer’s early work was introduced to bring to light questions
of assault and rape, and Ana Victoria Jiménez’s introduced themes of domesticity
(Figure A5).
64
Mayer and Bustamante presented slides that depicted the work of these
artists, among others, and offered a narrative explanation to accompany the slides.
Their narration pointed to problems and issues that the artists addressed in their work
as well as those that they faced in their daily lives.
During their lecture tour, Mayer and Bustamante were both pregnant, Mayer at
six months and Bustamante at three. To exaggerate the reality of their pregnancies,
they conducted the lectures wearing prop bellies. This exaggeration is interpreted as a
partial extension of the bitter irony that Black Hen Powder brought to light in Peace
means respecting the rights of others’ bodies. In 1984, feminist activists were continuing
to organize to protest the control and regulation of women’s bodies. While Black Hen
Powder’s first performance addressed violence against women through a specific focus
on rape and sexual violence, Women artists, or we’re looking for a wife focused on the
ways in which maternity was viewed in Mexico and on how it had been transformed by
governmental policy, as discussed in reference to their first performance. By
conducting the series during this period, and by discussing it in relation to the project,

64
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 39; Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 43.
53
their choice to become mothers, a point which they also envelope in humor to indicate
their control over their own bodies, they provide an initial layer of critique of Mexican
maternity and government policy. By exaggerating the reality of their pregnancies
through the farce of their prop bellies, they draw attention to that choice. Furthermore,
by giving their art historical performance lectures during this period, they are pointing
to a new vision of maternity in which motherhood is not a passive state and in which
mothers, and women more generally, are not passive receivers of culture and politics.
Mayer and Bustamante’s series suggests that, in contrast, they should be and are active
participants. In conjunction with the themes presented by the women artists whose
work they included in their project, Women artists remained broadly focused on how
women, Mexican art, Mexican mothers, Mexican women artists, and Mexican women
artists who were mothers were understood.
Therefore, Women artists, or we’re looking for a wife provided Mayer and
Bustamante with an opportunity for a three-fold revision. First, they revised the art
historical canon by introducing the student audience of their lecture/performances to a
wide range of women artists in Mexico. Second, they proposed a revising of art and
artistic practice by introducing to students artworks that can be understood as feminist
in form or function. Third, they presented a new vision of maternity through their
performance, which also built upon farce and irony. The title supports this three-fold
revision by engaging a sense of irony not unlike the irony of Black Hen Powder’s first
performance. Through the title Mayer and Bustamante suggest that all of the artists
54
discussed – themselves included – were simply missing a wife who would believe in her
partner’s talent, maintain her partner’s public relations and sales, and take care of
household tasks.
65
More generally, they are suggesting that the status of women artists
and artwork produced by women could be improved if only these women had wives.
The wives’ work would be done not for a salary but in the name of love.
66
Mayer and
Bustamante’s conclusion that such a wife would surely elevate the career of female
artists, just as wives had largely throughout history made possible the elevated careers
of male artists, echoes the argument in Linda Nochlin’s foundational essay “Why have
there been no great women artists?” which was published just one decade before Black
Hen Powder formed. Nochlin argues that over various historical periods women were
limited by their social realities and thus, were unable to establish as a career any sort of
artistic practice.
67
While it is unlikely that Bustamante and Mayer, especially, had not
encountered this text, Fernando Gamboa’s essay in the catalogue of the
aforementioned exhibition La mujer como creadora y tema del arte in 1975 reiterated
Nochlin’s concerns as rooted in Mexico City.
68
Despite the exhibition’s failure to
provide a general feminist intervention into Mexican art history, Gamboa’s essay was a
beginning step considering the social reality of women artists in Mexico, raising
questions similar to those of Nochlin.

65
Villegas Morales, 49.
66
Villegas Morales, 49.
67
Nochlin, “Why have there been no great women artists?”
68
Gamboa, untitled.
55
In their lecture/performances, Mayer and Bustamante were not denouncing art
practice or how it was represented in art history, nor were they denouncing
institutional pedagogy. Instead, they sought to deconstruct and revise: art practice, art
history, and women artists did not have to follow one specific path, especially a
patriarchal one. Their series makes a feminist intervention into art history, as would be
later outlined by Griselda Pollock in Vision and Difference (1988) as well as in Encounters
in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007). In her work, Pollock suggests that there should
be no feminist art history but only feminist interventions into art history. Part of her
proposal builds upon the idea that there is no single history of art, which is also part of
the logic of Mayer and Bustamante’s work in Women artists. In recognizing the plural
and critical nature of art history, or histories, the emphasis on feminist interventions
into art history reminds one that feminism does not end with the insertion of female
artists into the art historical canon or the recognition of art practices that have been
historically attributed to women.
This strategy of artists becoming art historians was not unfamiliar to feminist
artists, although it appeared to be somewhat new in Mexico City. Interestingly, Mayer
had produced a revisionary art history curriculum as part her 1978 work Traducciones
(Translations), which was organized toward the end of her participation in the Feminist
Studio Workshop in Los Angeles. Earlier in the 1970s, Judy Chicago had developed the
Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College. Together with Miriam Schapiro, Chicago
56
was able to move the program to California Institute of the Arts.
69
The program was a
more institutionalized version of what Mayer and Bustamante were doing through their
series, and its model had become an important point of departure for the Woman’s
Building activities. As such, the practice of conducting lectures to introduce audiences
to other feminist artists had a strong transnational history.
The audience of Mayer and Bustamante’s series was different than that of Black
Hen Powder’s first performance. For the public of Peace means respecting the rights of
others’ bodies, few elements of the performance were likely to have been a surprise.
Viewers were in attendance for a march organized by the National Network of Women
to protest violence toward women. While the form and bitter irony of the group’s
performance might have been a surprise, the march attendees were likely already
sympathetic with the cause. In this way, Women artists stands out and surprises across
two fronts. It received government support and was conducted in an institutional space
of art history. Therefore, Mayer and Bustamante’s criticism of governmental policy and
Mexican maternity, in addition to their revision of art and art history through feminist
intervention, was surprising at a conceptual and organizational level and at a
pedagogical and interpersonal level. Mayer has described the students’ reactions: “we
arrived at various schools wearing our prop belly aprons that further accentuated our
already pregnant bellies…which, for some strange reason, disturbed many students.”
70

69
Harper, 762–763.
70
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 39.
57
Yet this air of surprise, for Andrea Giunta, has efficacy as conspiracy.
71
With
regard to the relationship between the content of the series and the public
administration, Giunta has explained, “money that the State had provided for an
educational program…was used in order to advance an action that was critical of the
sexist discourses that the institutions of the State were themselves responsible for
reproducing.”
72
While this conspiratorial structure should not be undermined, what is
perhaps more notable about Women artists is that Mayer and Bustamante were not
conspiring as iconoclasts to destroy images, sexist or otherwise, or as anarchists to
destroy the institution and the academy. Instead, they conducted their series of
lecture/performances to deconstruct a genealogy of art and reformulate it.
73
Their
series intervened in art history and knowledge production from one of its original seats,
which – for better or worse – remains a locus of the formulation of art history and the
circulation of images in contemporary culture. Although that original seat was
historically available only to the privileged and educated elite of Mexico and its urban
areas, Mayer and Bustamante would continue to shape their practice such that their
three-fold revisioning had a broader reach, as the following study of their multi-faceted
project Mothers! demonstrates.

71
Giunta, “Feminisms and Emancipation,” 97.
72
Giunta, “Feminisms and Emancipation,” 97.
73
Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 43.
58
Mothers! (1987–1988)
Black Hen Powder is more popularly known for its work ¡Madres! (Mothers!). Mayer has
described this project as the group’s most ambitious work, and Bustamante has noted
that it gained them attention nationally and internationally, helping to define their
future work.
74
The piece created an alliance between feminist art and national
institutions as part of their strategy to conceive of Mothers! as a “visual project.”
According to Mayer, a visual project involves:
plastic art actions that are conducted over long periods and involve all kinds of
artistic support, from traditional mediums (painting, drawing), to non-
traditional ones (performance, mail art) or to things that usually aren’t
considered as mediums (game shows, round tables, demonstrations), which are
all necessary to influence the collective unconscious.
75

This is the type of work that Mayer and Bustamante considered integral to unite the
political and the artistic as it would have a wide, public reach and would challenge
traditional definitions of art and art practice.
76

¡Madres! began as a broad project of smaller, stand-alone works that engaged
institutional participation to varying degrees. In the initial phase of Mothers!, Mayer
and Bustamante organized a mail art project and sent mail to Mexican artists,
feminists, and the Mexico City press. The individual pieces were designed as
photocopied collages emphasizing aspects of maternity, from Mayer’s and

74
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 39; Bustamante, “Conditions, Roads, and Genealogies of Mexican
Conceptualism, 1921–1993,” 146.
75
Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 44.
76
Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 44.
59
Bustamante’s own relationships with their mothers to an imagined year 5,000, in which
their descendants would have ultimately reformulated the archetype of the mother.
The collages included typewritten and handwritten letters, figurative drawings
reminiscent of comic books (historietas), and a variety of cut-and-pasted letters in the
style of ransom notes (Figures A6 and A7). In Carta a mi madre (Letter to my mother),
they maintained a focus on epistolary practices but organized a participatory
performance in which they asked the public to write letters that described things that
they wished they would have said to their mothers but never dared to say.
77
Mayer was
already familiar with mail art in her own practice, as her postcard series Lo normal
(1978) demonstrates, and many Mexican artists had already become involved with mail
art due to the facility with which it could be independently produced and distributed.
78

As Alberto McKelligan has aptly noted, the first mail art project of Mothers! was also in
dialogue with the 1970s work of Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, who created
versions of feminist comic books, such as Las aventuras de Maga-Lee.
79

Despite the prominence of mail art and its production by Mexican artists during
this period, in the second phase of Mothers! Bustamante and Mayer left mail art behind
to engage with the public through more performative means. The most popular
Mothers! project comes from this phase. It was the second of four performances known

77
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 40.
78
For example, Felipe Ehrenberg and Ulises Carrión were quite prominent as mail artists at this time.
Ehrenberg had emigrated to London, where he and Martha Hellion ran Beau Geste Press. Carrión was in
Amsterdam with his own press as well as archive.
79
McKelligan, 163.
60
as the Mothers! series.
80
While Mothers I, III, and IV took place at universities and
museums, Mothers II was organized within a different institution, on a highly rated
Mexican television program. Mothers II took on the name Madre por un día (Mother for a
day).
Mayer and Bustamante organized Mother for a day as a performance for Nuestro
Mundo, the television program led by Guillermo Ochoa for Televisa’s Canal 2, and it
aired on August 28, 1987. The first half of the show consisted of typical interview-based
talk show discussion. To begin, Ochoa explained to viewers, “Tonight we are going to
have a conversation which we may not understand.” Once Bustamante and Mayer were
seated, Ochoa welcomed them to the show. Ochoa admitted that Bustamante had first
won him over in 1979 when she patented the taco. They moved on to discuss Black Hen
Powder and its projects, at which point Ochoa asked about Bustamante’s pregnancy. At
the time, she was six months pregnant with her second child. When she responded that
pregnancy was the natural first step of “a larger project of the group,” Mayer smiled
and added that the project initially began with the birth of their daughters in 1985,
which was achieved “with the support of [their] husbands, who are also artists, Víctor
Lerma and Rubén Valencia, and who kindly helped [them] get started on the
motherhood project.”
81

80
Barbosa, 120.
81
Nuestro Mundo, “Madre por un día.”
61
When the next frame showed Ochoa’s face, it revealed him wearing a confused
half smile. He then asked if her current pregnancy was outside of that project, and in
plain speech Bustamante replied, “No. I was so convinced of the importance of this
project…that with my husband I decided to repeat it.”
82
This farcical and ironic sense of
humor was made more subtle when Ochoa brought attention to the title of their group
and asked about the necessity of feminist art. While Mayer and Bustamante retained a
humorous posture, they also began to discuss the group’s platform and goals.
Bustamante said that their “magic dusts must start working” to account for the lack of
knowledge about women in art and the ways that women are represented in art and
media. Mayer explained that because images of motherhood had traditionally been
painted by men, women’s experiences were not being portrayed.
83

Mayer and Bustamante engaged their humor-based strategy and explained that
they would use that night’s program for the purpose of art, turning the concourse into
something “like the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries” (Figure A8). They dressed
Ochoa as a pregnant woman, giving him a giant prop belly and an apron. Then they
adorned him with a crown so that he could assume his place as “queen of the home.”
He swallowed placebo pills intended to induce cravings and morning sickness. After
following their performative ritual – a passage to motherhood – Ochoa was named
“mother for a day” (Figure A9).

82
Nuestro Mundo, “Madre por un día.”
83
Nuestro Mundo, “Madre por un día.”
62
The program reached over 200 million viewers in Mexico and in select cities
across the United States. It has been dryly described as the one in which “Guillermo
Ochoa was made pregnant.” Mayer has noted that the public immediately responded to
the performance: men were outraged and women fascinated. Yet their humor was not
entirely lost on the public, as she has recalled, “at nine months someone from the
public called Ochoa to ask him if he had a boy or a girl.”
84

While Mothers! included other projects, the pieces discussed above are notable
for the ways that they circulated through the public via mail art networks and televised
performance. In these cases, Mayer and Bustamante’s approach differs from that of
Peace means respecting the rights of others’ bodies and of Women artists, or we’re looking
for a wife. Although those two pieces eventually involved elements that circulated more
widely, such as the published recipe or the archived lecture slides, their point of
development was live performance. The projects from Mothers! mentioned here,
however, were originally developed in more circulatable media – mail and television. In
this way, Mayer and Bustamante borrowed from Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s
feminist media strategies,
85
which Mayer was familiar with from her experience at the
Woman’s Building.
Nonetheless, the humor and critique that fuels the Mothers! projects did build on
that of Black Hen Powder’s previous work. As its name suggests, this humor and

84
Mayer, “De la vida y arte como feminista,” 44.
85
Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, “Feminist Media Strategies for Political Performance,” 302–313.
63
critique is tied to debate about Mexican maternity. This debate was already present in
Mayer’s practice, as she had invoked the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe in
works such as the 1977–1978 series Nuestra señora (Our lady). In this series, Mayer used
graphite and ink drawings to represent seven versions of the Virgen of Guadalupe, who
for Mayer represented the most strict female stereotype in Mexican culture.
86
Barbosa
has related this debate to a critique of Octavio Paz, whose Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
became a point of contention for elaborating the archetype of La Malinche.
87
Edward
McCaughan picked up on that point in his article “Navigating the Labyrinth of Silence,”
which proposes that the efforts of women artists who participated in art and activist
movements during that period were often met with resistance, in the art world and
activist movements, given the conflated machismo in which the heroic left and
Mexican identity were rooted.
88
Paz’s discussion of La Malinche is part of that
conflation, as his critics are keen to note.
89
Mayer and Bustamante’s efforts through
Black Hen Powder directly countered the ways in which archetypes such as La Malinche
and the idealized vision of nurturing, selfless maternity have been promoted by various
actors within Mexican political, intellectual, and artistic history.

86
Mayer, “Las vírgenes.”
87
Barbosa, 175; see also Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude (1950).
88
McCaughan, “Navigating the Labyrinth of Silence.”
89
For example, see Carlos Monsiváis, “Octavio Paz y la izquierda” (1999).
64
Black Hen Powder disbands
Like the groups before it, Black Hen Powder ultimately disbanded. In 1993, after ten
years of activity, Black Hen Powder dissolved. Outlasting many of the groups formed in
the 1970s, and outlasting the other feminist artists’ collectives, Black Hen Powder was
nonetheless affected by political and economic crises, the increasing popularity of
Mexican art in the international market, and a turn of events in Mayer’s and
Bustamante’s personal lives. Mayer and Bustamante had maintained their individual
careers and other collaborative practices while Black Hen Powder was active, and they
would continue those paths after it dissolved.
In 1993, Mayer was in Los Angeles for The Kitchen Table, a project that involved
26 artists from different countries having conversations about the relationship between
community and art. In the fourth conversation of the project, Mayer explained:
I come from the only feminist art group in Mexico. There are only two of us. It’s
called Black [Hen] Powder, which is the remedy against the evil eye. We figure
it’s hard enough to be a woman, and a woman artist and a feminist, so we
protect ourselves. Our work is usually very humorous. We do performances on
television and we do mail art…we do things that aren’t objects necessarily.
90

Thus, just as Black Hen Powder was ceasing its activity, Mayer provided a brief, if
understated, account of its efficacy. Black Hen Powder was the lone two-woman
feminist art group in Mexico that took its name from the remedy for evil eye, a bitter
and humorous gesture to suggest the complex history of women in patriarchal systems

90
Mayer, “Kitchen Table Talk 4,” 35.
65
as well as the present reality for women artists in Mexico, and used humor to make art
that was usually not objectual.

Conclusion
This chapter has provided a tripartite examination of Mexico’s longest-running
feminist artists’ group, Black Hen Powder. The group, although founded in 1983 by
three women, was primarily active as a two-woman group. Already a small collective at
three members, its legacy as a two-woman group suggests that its activity occurred less
on the plane of the collective and more on that of the couple, the pair, and the
partnership. While Black Hen Powder had a prolific and public-facing career, this
unique understanding of collectivity is of a collectivity transformed into intimacy.
Indeed the group generation had already transformed the artistic collectivism of the
1920s and 1930s into something else; however, their collectivism – while less dogmatic
than that of the post-Revolution years – was ideologically connected to the group
formation and group political and militant goals. Black Hen Powder thus provides a
new understanding of the artists’ group and its relation to collectivity. It offers a
nuanced narrative of collectivity through its emphasis on feminist goals and its
engagement with intimacy.
In the same year that Mayer and Bustamante organized Women artists, Lucy
Lippard published an article that has become instrumental for conceiving of
performance art and social practice and whose philosophy circulated through the
66
Woman’s Building and the feminist art circles of Mexico City. In “Trojan Horses:
Activist Art and Power,” Lippard proposed: “Maybe the Trojan Horse was the first
activist artwork. Based in subversion on the one hand and empowerment on the other,
activist art operates both within and beyond the beleaguered fortress that is high
culture or the ‘art world’.”
91
Mayer and Bustamante were seizing upon this idea,
although it was seemingly rooted in their earlier experiences and realizations. What
Lippard would term “activist art” was a necessary means of feminist art practice for
artists such as Mayer and Bustamante in Mexico City during the 1980s. Nevertheless,
the metaphor of the Trojan Horse that adopts subversive and empowering tactics
provides a model to understand the work of Black Hen Powder. Bustamante would
address these tactics indirectly in her manifesto-like essay “New Transdisciplinary
Visualities As an Alternative to Redistribute the Power of Thought,” which closes with
the following suggestions: “We should encourage the most eccentric actions and
prepare individuals to handle confrontations with other truths. We should encourage
conduct that uses demystifying humor as a means of survival when confronted with the
feeling of chaos.”
92
The humor that permeated Black Hen Powder was not lost on
Bustamante. Mayer, too, has repeatedly alluded to the importance of humor.
Historian Caroline Bynum has written about a comic stance of doing history,
which for her, is “aware of contrivance, of risk. It always admits that we may be wrong.

91
Lippard, “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power,” 341.
92
Bustamante, “New Transdisciplinary Visualities As an Alternative to Redistribute the Power of
Thought,” 170.
67
A comic stance knows there is, in actuality no ending (happy or otherwise) – that doing
history is, for the historian, telling a story that could be told in another way.”
93
In the
three works presented here – Peace means respecting the rights of others’ bodies, Women
artists, or we’re looking for a wife, and Mothers! – humor and history play an integral role
in Black Hen Powder’s feminist interventions into art, visual culture, and more broadly,
into social and political life. These three works demonstrate Black Hen Powder’s
interest in revising history and visual culture, in line with the goals described by Mayer
and Bustamante, and in revealing bitter truths that have been hidden by injustice and
inequality. Black Hen Powder’s group nature is not that of the conglomeration of the
crowd or that of the mass, which have a history of being critically examined, such as in
the accounts of Gustave Le Bon in 1895 and Sigmund Freud in 1921.
94
Instead, Black
Hen Powder’s group nature is more intimate, like the group nature of the family, which
has its own history of being examined, too. In terms of the literal family, over the
duration of Black Hen Powder’s activity, Mayer and Bustamante became mothers and
grew their families in various ways. With these points in mind, the artistic practice of
Black Hen Powder becomes a practice of intimacy: two pregnant women are working in
institutions, casting spells like witches, and using humor to demystify. In her study of
artists’ groups in North America between 1968 and 1978, Kirsten Fleur Olds has pointed

93
Bynum, “Introduction: In Praise of Fragments, History in the Comic Mode,” 25.
94
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many intellectuals became suspicious of the
group formation, in theory and in practice. In 1895, Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the
Popular Mind, and in 1921, Sigmund Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
68
to such an idea of intimacy, noting that “Artists’ groups often resemble families…they
draw on the best qualities of their individual members to realize collective goals.
Sometimes this works out better than others, but the sentiment remains.”
95

While Mayer has written about the importance of the artists’ groups and the
group generation for dispelling the myth of the single genius artist who labors alone in
his studio, it seems that collectivism within Black Hen Powder means intimacy. That is,
it means engagement between artist and artist, between objectual and non-objectual
art, between traditional art spaces and non-traditional spaces, and between artist and
viewer. Importantly, it is also an intimacy between the social and the artistic, for which
Mayer and Bustamante endured as feminist artists when feminist activists felt that art
was not an appropriate means to social and political ends and when activist artists felt
that the concerns of feminism should not be a priority.

95
Fleur Olds, v.
69
Chapter 2. The art retrospective When in doubt…ask: A
retrocollective exhibit (2016)

Introduction
This chapter analyzes Mónica Mayer’s first retrospective exhibition, which was held in
2016 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The
exhibition, Si tiene dudas…pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva (When in Doubt…ask:
A retrocollective exhibit) is notable for the ways that it aggregated Mayer’s art practice
within a prominent seat of the art world – the art museum. Interestingly, the
exhibition’s curatorial strategy is everything but proper to the art world. As this chapter
will make clear, the retrocollective logic with which the exhibition was designed and
what first appears as a collectivist ethos in which that logic is rooted distinguish the
exhibition for several reasons. At the same time, this analysis of the exhibition suggests
that what appears as collective becomes something else. The exhibition’s attention to
collectivity, while honoring some of the strategies discussed in the previous chapter
with regard to los grupos and Black Hen Powder, is more nuanced. Collective practice
has permeated most aspects of the art of the exhibition, from the material gathered and
presented to the way in which that material is organized and curated. Before discussing
the work included in the retrocollective and the programming that accompanied it, I
consider the context of the museum and the common function of the retrospective
70
exhibition in particular in order to reveal how When in Doubt…ask has intervened in
each.

Context
From museums to art museums
There is the notion that a museum – in Spanish, un museo – is a tomb or mausoleum,
un mausoleo. In English and Spanish, museum and mausoleum are phonetically
associated, but their etymologies differ. Museum and museo are related to the Latin
museum and the Greek mouseion, while mausoleum and mausoleo come from the Latin
mausoleum and the Greek mausoleoin. In English’s German sibling, as Theodor Adorno
has explained in “Valéry Proust Museum,” the two are phonetically connected. In fact,
Adorno notes that the pair of words, together with the German museal, which translates
to “museum-like,” have “unpleasant overtones.”
1
This association served to introduce
his essay’s point of departure: “Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art.
They testify to the neutralization of culture.”
2
Mayer has also recognized this point and
explains that the museum is not the natural habitat of her work. As the previous
chapter began to indicate, Mayer’s work has more frequently been found at

1
Adorno, 175.
2
Adorno, 175.
71
demonstrations, on the street, on television, and in publications. This is to say that it is
more often found out in public, not inside in the museum.
3

The space inside in the museum, and in the museum of art especially, is a
strange one. The museum provides a fictional narrative, similar to that of other
ideological practices, in order to generate knowledge and canonize it. Donald Preziosi
has described the museum as “one of the premier epistemological technologies of the
Enlightenment” given its invention just prior to the nineteenth century and due to the
ways in which museums have been used to form social and political narratives that help
shape nations and their citizenry.
4
For Preziosi, the museum is crucial in fabricating
social realities. He refers not only to the art museum but also, and importantly, to those
first museums out of which the art museum evolved, museums of natural history. Yet,
Preziosi suggests that the art museum is distinct in its uncanny staging. The way in
which artworks are presented in the art museum, their curation, presentation, and
organization, is similar to the “visual effects of works of art themselves,” thus
broadening the object interpretation from the work of art to the context in which it is
shown, the art museum.
5

In Preziosi’s view, “[a]rt or artistry, in other words, is both the content of and the
technology for framing and foregrounding what are framed as instances of artistry.”
6

3
Mayer, “Interview with Mónica Mayer and Karen Cordero Reiman.”
4
Preziosi, “Collecting/museums,” 56.
5
Preziosi, “Palpable and Mute as a Globed Fruit,” n.p.
6
Preziosi, “Palpable and Mute as a Globed Fruit,” n.p.
72
Mayer’s art practice and the way that her work was curated and presented for her first
retrospective exhibition suggest a keen awareness of Preziosi’s view. As her work with
Black Hen Powder has demonstrated, Mayer has long recognized the role of the
museum in ideological development and epistemological production. More specifically,
in Mexico, the museums and the art that they have presented have had a crucial role in
the narratives of nationalism – especially after the Mexican Revolution – that, in part,
Mayer and her accomplices have sought to destabilize. New and innovative
museological practices offer an opportunity to intervene in the art world and in art
history, and Mayer’s retrospective has done this. The exhibition’s “retrocollective”
logic prioritizes a notion of collectivity that has permeated Mayer’s art practice.
However, it also distinguishes itself from the collective logic of the group, as discussed
in Chapter 1, and from the collectivism that is engaged in the archive, as explained in
Chapter 3. I propose that this retrocollective logic helps address the uncanniness of the
art museum and the paradox of its form and function. At the same time, as noted in
Chapter 1, this collectivity also emerges as something distinct.
In Mayer’s retrocollective, the “content of and the technology for framing and
foregrounding” are not easily rendered invisible, as is often the case in the art museum,
due to the exhibition’s logic and the operative strategies of Mayer’s practice. In fact,
Mayer and the curator of the exhibition, Karen Cordero Reiman, worked to promote the
visibility of such framing and foregrounding. This is also addressed in gesture through
the exhibition title, When in doubt…ask, which invites viewers and participants to
73
engage with the work and the space and ask questions about it. Moreover, it
acknowledges that one may have doubts about what they are viewing and engaging,
which suggests – as this chapter intends to reveal – that Mayer’s practice recognizes
and involves a degree of intimacy and dialogue.

Retrospection in museums and art history
Given the varied and collective nature of Mayer’s art practice, how could her work be
gathered together and organized in the museum? How could anyone’s work be
organized in any museum and uphold a critical posture given the nature of the
museum? This was an important question not only for feminist artists of 1970s and
1980s Mexico, like Mayer, but also for the collectively-oriented and militant artists of
those decades who wanted to rethink museological practices of the times and
reconsider the national narratives that such practices often promoted. For example, the
exhibitions that were organized in conjunction with the 1975 Women’s Year were
anything but what the feminist artists had hoped. While criticism of the art museum
and of art history has remained an important aspect of Mayer’s practice, that criticism
has not been able to outweigh the notion that an artist of certain acclaim will have had
a museum retrospective. “[S]ince the expansion of the art market in the 1980s – which
formed the foundation for the commodification of art that now largely governs how art
74
is collected and valued – a museum retrospective has become quite common, even
assumed.”
7

The retrospective, short for “retrospective exhibition,” generally functions as a
mid-to-late career survey and has become a ubiquitous exhibition format. The term
comes from “retrospect,” which as early as the 1660s meant “a survey of past events.”
8

In this case, “past events” refer to an artist’s artwork. As such, the retrospective offers a
format to look back over an artist’s lifetime of work and make sense of it, examining it
together for the first time, together with new additions, or together anew. Often
retrospectives are neither insightful nor breathtaking. Yet retrospectives reveal
something about who is valued in the artworld and its market given that some artists
have had museum retrospectives and some have not.
9
Aside from the format of the
retrospective, any solo exhibition at a major museum indicates a degree of artworld
importance and art market value.
10

The birth of Mayer’s retrocollective
Prior to 2016, Mayer had not been the focus of a solo exhibition or a retrospective.
During a conference at the Museo de Mujeres Artistas Mexicanas,
11
Mayer was in a Q&A

7
Schwartzman, n.p.
8
Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Retrospect,” https://www.etymonline.com/word/retrospect.
9
Schwartzman, n.p.
10
Lagrange and Klein, n.p.
11
The focus of the conference was feminism and art. Participants included Lourdes Méndez, one of the
Guerilla Girls, Karen Cordero Reiman, Mónica Mayer, Xabier “Arakis” Arakistain, and Cuauhtémoc
Medina.
75
session wherein a woman asked how she could promote her work as an artist. Mayer
responded, “You shouldn’t ask me that; I am 60 years old and still haven’t had a
retrospective.”
12
Cuauhtémoc Medina and Xabier “Arakis” Arakistain were attending
the conference and participated in that particular session. After the session, Arakistain
asked Medina, “Then, when will you have Mónica’s retrospective here [in Mexico]?”
13

This exchange brings to light two things: that the retrospective exhibition remains a
sought after marker in the art world and that Mayer is an important enough artist for it
to be surprising that she had not yet had one. Mayer had already been thinking about
forms of reflecting upon and curating exhibitions about feminist artists and archives in
Mexico City. In fact, as part of that process, Mayer, Karen Cordero Reiman, Deborah
Dorotinsky, and Paz Sastre had organized “Women, and what more? Reactivating the
archive of Ana Victoria Jiménez” at the Universidad Iberoamericana in 2011.
14
Cordero,
who would curate Mayer’s retrospective, has spent a significant portion of her career
conceiving of curatorial strategies that are rooted in a feminist perspective and
integrate various formats of artwork.
15

Indeed, Mayer’s retrospective would necessarily require curatorial innovation.
This was the challenge of conceiving of her retrospective. Mayer’s retrospective thus
offered an opportunity to revisit and rethink artworks decades after their creation as

12
McCutcheon, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 176.
13
McCutcheon, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 176.
14
McCutcheon, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 176–77.
15
McCutcheon, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 177.
76
well as to engage with new work in innovative ways. It encouraged viewers and
participants to recognize and reconsider the context of museum and its function in
Mexican social life. Ultimately, Mónica Mayer: If you have doubts…ask: a retrocollective
exposition was held from February 6 to July 31, 2016 at the Museo Universitario Arte
Contemporáneo of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in Mexico City.
“Retrospective” was substituted with “retrocollective,”
16
a choice whose reasoning and
significance are discussed toward the end of this chapter.

When in doubt…ask, the retrocollective
The exhibition was organized in four parts, an introduction and three main sections.
Below, I consider each as presented thematically in the exhibition catalogue in order to
analyze the work presented and examine the logic with which it was organized.
Although examining and writing about the exhibition in this way cannot stand in for
engaging with it in person at the museum, it nonetheless provides a unique view of the
retrocollective. Moreover, as this section notes, the art museum was only one site at
which the retrocollective took place.

16
From this point forward, I refer to the exhibition as a “retrocollective” instead of a “retrospective.”
77
“Setting up networks”
This section provided an introduction to the retrocollective. It formed the entry space
into the exhibition as well as the exit from the exhibition. To engage with the
retrocollective at the museum, visitors had to pass through the threshold of this
networked space. What type of network was being set up, exactly? In general, as a
physical entry- and exit-point of the exhibition, it was a place for the work within the
exhibition and the meaning that it carries to expand its reach. With each new entrant,
the network of knowledge about Mayer’s practice, collective practice, social practice,
feminist art, feminist art in Mexico, contemporary Mexican art history, and
contemporary feminist art history would be further established. This understanding of
network is similar to the conceptual play with which Mayer and Bustamante imbued
Black Hen Powder – it is related to the idea of space and how the public engages with it.
More specifically, though, this section points to the networked aesthetic and networked
function of the works that it presented.
The section included five pieces, four of which concerned Mayer’s participatory
installation El tendedero (Clothesline). There was the documentary presentation of
Mayer’s first Clothesline from 1978,
17
of Clothesline reactivated in 1979 for Suzanne
Lacy’s Making It Safe project in Los Angeles, of Clothesline reactivated for an exhibition

17
This first activation of Clothesline took place at the Museo de Arte Moderno for Salón 77–78, Nuevas
Tendencias.
78
at Universidad Iberoamericana in 2009,
18
as well as the participatory installation of
Clothesline specifically designed for the retrocollective (Figure B1). Clothesline is an
installation composed of a clothesline with a pink frame, wooden clothespins, and pink
slips of paper that invite various publics who are at once participants and audience to
answer a question in their own words and, in turn, hang their responses on the
clothesline. This piece has evolved with and through Mayer’s career, from its first
iteration in Mexico City in 1978 (Figure B2) and its reactivation in Los Angeles in the
next year (Figure B3) to its documentary installation in 2007 for WACK: Art and the
Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. When Mayer
first presented Clothesline in 1978 at the Museo de Arte Moderno, participants were
invited to answer the question “Como mujer, lo que más detesto de la ciudad es…” (“As
a woman, the thing I most hate about my city is…”). More than 700 women responded,
and most answers referred to sexual harassment taking place on the city’s streets and
in its public places. However, participants were initially hesitant to divulge such
information, and Mayer worked to encourage participants’ candid responses by
suggesting that they consider the relationship between their bodies and the urban
environment, for example.
19
In this way, Mayer incited dialogue through which women
could consider their bodies and experiences in urban space and visualized those
considerations in a collective register through the clothesline installation.

18
This activation was included in the exhibition Sin centenario ni bicentario: revoluciones alternas (No
centenary or bicentennial: Alternate revolutions), curated by Karen Cordero Reiman.
19
Barba, n.p.
79
As noted above, Clothesline was first reactivated in Los Angeles for Suzanne
Lacy’s 1979 project Making It Safe. Although the term “reactivation” was not commonly
used at the time, Mayer “reactivated” the piece for the specific context of Lacy’s
project. Mayer has explained: “In this Clothesline, my questions and the project at large
focused on the community’s perception of security and insecurity of the people of
Ocean Park and their proposals to feel safer.”
20
The Clothesline of 1978 and the
subsequent 1979 reactivation had their formal differences to account for changes in
context and publics. The 1979 reactivation was simpler – it was mounted at a few
points on the street, and due to the small number of passersby, did not need to be as
large as the clothesline installed in Museo de Arte Moderno.
21
For the 2009 reactivation
as part of No centenary or bicentennial, Mayer considered the specific context of the
private university. In this case, she wanted to move away from an overt tone of
denouncement in order to best elicit thoughtful responses with the questions. As such,
the question were “¿Cuáles son las ventajas de ser mujer?” (“What are the advantages
of being a woman?”) and “¿Cuáles son las ventajas de ser hombre? (“What are the
advantages of being a man?”).
22
To prepare for this reactivation, Mayer formed a public
Facebook group in 2008. The group was named Clothesline and allowed her and

20
Mayer, “El tendedero L.A.,” n.p.
21
Mayer, “El tendedero L.A.,” n.p.
22
Mayer, “El tendedero de la Ibero,” n.p.
80
participants to reflect on the questions posed by the piece as well as the project at
large.
23

Clothesline was reactivated once again for the retrocollective. For this particular
reactivation, Mayer and colleagues gathered public responses by taking to the streets,
hosting conferences, and organizing discussion forums. These interactions generated
responses that were then gathered and hung on the installation’s clothesline in a
corridor opposite the documentation of the clotheslines from 1978, 1979, and 2009.
Mayer has noted that Clothesline was one of the most attended to pieces in the
exhibition, with people reading the responses and contributing their own. Over the six-
month duration of the retrocollective, enough responses were generated to require the
frame of the piece to be extended. Moreover, at the end of the exhibition, this
Clothesline would be further transformed as part of El megatendedero (Megaclothesline),
which was created for the day-long performance with which the exhibition closed
(Figure B4).
In English, el tendedero translates directly to “clothesline,” a word whose
meaning is hardly ambiguous. Unless one is using “clothesline” to refer to the
American football tackle maneuver that includes a blow across the neck or head, which
appeared in the early- to mid-twentieth century, “clothesline” refers to the apparatus
of poles with a rope or string running between them and from which clothes are hung

23
The group remains ongoing (see https://www.facebook.com/groups/27633923693/).
81
to dry, a use that appeared in the early nineteenth century.
24
In Spanish, “clothesline”
is a bit more complex. The 1843 edition of the Diccionario de la lengua castellana of the
Academic Española defines tendedero as “el sitio o lugar donde se tiende alguna cosa;
como la ropa.”
25
Here, tendedero is a clothesline, although not necessarily so. For
example, the root verb of tendedero, “tender,” means “desdoblar, extender o desplegar
lo que está código.”
26
In the contemporary understanding of “tender,” its definition
suggests also “Dirigirse de manera natural hacia algo…aproximarse,”
27
which is to say,
“tend to” or “approach” or “near.” Tender comes from the Old French tendre, or
“stretch out, hold forth, offer,” and from the Latin tendere, “to stretch aim, direct
oneself.”
28

Yet tendedero can also assume a negative connotation. Gabriela Aceves
Sepúlveda has pointed this out in her discussion of Mayer’s Clothesline: “[The word] is
also used pejoratively to signal a place where women gather to talk, gossip, and reveal
things to one another.”
29
With this valence of meaning, Mayer’s Clothesline takes on the
double meaning of tendedero. As Aceves Sepúlveda has explained, in this piece Mayer
“transform[s] a traditionally private female sphere into a public one by making
women’s everyday experiences, which do not normally belong in an art museum, visible

24
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Clothes, n.”
25
Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “Tendedero,” 694.
26
Diccionario de la lengua castellana, s.v. “Tender,” 694.
27
Diccionario de la lengua española, s.v. “Tender,” https://dle.rae.es/tender?m=form&e=.
28
Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Tender,”
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=tend&ref=searchbar_searchhint.
29
Aceves Sepúlveda, 3.
82
to the public.”
30
This point is belabored for its significance. Mayer’s Clothesline, as its
reactivations are documented and reimagined for the retrocollective, tends to
something. It offers something, and it plays on the many meanings of tendedero. Mayer
has previously remarked that the object of interest in Clothesline is not the physical
structure with its printed responses, although important, but that it is “the interaction
that results from asking for public responses and [the interaction that results] from the
public reading them.”
31
In this way, it tends to an intimate dialogue that offers an
opportunity to listen and to be listened to. Keeping with her strategy of nuanced and
ironic humor that was often emphasized in the work of Black Hen Powder, Mayer
redefines the pejorative sense of tendedero. By spending time before each exhibition of
Clothesline to form and nurture relationships with participants and collaborators, the
installation of the piece and the interactions it produces thereafter enable Mayer to
reach a broader public and to develop a network of voices in support of community-
based advocacy.
In the catalogue of the retrocollective, Sol Henaro laments that although many
of the responses to the contemporary Clothesline reactivations – such as the one at
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo for the retrocollective – are not that
different from those of its first activation in 1978, the piece is thus all the more
important to continue the practice of “raising one’s voice.”
32
When a response is

30
Aceves Sepúlveda, 3.
31
Mayer, “El tendedero de la Ibero,” n.p.
32
Henaro, 20.
83
displayed on the clothesline, it goes through the physical process of being raised to be
displayed on the clothesline. This process can be extended to the metaphor of raising
one’s voice. When viewing Mayer’s Clothesline, the number of voices displayed is
startling as it visualizes in mass the lives at stake in the responses. The formal qualities
of Clothesline thus recall a network – a mass of voices woven together, an aggregation
of parts held in relation. This networked aesthetic also relates to the networked
function of the piece. Voices are held in relation to each other, questions and
conversations are brought to light in spaces, perhaps new, and voices are raised. As
such, this attention to Clothesline and its many reactivations in this entry-point to the
retrocollective is especially notable for its ability to “set up networks.”
The introductory section included, in addition to Clothesline, the piece
Performance parásito (Parasite performance), which was first organized in 2005 but was
reactivated many times thereafter and from which the title of the retrocollective was
derived. During the piece, either Mayer or Lerma and Mayer would be situated near a
public space where other artists were conducting a performance. From this liminal
spot, Mayer would converse with the public to incite dialogue and engagement with the
work (Figure B5). To distinguish herself as a collaborator and to signal that she was
there to participate in dialogue, she and collaborators held signs on which a printed
phrase read “Si tiene dudas…pregunte” (“When in doubt…ask”). One of the questions
that guided Mayer in organizing this piece asks whether “we see the work or [see] only
84
what we know about it.”
33
More specifically, Mayer has noted that when she attended
public performance art pieces or accompanied her colleagues at their performances,
something curious would happen: “the public either accepts it only because it is ‘art’
(which is very useful regarding the police, who inevitably will appear) or they
immediately say they don’t understand it at all because it is ‘art’.”
34

Calling attention to Mayer’s concern for attending to this either/or scenario and
broadening conceptions of what art is and how artists should create art, the
retrocollective engaged Parasite performance in three ways. First, it displayed
documentation of and materials from past performances conducted by Mayer alone,
Mayer and Lerma, or Mayer with others. Many of the signs and objects that were part of
the performance have since become part of Mayer and Lerma’s archive. When viewers
engaged with this documentation and material, they were able to gain a sense of how
the performance was conducted. Second, the piece was reactivated online for the
duration of the exhibition. Mayer worked with the Museo Universitario de Arte
Contemporáneo’s social networking team to utilize Twitter as a platform for
articulating 180 dudas or doubts and for responding to them (Figure B6). Thus, Mayer
programmed and tweeted 180 doubts, with accompanying responses, under the project
name #180dudas. The museum’s team promoted them through Twitter and
Instagram.
35
This reactivation of Parasite performance further emphasizes the idea of

33
Mayer, “Performance parásito,” n.p.
34
Mayer, “Performance parásito,” n.p.
35
Mayer, “#180dudas,” n.p.
85
“setting up networks,” as the medium for #180dudas was a social network that was able
to reach Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo’s growing public while answering
questions about Mayer’s retrocollective and disseminating knowledge about her art
practice more generally. Lastly, the exhibition’s title, which repeats Parasite
performance’s call for engagement, magnifies the impetus of dialogue and intimate
interaction. As Mayer has described in an interview with El Universal, “The title [of the
exhibition] responds to the spirit that we wanted to give the exhibition, that is, a spirit
of participation…my role is to establish a relationship with the public.”
36
This titular
gesture, for Parasite performance and for the retrocollective at large, is one of
participation. It signals to any person who is engaging with the work, especially inside
in the museum of art – a place that has often supposed distance and, as Adorno noted,
unpleasant overtones of neutrality and death – as well as in the discourse surrounding
art – which is often known for its impenetrable language – that their questions, doubts,
and comments are welcome. They need only to ask. This gesture was extended into the
programming that accompanied the retrocollective, thereby allowing more
opportunities for the public to ask questions and engage in dialogue, often with Mayer
herself.

36
Mayer, “El arte feminista en México no figura en los libros.”
86
“Feminism and formation”
This is the first of the retrocollective’s three primary sections. “Feminism and
Formation” includes 28 works that were largely created during the 1970s – the decade
that provided a backdrop for the foundation of Black Hen Powder, as explained in
Chapter 1, and of the feminist art practice that Mayer began engaging. This section
emphasizes the feminist art strategies present within Mayer’s work. As the pieces
described in this section indicate, the feminist ethos that has guided Mayer through the
production of these works is collective in nature, although its collectivism may not be
the collectivism of the mass or the crowd. Nevertheless, works were often collective in
form – being developed in collaboration with other artists – or collective in function –
having engaged themes that spoke to the collective social sphere.
To begin, this section presented the graphic poster that Mayer designed for the
1976 Mesa redonda sobre arte feminista (Roundtable on feminist art), in which she also
participated (Figure B7). The poster provides a clear display of Mayer’s facility with
graphic design as it superimposes a fist clenching a paintbrush into the center of the
standard graphic symbol for woman. Mayer has said that this event and her work for it
marked the beginning of her life as an artist, a feminist, and a feminist artist.
37
In 1976,
Mayer returned from a two-week workshop at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles and
was eager to share what she learned there. Overcoming her fear of public speaking,

37
Mayer, “Cartel para mesa redonda sobre arte feminista.”
87
Mayer participated in the roundtable with her former art history professors Armando
Torres Michúa and Juan Gutiérrez.
The three 1977 collages A veces me espantan mis fantasías (Sometimes my
fantasies frighten me), Paloma (Dove), and Pareja (Couple) that were exhibited at the first
self-proclaimed exhibition of feminist art in Mexico were also included in this section
(Figure B8).
38
These collages each engage photography, drawing, and fabric and suggest
questions about sexual taboo, woman as object, maternity, and female bodies. For
Mayer, photography allowed the collages to have qualities of verisimilitude, and fabric
invited a reflection on feminine experience.
39
Karen Cordero has proposed that the way
in which these collages reconsider female bodies and desire “without separating [their]
personal and social dimensions”
40
is similar to the notion of feminine writing
elaborated by Hélène Cixous.
In addition to the three collages mentioned above, the section displayed Primero
de diciembre de 1977 (December 1, 1977), which consisted of two photographs, colored
pencil on paper, and thread. The photos included in the collage document Mayer’s
participation at protests during the mid-1970s that supported legal and free abortion.
The eerie nature of the colors and photographs used in December 1, 1977 is similar to
the vibrant colors and photographs of the 1979 triptych Genealogías (Genealogies),

38
Mayer has narrated the history of that exhibition in the “Collage íntimo” entry on
pregunte.pintomiraya.com.
39
Mayer, “Collage íntimo,” n.p.
40
Cordero, “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica Mayer’s Artistic Project,” 36.
88
which was also included in this section. The three panels of Genealogies presented
photographs collaged with colored pencil and pastel on paper. Cordero has described
such work as crucial for “inaugurat[ing] a process that she [Mayer] has continued
throughout her graphic and conceptual work…imbricating, reworking and resignifying
elements from her vital archive (literal or performed, photographed or photocopied).”
41

At a superficial level of content and aesthetic form, Mayer’s collages – as described by
Cordero, in particular – reveal a process of gathering and collecting. The collage
provides a platform through which the artist collects various elements and reimagines
them in new form. As Cordero noted, in Mayer’s case many of these elements came
from her “vital archive,” which suggests that the collage helps reimagine certain
historical and cultural narratives, at the broad social level and on an intimate
interpersonal level.
The 1978 triptych Tapices (Tapestries) demonstrates a similar visual reimagining
but through boldly-hued overlapping watercolors and rectangular forms (Figure B9).
The blue and orange hues of the first panel, Tapestry for a friend, pale next to the pink,
purple, and burgundy of Tapestry for a seducer and next to the dark burgundy, gray, and
black of Tapestry for a rapist. Moreover, the colors of the series of panels are even paler
in comparison to the range of characters and experiences revealed in each panel’s title.
In this way, Mayer addresses the collective experience of female bodies in their honest

41
Cordero, “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica Mayer’s Artistic Project,” 35.
89
histories. Cordero has pointed out that this series is “among the few works by Mayer
that we could call abstract,”
42
which is a testament to the range and complexity of
Mayer’s artistic practice from its outset.
Less abstract than Tapestries, Nuestra señora (Our Lady) is a seven-panel series of
drawings from 1977–1978 that was included in this section. For this series, Mayer
composed seven graphite and ink drawings, each corresponding to a facetiously named
saint: Our Patriarchal Lady, Our Lady of Open Eyes, Our Lady of Submission, Our Lady
of the Stiff Bed, Our Shy Lady, Our Lady of Oppression, and Our Lady of the Voyage.
The series was developed after Mayer studied at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles,
about which Mayer has recalled, “One of the things that surprised me the most when I
studied there…was how some teachers and students interpreted the Virgin of
Guadalupe.”
43
For Mayer, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been associated with some of the
most strict and pernicious female stereotypes in Mexican culture. Thus, she attempted
to engage with and reimagine such stereotypes by creating the seven-panel Our Lady
series. The photocopy-based six panel series La dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows) from
1978–1979, which was also included in this section, is likewise rooted in this
engagement and reimagining (Figure B10). For the six panels of Our Lady of Sorrows,
instead of drawing the Virgin as she did in the seven panels of Our Lady, Mayer used

42
Cordero, “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica Mayer’s Artistic Project,” 36.
43
Mayer, “Las vírgenes,” n.p.
90
photocopies of an image that she took in a Oaxacan cathedral in which a figure of the
Virgin was enclosed, or enchained, in a box of alms.
44

The series of printed cards titled Lo normal (The normal) from 1978 echoes the
serial nature of the Our Lady series mentioned above. The normal consists of a
collection of postcards that function as an index to reflect on female experience, taboo,
and more generally, “conventional ideas about the normal.”
45
The series was created for
the 1978 exhibit “Lo normal,” in which Mayer participated with six other feminist
artists. Each postcard in the series includes ten small images of Mayer’s face,
demonstrating expressions from pleasure to disgust and that are marked with numbers
1 to 10. Below the images, Mayer imitates the tests and quizzes that women’s
magazines often offer their readers such that the public is instructed to respond to any
number of phrases. In Mayer’s case, the opening phrase “Quiero hacer el amor…” (“I
want to make love…”) is completed when the reader circles the expression that
corresponds with their response. The instructions ask the reader to total the value of
their responses and subtract their date of birth, both irrelevant numbers (Figure B11).
The postcard explains that if the result is less than 10, the reader is considered
“normal.” Yet, as Mayer has noted, anyone actually reaching 10 is unlikely, suggesting
that “the normal” is not fixed by an objective metric and especially criticizing the
seemingly arbitrary nature of assessments and quizzes for such things as they have

44
Mayer, “Las vírgenes,” n.p.
45
Mayer, “Lo normal,” n.p.
91
been popularized in women’s magazines and publications.
46
The phrases numbered
from 1 to 10, to which “I want to make love…” corresponds, were as follows: with my
lover; in a crowded theater; before getting married; with my father; with an animal;
with a child; and be paid for it; with a rapist; with a woman; and with myself. The
normal was eventually acquired by the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo,
marking it as Mayer’s first museum-acquired piece. To date, The normal is one of the
few pieces that Mayer has sold.
47
In this way, she is described as a non-market artist.
Accompanying The normal in the retrocollective was an intervention made by
contemporary artist María Rodríguez Cruz. Her piece Si Peña fuera mujer (If Peña was a
woman) reinterpreted Mayer’s The normal but used the face of then president Enrique
Peña Nieto. Rodríguez Cruz followed the formal and conceptual qualities of Mayer
piece, creating 10 postcards, each with an image of Nieto’s face adorned with a wig and
lipstick. The public was invited to choose the appropriate Nieto face to match various
responses to the question, “Si Peña fuera mujer, al enterarse de que…en México, ¿qué
cara haría?” (If Peña was a woman, what face would he make upon learning that … was
occurring in Mexico?). Instead of circling their response, as Mayer instructed her
readers and viewers to do, participants were encouraged by Rodríguez Cruz to put on
lipstick and kiss the appropriate Peña response (Figure B12).
48

46
Mayer, “Lo normal,” n.p.
47
Mayer, “Lo normal,” n.p.
48
Rodríguez Cruz, n.p.
92
The final graphic work included in this section of the retrocollective was the
tripartite series of digital prints from 2001 that Mayer refers to as docucuentos
(docustories). These small mixed-media pieces integrate documentary photographs of
Black Hen Powder’s Mothers! project, prints, and drawings. Mayer has introduced the
pieces by explaining, “One of the themes that most interests me is memory, and as a
result, documentation.”
49

In addition to the many graphic works that indicated the roots of Mayer’s
feminist practice and her formation as a feminist artist, a few of her video and
documentary installation works were included in this section. Super 8 footage of the
performances Mayer participated in for Celebración (Celebration), a piece organized
between 1980 and 1981, were shown. In Celebration, Mayer collaborated with Maris
Bustamante, Magali Lara, Rowena Morales, Lourdes Grobet, Rita Eder, Jesusa
Rodríguez, Carmen Boullosa, and Ana Lara. The performance was created to celebrate
Magali Lara’s Historias de Casa (House Histories) exposition at Los Talleres and to
emphasize aspects of quotidian social life that women have traditionally imbued with
meaning, such as sisterhood.
50
Documentation of the 1984 performance Creación
(Creation), which was organized by the Tlacuilas y Retrateras (Women Scribes and
Portraitists) group, was presented. Interestingly, Women Scribes and Portraitists is
most well-known for its performance La fiesta de XV años (The quineceañera), which was

49
Mayer, “Docucuentos,” n.p.
50
Mayer, “Celebración.”
93
also organized in 1984 and whose documentation was likewise included in this section
of the retrocollective.
When Women Scribes and Portraitists formed in 1983, its goal was to investigate
women artists in Mexico – their art practices and the issues they faced – and to create
artwork based on what they were learning.
51
The quienceañera was the largest-scale and
most prominent work of Women Scribes and Portraitists. The performance was based
on the image and ritual of the traditional quinceañera party and, in particular, the
woman’s role within the party.
52
For the group’s performance, which was held on the
patio at San Carlos, the participants, or quinceañera bridesmaids, were artists who had
designed their own dresses. One dress was missing its chastity sash, and one was
covered in handprints. Nahum B. Zenil was the performance godfather, and Raquel
Tibol was the godmother. Tibol’s participation ultimately led to a humorous encounter,
about which Maris Bustamante and Mayer published a letter in Unomásuno that August.
Tibol called Mayer and asked her to redact the letter, a request which Mayer ultimately
refused.
53
In this section of the retrocollective, the short video “La mítica fiesta de XV
años” (2011) from contemporary artist Liz Misterio accompanied the quienceañera
party documentation. Misterio’s video attempted to reconstruct the performance 27
years later by animating its form and content through participant interviews and

51
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 29.
52
Cordero, et. al., 64.
53
Mayer, Rosa chillante, 30–31.
94
reflections. Misterio has described the piece as a “reconstruction of the memory of the
event, of which hardly any documentation exists.”
54

Documentation of the 2012 performance Maternidades secuestradas (Abducted
maternities) was included alongside Misterio’s video and the quienceañera party
documentation. For Abducted maternities, which was organized as part of the Taller de
Activismo y Arte Feminista (Feminist Art and Activism Workshop), Mayer and her
colleagues held a series of intimate dinners, conversations, and social networks. This
series ended with the demonstration Protesta del día después on the day after Mother’s
Day is celebrated in Mexico. For the demonstration, participants wore fake bellies and
aprons while holding signs that made public their responses to issues related to
maternity. Mayer had aggregated these responses from Facebook, where she asked the
group participants, who eventually totaled nearly 1,200, to complete the following
phrase, “Una maternidad secuestrada es…” (“An abducted maternity is…”).
55
The
retrocollective presented photographs of the performance and demonstration in
conjunction with the aprons and placards from the demonstration. Accompanying such
documentation was a monitor that museum-goers could use to respond in their own
words to the eponymous phrase. While the piece was reactivated in part through these
participatory responses, it was also reactivated at multiple points during the exhibition.

54
Misterio, n.p. The video, which is available on Youtube (see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCeWU2ihk7Y), was originally created with documents from the
Ana Victoria Jiménez Archive for the 2011 exhibition Mujeres: ¿y qué más? at the Universidad
Iberoamericana.
55
Mayer, “Maternidades secuestradas.”
95
For instance, Mayer invited the public to take part in the protest, wear the aprons, and
hold a placard that discussed issues of motherhood in relation to the art world, in
particular (Figure B13).
56

A substantial amount of work created under the Mothers! project of Black Hen
Powder was also included in this section. Fifteen letters were shown from Carta a mi
madre and a video recording was projected of Madre por un día. The ventriloquist
dummy that Mayer and Bustamante presented in Madre por un día was displayed as
well. Known as Maruca (la mala madre), and presented alongside the accompanying
Madre por un día footage, the doll was used in performances until 2005. The
documentation of Black Hen Powder’s 1983 performance, Receta de Gallina Negra para
hacerle el mal de ojo a los violadores, o el respeto al derecho del cuerpo ajeno es la paz,
which was discussed in detail in Chapter 1, was also presented.
Documentation of an earlier project of Mayer’s, Traducciones: un diálogo
internacional de mujeres artistas (Translations: An international women’s dialogue) was
included in this section as well. Translations was organized between 1979 and 1980 as
the final part of Mayer’s master’s thesis “Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool.” For
the project, Mayer facilitated an exchange of experience and dialogue across borders.
Translations brought three women with whom Mayer had worked at the Woman’s
Building in Los Angeles – Jo Goodwin, Denise Yarfits, and Florence Rosen – to Mexico.

56
Mayer, “Tres días seguidos de protestas desde la maternidad.”
96
Together with Mayer and women artists from Mexico, Goodwin, Yarfits, and Rosen gave
conferences and participated in group workshops. In addition to Mayer, the women
from Mexico included Lilia L. de Mayer (Mónica’s mother), Ana Victoria Jiménez, Yan
Castro, Mónica Kubli, Ester Zavala, Marcela Olabarrieta, Yolanda Andrade, Ana Cristina
Zubilaga, and Magali Lara. Andrea Giunta has described the transitory community that
emerged from the activities of Translations – greeting the artists at the airport, sharing
meals, presenting slides at museums, and exhibiting documentation of the project at
the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles – and emphasized its relevance then and now:
“[It] also anticipates micropolitical community programs of dialogue organized in
relation to a common objective, where each person’s sphere of pertinence is disrupted
to immerse one’s self in a time shared with others that transforms preconceived
notions, perceptions and thus broadens knowledge through living with others.”
57
Mayer
has recalled, however, that at the time few people understood the work of Translations
as art.
58

Following the dialogical nature of Translations, and as a testament to Mayer’s
prolific writing for print publications in Mexico City, a selection of pieces that Mayer
wrote for El Universal were presented. From February 8, 1992, there was “Sospechoso
grupo de artistas feministas convoca a la Bienal ‘Olga Tamayo’.” From July 22, 1992,
there was “Orozcomanía.” Lastly, from January 11, 1993, there was “Viva la reforma del

57
Giunta, “Feminist Disruptions in Mexican Art, 1975–1987,” n.p.
58
Mayer, “Weaving Ties of Mutual Understanding, Shaping Publics,” 170.
97
Paseo de la Reforma.”
59
Building upon the dialogical aspects of Translations as well as
the newsprint writings, one more project was exhibited to conclude this section of the
exhibition, the feminist art historical project Archiva: obra maestras del arte feminista
(Archiva: Masterpieces of feminist art in Mexico). Archiva is a mini archive that contains
76 pieces selected from Mayer and Lerma’s I Draw My Line archive. The pieces were
selected for their importance as works of feminist art in Mexico “in order to question
established canons and mechanisms of legitimization.”
60

The dialogical nature with which Mayer’s work is imbued, as Cordero has
explained and as evidenced through the three projects discussed above, is more broadly
manifest in “the many formats favoring communicated and affective interchange that
are part of her [Mayer’s] art practice, both individual and collective; in her insistence
on using clear, direct, simple, playful language, and a conversational tone.”
61

“Toward another erotics: art, life, affect”
The second main section of the retrocollective included 26 pieces that were generally
from the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Toward another erotics: art, life, affect” was thus
designed to suggest “the linkage of the personal with politics and aesthetics in Mayer’s
work.”
62
The decades addressed in this section are marked by Mayer’s participation in

59
Mayer, “Piezas para periódico.”
60
Cordero, et al., 46.
61
Cordero, “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica Mayer’s Artistic Project,” 39.
62
Cordero, et al., 41.
98
Black Hen Powder, the birth of her children, the death of her mother, her development
as an educator, and the creation of I Draw My Line.
63
Most of the pieces in this section
are based in some form of drawing or collage.
To begin, the blue-hued series of prints from 1982, Concepción (Conception) and
Separación (Separation) were motivated by Mayer’s physical sensations (Figure B14).
64

The collage aspect of these two prints provides a mixture of facial images, text, and
stitching. Erin L. McCutcheon has described Mayer’s drawings as approaching “the
conceptual divide between the practices of performance and drawing, allowing for the
assertion of action, agency and duration into works of previously caged off in the realm
of what has been traditionally considered intimate, distanced and passive.”
65
In this
series in particular, the viewer glimpses at action and agency through the collage
aspects of the prints in their gesture of action in form as well as the figurative gesture
of action in the print titles.
These two prints were followed by the 7-panel polyptych Diario de las violencias
cotidianas (Diary of everyday violence) from 1984 – each panel represented a day of the
week. This series sought a less provocative strategy than, for example, Nuestra señora
and La dolorosa. For the polpytych, Mayer utilized a series of photographs that depict
her and her child, an illusion to the Virgin, instead of using images of the Virgin. The

63
Cordero has discussed these biographical aspects of Mayer’s life in “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica
Mayer’s Artistic Project.” For more detail, see page 36 of Cordero’s chapter.
64
Mayer, “Concepción y Separación.”
65
McCutcheon, “Drawing Time: Mónica Mayer’s Two-Dimensional Performance,” 143.
99
images and the drawings that engage them refer to domestic labor, which Mayer’s life
was engulfed in at the time as her children were young.
66
The decision to include
herself in the images in place of images of the Virgin emphasizes the conceptual nature
of the series, enabling Mayer’s interlocutors to focus on the ideas that interested her
instead of responding to perceived criticism of traditional religious symbols. This
strategy echoes the sentiment of engagement and dialogue that permeates Mayer’s
work: “Confrontation is sometimes inevitable, but as a long-term political strategy, I
will always prefer dialogue, which over time produces more profound change.”
67

The drawing Derrumbe from the 1986 series Mapas, was presented in
conjunction with the drawing titled Mi vientre and Lengua, No, Príncipe, and Puta íncipe,
which were all parts of the exhibition Novela rosa o me agarró el arquetipo. During this
period, Mayer had been reading about female archetypes from authors such as Marina
Warner and Erich Neumann. The title of the exhibition was intended to be a response
to the title of Nuemann’s book, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. These
drawings reveal the many dimensions of Mayer’s practice, as noted previously by
McCutcheon, given that Mayer had begun to integrate words as graphic elements into
her drawings and to transform them into active images by integrating her own picture,
in various positions, through photocopied collage. The elements depicted in the pieces

66
Specifically, Mayer recalls: “You can leave the dishes unwashed or the bigger ones’ clothes dirty, but
caring for a small child requires constant attention, every day and at all hours” (Diario de las violencias
cotidianas”).
67
Mayer, “Diario de las violencias cotidianas.”
100
for this exhibition incite reflection on and complication of the many female archetypes,
especially those related to motherhood. Mayer’s own relation to these works might be
suggested by her ambivalent response to another series included in this section – Algo
como el agua – about which she has recalled, “I don’t know what to say about these
pieces. Are they about anxiety? Do they have something to do with relinquishing
control and letting go? Are they referring to destruction and resilience? To life and
death? To vulnerability? To eroticism?”
68
In the Algo como el agua series (Figure B15),
the dark hues and ambivalent expressions gesture toward Mayer’s own questions. The
series’ abstract form and figures as well as the individual metaphorical titles magnify
the gesture of the hues and expressions.
The remaining drawings and prints in this section included the photocopy-based
print Te amo from 1989 and, from the same year, the drawings Cinco viajes and Hachazo
from the De niñas y pesadillas series. There was the 1990 drawing Su lengua tibia, from
the series Los naufragios del cuerpo and the prints Tres and Cuatro, also from that series.
The drawing Necesito was from 1997. Lastly, from 1998, there were the five prints
Afuera, Bardeada, Casitas 1, Casitas 2, and Casitas 3 as well as the drawing Silla y muro.
In terms of performance and documentary installation, this section exhibited the
video of Las bodas y el divorcio, the project that Mayer organized with Víctor Lerma over
a 35-year period, beginning in 1980 and ending the year before the retrocollective

68
Mayer, “Los naufragios del cuerpo.”
101
opened. The installation digitized and aggregated many of the intimate pieces that
Mayer and Lerma have collaborated on since they met and joined forces. The footage
from the video included pieces such as “Foto falsa a 10 años de la boda,” “Dualidad
virtual,” “Ni tu título, ni mi título,” and “La cena.” This section also included video
footage and photographs of the 1993 performance Del tiempo, la muerte y los huesitos de
la tía Anita, which Mayer organized at Ex Teresa in conjunction with Alain Kerriou,
Gala Sánchez Renero, Adán Lerma, Yuruen Lerma, Hugo Heredia, and Javier Bolaños.
Tía Anita or aunt Anita, Mayer’s paternal grandfather’s sister, deeply influenced Mayer,
and she was the first member of that side of Mayer’s family to be born in Mexico (1902).
Mayer has noted that Anita “was always her accomplice.”
69
To close this section, the
exhibition presented a documentary installation of Huesitos (Little bones), a project that
continued honoring aunt Anita and was carried out between 1992 and 1995. The
graphic work for Huesitos, which was shown for the retrocollective, was largely created
under the project Aquerotipo and through Black Hen Powder. Interestingly, the
retrocollective was the first occasion that all of the work related to Mayer’s aunt Anita
had been presented together (Figure B16).
70
As such, it is notable for its demonstration
of how the same theme can be approached and represented across media.

69
Mayer, “Huesitos.”
70
Mayer, “Huesitos.”
102
“The personal is political, performative, and public”
The third and final section of the retrocollective referenced the well-known feminist
notion that “the personal is political” and extended it to performance- and socially-
oriented art practice. “The personal is political, performative, and public” consisted of
nine pieces, many of which were reactivated specifically for the retrocollective. The
section was intended to reveal “the dialogical conception of the oeuvre in relation to
different publics and socio-political contexts.”
71
This section is distinguished from the
others for its attention to the context of the retrocollective. For instance, it engaged
such questions as how an archive might be installed for an exhibition in an art museum
and how performances are reactivated or created anew as part of and for an exhibition.
Considering the retrocollective, Mayer had addressed these queries in a letter to María
Laura Rosa in 2015. She wrote:
Now, the complicated part of these pieces, as in any performance, is putting
them in a museum space afterwards. It’s like trying to put your foot in a shoe
that’s four sizes too small. How do you reflect personal experiences and learning
processes on a wall? Do you evoke a piece by basing yourself on its
documentation? Do you reactivate it by seeking its essence, even though it takes
on another form? Do you reinterpret it, or present its vestiges?
72

With these questions in mind, Mayer and Cordero used this section to present and
engage with Mayer’s performative work and parts of the archive. Importantly, they did
so in a manner that brought attention to such queries themselves.

71
Cordero, “When in Doubt…Ask: Mónica Mayer’s Artistic Project,” 41.
72
Mayer, “Fragments of a Correspondence,” 199.
103
The archive of I Draw My Line was represented through a selection of its archival
material (Figure B17). Mayer and Lerma had begun the I Draw My Line project in 1989
as an artist-run gallery. Yet it is most known for its archive, which Mayer and Lerma
started a few years later. However, they have organized projects and performances
under the moniker. Thus, to introduce and present I Draw My Line was, as Mayer has
noted, one of the principal challenges of the retrocollective: “How you reflect in three
meters a project of 25 years, with so many components? How do you present an archive
in a museum space whose logic is different than the archive’s own? How do you
indicate to the public that the natural habitat of the pieces might be an archive or
center for documentation and that they are still art?”
73
Given these archive-specific
concerns, Mayer and Cordero exhibited a range of work related to I Draw My Line. To
represent its archival aspect, for example, documentation of the art journal Raya:
crítica y debate en las artes visuales was shown. Raya was launched by I Draw My Line in
order to bring together art writing and criticism that was published in the primary
national newspapers, and more recently in blogs, between 1991 and 2015 (Figure
B18).
74
There were also examples such as Hurgando en el archivo and Archivo activo, each
a compendium of material included in Raya but that was organized according to a
specific theme. Hurgando, for instance, included material related to performance,
installation, and women artists.
75
These works and their documentation were mounted

73
Mayer, “El archivo.”
74
Mayer, “El archivo.”
75
Mayer, “El archivo.”
104
and shelved behind acrylic glass as if they were sculptures. The decision to display
these materials behind glass was, in Mayer’s words, an ironic gesture to mask the
archive “as a traditional artwork…in the face of contemporary refusals to accept the
project as art.”
76
Mayer has explained that on its own, Raya is indeed a collection with a
specific hemerographic function for scholars and friends of contemporary Mexican art.
As part of I Draw My Line, on the other hand, Raya takes on I Draw My Line’s
conceptual nature, which is tied to lubricating the art system so that it functions better.
As such, Mayer notes that it should be staged as art to emphasize that nature.
77

Not all of the I Draw My Line materials were presented behind acrylic glass,
however. Some of the archival materials were more interactive. For instance, a 20-
minute video described the timeline and basic information for each piece while
displaying the specific documentation. There was also a computer monitor that played
through part of Pinto mi Raya: un espacio donde las artes visuales suenan, a radio
program led by Mayer and Lerma from 2001 to 2002. The program included interviews
with authors and art museum staff. The monitor also displayed Por amor al arte, the
2002 television workshop that Mayer and Lerma gave on Canal 23 to reflect on the art
system, to form a new network of Mexican artists, and to propose solutions to problems
that they faced in the artworld.
78
For the workshop, they were joined by artists such as
Antonio Ortíz Gritón, José Manuel Springer, and Lorena Wolffer. Ultimately, the

76
Mayer, “El archivo.”
77
Mayer, “El archivo.”
78
Mayer, “Por amor al arte.”
105
workshop had over 300 tele-students who participated through the internet and
telephone across Mexico, from Balacalar, Quintana Roo, and Tijuana to Mérida and
Mexico City.
79

In addition to the archival aspects of I Draw My Line, the projects organized and
reactivated by I Draw My Line were also presented in this section of the retrocollective.
First, there was the documentary installation for I Draw My Line’s project Nuestras
banderas (Our flags), which was based on two distinct pieces, Nuestra bandera (Our flag)
(2003) and Yo no celebro ni conmemoro guerras (I don’t celebrate or commemorate wars)
(2008–to date). These projects were created in collaboration with and were documented
by Antonio Juárez. Moreover, for the retrocollective they were presented in tandem
given their engagement with the flag and performance strategy as well as for their
emphasis on Juaréz’s documentation. Our flag was first performed in 2003 as part of the
Acciones en Ruta project. Mayer and Lerma brought the tattered Mexican flag that had
been hanging in front of their house in Mexico City for over 15 years and asked
participants to help restore it. Mayer has recalled that participants engaged willingly
and with gusto, helping to sew and mend it, which is especially notable given that the
country was in crisis at that time and “many people felt that the country was in
ruins.”
80
During the performance they hung signs that pictured the flag and explained

79
Mayer, “Por amor al arte.”
80
Mayer, “Nuestras banderas.”
106
how people had, upon seeing the flag hanging outside of their door, knocked to ask if it
was the Mexican consulate.
In contrast, for I don’t celebrate or commemorate wars, which was conducted at
Casa del Lago in 2015, Mayer and Lerma created a flag whose primary idea and design
was rooted in a project they had begun in 2008 (Figure B19). For the project, to begin
they created a simple white flag whose serif font read “Yo NO celebro NI conmemoro
GUERRAS” (“I DON’T celebrate OR commemorate WARS”). In addition to making and
displaying the flag, they organized a public performance wherein participants wore
shirts on which was printed the phrase from the flag. The participants sat down and
discussed the idea behind the phrase. Furthermore, they were invited to acknowledge
and share what they celebrate in their daily lives and then form their own salute to the
flag and its significance.
81
The performance has been reactivated in various forms since
the 2008 performance. In fact, in 2010 Mayer noted, “It was a call to reflect and also a
call to action. After a few months, and years, the project has taken its own path,
becoming a participatory performance that has flourished due to the engagement of a
willing public.”
82

The performance Abrazos (Hugs) was reactivated for the retrocollective
exhibition. It was first organized by Mayer and Lerma in 2008 and 2009, in Romania
and Israel, respectively. In its first iterations, Mayer and Lerma promoted the piece

81
Mayer, “Nuestras banderas” and “Nuestra bandera.”
82
Mayer, “Yo no celebro ni conmemoro guerras.”
107
before the event, inviting friends and colleagues to share with them through Facebook
a memory of a significant hug. These memories were recorded as stories, and during the
performance either Mayer or Lerma would read the story while the other performed the
hug with an audience member.
83
At the performance, audience members were also
invited to record their own memories of a particularly significant hug. While some
photographs of the 2008 and 2009 performances were included in this section of the
retrocollective, these photographs were only vestiges of the performance and cannot
account for its intricacy or intimacy. Perhaps the more important aspect of Hugs’
inclusion was its near constant reactivation over the duration of the exhibition. As
Mayer has explained, the inclusion of Hugs presented a challenge in involving a
participatory, public audience in the context of an art museum. Indeed, it is difficult for
photographic documentation hung on a wall to achieve that purpose.
84

With this in mind, the performance was represented by 13 lanyards, each with a
placard that presented five text-based recollections of hugs. Throughout the
exhibition, either Mayer or her accomplices “los Enlaces” (“the Links”) – the student
volunteers who work with the museum in order to generate dialogue with visitors
– would engage museum-goers who would then read one of the stories of a hug from
the placard and perform the hug with Mayer or the Link who was facilitating the
exchange. Interestingly, the manner in which the performance was conducted changed

83
Mayer, “Abrazos.”
84
Mayer, “Abrazos, los de ahora.”
108
over the course of the exhibition. The first reactivation of Hugs occurred during the
retrocollective’s inauguration. By the exhibition’s end, Mayer had reactivated the piece
over 40 times.
85
The performance was often conducted in a circle, the stories read
collectively, and the museums-goers shared their own recollections instead of reading
one from a placard.
The documentary and interactive installation of Justicia y democracia. A fin de
cuentas, no nos interesa ni la masa ni el poder (Justice and democracy. After all, we are not
interested in crowds or power) occupied a large corridor of the retrocollective. The
participatory piece was first presented in 1995 at the Museo de Arte Moderno as part of
Fuego, masa y poder. En torno a Elías Canetti. At the retrocollective, documentation of
the 1995 performance and its participatory components was presented behind acrylic
glass, and a facsimile of those components was displayed openly so that the public
could interact with and handle the materials. Behind the display, in large text on the
wall the title “JUSTICIA Y DEMOCRACIA” (“JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY”) was printed.
Below that, printed in smaller font was the question, “Hoy, en este México
resquebrajado por la crisis y el escepticismo ¿qué acción concreta tomarías para llegar a
este utopía?” (“Today, in this Mexico fractured by the crisis and skepticism, what
concrete action would you take to reach this utopia?”). On a table centered under the
question, there were textual objects with which viewers could engage in order to learn

85
For more information on the enlaces program, see the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo
website (https://muac.unam.mx/mediacion); Mayer, “Abrazos, los de ahora.”
109
more about the 1995 piece and its current relevance (Figure B20). For example, there
was a copy of the diary that Mayer kept during the 1995 exhibition, a notebook in which
museum-goers could pen their responses to the question on the wall, and a book of
documents created by the group Los Abajofirmantes in order to reflect upon the
formation of the FONCA. By the end of the exhibition, over 800 responses had been
collected in the notebook.
In line with the latter reflection and criticism about the FONCA, this section
presented the emblematic candle and documentation for I Draw My Line’s 2013 piece,
Con el FONCA y sin el FONCA (With the FONCA and without the FONCA). The FONCA, or
Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (the National Foundation for the Arts and
Culture) was created in March, 1989 to promote artistic and cultural production, to
support culture programming, to increase cultural activities, and to preserve the
cultural patrimony of Mexico. Scholars such as Ignacio Sánchez Prado have been
similarly critical of the FONCA’s relationship with the arts in Mexico.
86
Mayer has noted
that with these pieces, she intended to demonstrate that in the face of the crowd and
the masses, it is “best to strengthen our personal and our community ties.”
87

The performance Belleza, arte y precariedad (Beauty, art, and precarity) also
known as El apapacho estético (The esthetic affair), is included in this section in the
retrocollective, which makes sense given its content. Its inclusion is unique due to the

86
See Sánchez Prado, “La ‘generación’ como ideología cultural.”
87
Mayer, “Justicia y democracia.”
110
fact that it was organized specifically for the exhibition and took place on May 22
nd

– during the mid-point of the retrocollective’s calendar. The esthetic affair formed out
of a proposal from Ignacio Plá and Andrea Bravo, who work with the Museo
Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo’s Departamento de Programas Públicos. The
performance was first supported by Diego Sexton and his team Brigadas de Belleza
Itinerante, a group of estheticians who volunteer their beauty services in Mexico City.
The Brigade works with groups of vulnerable women and offers them hair, make-up,
and salon services. Ultimately, Mayer collaborated with Sexon as well as Olga Nidia
Valenica to carry out the project at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo.
For the performance, museum entrance participants were first invited to discuss
precarity in art and respond to questions such as “Do you live exclusively from your art
production,” “Has your worked received the recognition it deserves,” and “Have you
ever abandoned art or have you thought about doing so?” Once inside the museum and
registered for salon services, participants entered the “Before and After” booth for their
portrait to be taken. While in the booth, they were asked if they had ever been slighted
by cultural media. Then, in the exhibition space Sexton and a team of 40 brigade
members offered various esthetic services, from haircuts and color to styling and make-
up application (Figure B21). Once “embellished,” participants returned to the booth for
their “after” portrait, at which point they were asked what they would do to combat
111
precarity in art and what the media has done to help them.
88
To conclude the
performance, participants engaged in a discussion led by Vivian Abenshush and Pilar
Villela, and they cut a cake upon which was written the phrase often attributed to Marie
Atoinette, “Let them have cake!”
89

Similar to The esthetic affair, the 8-hour piece Una jornada completa (A full day)
was organized as the retrocollective’s unique closing performance. It occurred on the
closing day of the exhibition and provided an end-point for the evolution of Clothesline,
which expanded exponentially during the retrocollective. Given the unfortunate but
continued relevance of the questions raised by Clothesline, in conjunction with the
public’s response, it was thus transformed into Megaclothesline, which included over
5,000 new responses. More responses were added to Megaclothesline a month before the
retrocollective closed (Figure B22). For A full day, participants were invited to read
responses that hung on the clothesline while engaging in the work of Tejiendo Cómplices
– a group that seeks to activate social ties by visualizing the rejection of sexual
harassment – and Lana Desastre – a guerilla crochet crew – in order to alter
Megaclothesline and reconsider its past and present relevance.
90
Thus, the 8-hour
workday was spent “[c]rocheting or learning to crochet and sew. Talking. Sharing stories.
Reading responses. Interacting with the public. Laughing. Hugging” – all of this in order

88
Mayer, “Apapacho estético.”
89
Mayer, “Apapacho estético.”
90
Each of these two collectives had also participated in the exhibition programming prior to this closing
performance.
112
to “make public our experience and dampen a little bit of the pain of violence toward
women.”
91
The resulting Megaclothesline was a three-dimensional collage of written
responses and crochet work (Figure B23). While the doors to the retrocollective closed
after the A full day performance, during its nearly six-month life in Mexico City, 2016
– from the beginning of February to the end of July – the retrocollective’s breadth and
depth extended beyond the works displayed for the exhibition and those included in the
catalogue.

Six retrocollective tours
The presentation and programming of the retrocollective exceed the material included
in the catalogue. In addition to the catalogue, the many tours and digital articles
accompanying the retrocollective form an integral part of the exhibition. On the blog
that Mayer maintained in conjunction with the retrocollective, she has discussed these
materials and goings-on as “the works that escaped the exhibition hall.”
92
This part of
the chapter focuses on six tours that were organized as part of the retrocollective.
The agenda of programs that were organized over the duration of the exhibition
were indeed important to its form and function. These programs were conceived out of
an impulse that was a driving force of the exhibition’s initial conception. As Mayer has
explained, “From the beginning, Karen Cordero and I did not claim that the exhibition

91
Mayer, “Una jornada completa.”
92
Mayer, “Las obras que se escaparon de la sala.”
113
would be an end…it had to be kept alive. So, given the option of having more space and
less time, or the opposite, we opted for more time. This allowed us to do activism from
the museum, add strong pedagogical content to the exhibition, and give it a life that
echoes the performative essence of my work.”
93
Over the six-month life of the
retrocollective, Mayer and Cordero hosted guided visits, a Wikithon, student-focused
discussions, performances, conferences, round tables, and demonstrations.
The six guided tours in particular added new context, meaning, and perspective
to the retrocollective. Each emphasized the logic that underpinned the exhibition. On
May 26
th
, for example, Víctor Lerma gave a tour of the retrocollective to reflect upon it
and discuss his significant involvement with it. As Mayer has noted, “The presence of
Víctor Lerma in this exhibition is as constant as it has been in my life…in short, we
have been seeing and living life together.”
94
Lerma has documented and photographed
Mayer’s projects for over four decades. He has facilitated the showing of many of
Mayer’s exhibitions. With Lerma, Mayer has organized numerous projects, not to
mention their creation of I Draw My Line in 1989. Shortly after Lerma’s tour, on June 4
th

Mayer and Lerma offered a jointly guided tour of the retrocollective. For the tour, they
reactivated the performance Dualidad virtual, for which they loosely bind themselves
together with a piece of yarn tied to one of each person’s forefingers. Mayer recalls
their guided tour and reflects on the significance of the yarn and its difficulties: “As in

93
Mayer, “Las obras que se escaparon de la sala.”
94
Mayer, “Recorridos especiales.”
114
our relationship and life itself, we are entangled.”
95
During the tour, Lerma wore a shirt
with the declaration “I am Mónica,” and on Mayer’s shirt was printed “I am Víctor.”
The tour allowed Mayer and Lerma to bring to light the intimacy between their art and
lives. How do you separate yourself from the people with whom you create art and with
whom you create life? Moreover, how do you separate art and life? This tour gestured
toward the intimacy with which Mayer approaches each aspect as well as their
interconnected nature, to which her work draws attention.
Marisol Gassé, as Madame Pedie Curie, led a tour of the retrocollective on June
16
th
. Gassé began with Clothesline and then humorously engaged the public with the
participatory work of the retrocollective.
96
On June 30
th
, Julia Antivilo gave a guided
tour and performative lecture for the exhibition. Antivilo first became acquainted with
Mayer during her graduate studies in Latin American feminist art history. She
continued investigating Mayer’s work after her graduate studies and is also a
performance artist. During her guided lecture, Antivilo focused on Mayer’s writings and
text-based work. She photocopied many of Mayer’s newspaper columns and articles,
such as those published in El Universal, and placed them on the exhibition floor. She
was also dressed in Mayer’s words – sheets of paper on which Mayer’s writings were
printed adhered to her body and dress (Figure B24). Antivilo’s word-dress emphasized
just how intimate the relationship between art and writing as well as form and function

95
Mayer, “Recorridos especiales.”
96
Mayer, “Recorridos especiales.”
115
can and, perhaps, should be. At one point during her tour, Antivilo sang “Gracias a la
vida” by Violeta Parra. Then, she read aloud excerpts from the photocopies of Mayer’s
writings and invited participants to do the same.
Katnira Bellow, a fellow artist who Mayer has known for over 25 years, gave a
tour on July 14
th
. Bellow focused on the private lives of the artworks in order to provide
a real-time discussion of their context and relevance. However, Bellow did not
emphasize the feminist context of Mayer’s work, a theme that many writings
surrounding the exhibition – such as the catalogue – have described. She prioritized
what the works contributed at their time of making in terms of material, technique, and
content.
97
Often, Mayer used material and techniques that followed the logic of
collectivity, which although in part rooted in the group generation is notable in Mayer’s
case since she has been of the few artists to continue emphasizing collectivity at
multiple levels of her practice.
The last of these tours was given on July 28
th
by María Rodríguez Cruz, whose
artistic intervention into Mayer’s The normal was included in the retrocollective. In line
with her piece in the exhibition, for the tour she invited participants to wear Peña
Nieto masks that resembled the various expressions included in her original piece.

97
Mayer, “Recorridos especiales.”
116
Fifty-two more tours
Distinct from the six tours mentioned above were the tours led by Mayer that were
associated with Si tiene dudas…El tour (If you have doubts…The tour). This work brings
attention to the name of the retrocollective and the work Parasite performance, from
which the retrocollective title comes. Mayer has explained that the original objective of
Parasite performance was to forge a bridge between artists and spectators. During the
piece, however, she realized that “the important thing was that it was a way to learn to
see through the eyes of others.”
98
What Mayer learned through the first iteration of
Parasite performance is something she sought to emphasize throughout the
retrocollective. To begin, its title reiterates that point by suggesting action and
dialogue, “if you have doubts…ask.” The retrocollective’s operational logic echoes the
sentiment of the titular phrase. As Mayer has described, it proposes “art as a collective
process and not as the product of a ‘genius.’”
99
Like the dialogue that results from the
invocation “to ask,” artmaking is participatory and collaborative; it is driven by a
collective-oriented process.
If you have doubts…The tour was born out of a desire to widen the breadth of
performance with regard to the exhibition. Many of the performances that formed part
of the retrocollective were presented through documentary photographs, video, and
installations. Although Mayer and her colleagues worked to diversify the ways in which

98
Mayer, “Si tiene dudas…el tour.”
99
Mayer, “Si tiene dudas…el tour.”
117
they presented performance throughout the exhibition – whether as part of the
retrocollective or as a programmed extension of it – Mayer noted that presenting so
many performances that way in the museum was irritating her such that an
“uncontrollable craving arose for revenge and to perform the exhibition itself.”
100
If you
have doubts…The tour was initially developed as a guide to the retrocollective. However,
Mayer has written that after the first tour she gave, she realized that the interactions
produced by the tour were something else entirely. It allowed her to view her own work
in a different way and to have fun: “from that moment on I considered the tours as a
piece.”
101
She realized that the tours were, for her, a performance. The first tour was for
a group of students from UAM. Most of the tours lasted an hour and a half, and at the
end of the tour Mayer and the participants would go sit and chat for another hour.
Other tours included students from UNAM, COLMEX, la Esmeralda, or la Ibero;
museum patrons and friends; and feminist groups.
By the retrocollective’s closing, Mayer had given 52 tours as part of If you have
doubts…The tour. The Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo said that no artist
up to that point had given that many exhibition tours for their own work.
102

100
Mayer, “Si tiene dudas…el tour.”
101
Mayer, “Si tiene dudas…el tour.”
102
Mayer, “Si tiene dudas…el tour.”
118
Retrocollective strategy
Art and pedagogy
When Mayer and Cordero were conceiving of the retrocollective and its programming,
Mayer recalls that they first asked to meet with the Museo Universitario de Arte
Contemporáneo’s three educational programming departments – Enlace y Mediación,
Programas Públicos, and Campus Expandido. They worked with Enlace y Mediación to
facilitate the participatory works of the retrocollective, such as Clothesline and
Abducted maternities. Enlace y Mediación also helped organize the guided tours and
Mayer’s 52 tours for If you have doubts…The tour.
103
The students who worked as the
Links in the exhibition space were also an asset to Mayer and her colleagues because
they engaged with the public and helped respond to questions. They wore pink shirts
on the back of which was printed, “ENLACE, MUAC, pregúntame, es gratis!” (“Link,
MUAC, ask me something, it’s free!”).
With the department for Programas Públicos, they organized the performance
The esthetic affair, as described earlier, and El tendedero: taller de arte feminista. For the
workshop, Mayer and Cordero discussed the previous iterations of Clothesline, their
ideas about feminist art, and the goals of the workshop, which sought to provide a
space to reflect of the function of Clothesline, to converse with other artists on the topic
of sexual assault, and to see what ideas would be brought to light. The workshop was

103
Mayer, “De arte y pedagogía en una exposición feminista.”
119
guided by the same questions that were used in the retrocollective’s Clothesline
installation. The responses revealed that many cases of assault come from early in life,
that this is a problem of the present, that the retrocollective itself and most of its
programming was taking place in a university environment – which is often a place for
discussion about assault, and that individual action can be taken to address and
perhaps improve these issues.
The most obviously pedagogical events were organized with the Campus
Expandido (Expanded Campus) program. Together, Mayer, Cordero and the staff
organized 10 events, including a Wikithon, conferences, exhibitions, and roundtables.
These events, each deserving of a close examination in a separate project, indicate the
extent to which Mayer and Cordero shaped the retrocollective with a unique logic. As
Mayer has written, organizing these events “was a way to generate artistic and political
dialogue.”
104
Indeed, the opportunity to generate and engage in dialogue and
conversation around art, feminism, and feminist art in Mexico was a goal of their
approach.

Outside the museum
Apart from the actual museum space, Mayer’s work was shown in the Centro de
Documentación Arkeia, also known as Arkeia, the contemporary art library associated

104
Mayer, “De arte y pedagogía en una exposición feminista.”
120
with the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo. In Arkheia, a collection of
Mayer’s publications was displayed alongside the materials for Archiva: masterpieces of
feminist art, which Mayer had donated to the museum in 2013.
105

The museum website maintains a well-designed framework to provide details
about its exhibitions. Here, and almost four years after the exhibition opened, one finds
a brief but well-documented introduction to Mayer’s retrocollective. The page shows
five images: a close-up of the pink papers of Clothesline, the large-format image of the
With the FONCA candle, a front-facing view of the documentation of Abducted
maternities, a frame of the television upon which plays Mother for a day adjacent to the
Maruca (la mala madre) doll and an image of Mayer in an embrace during a performance
of Hugs. From this page, visitors can download the bilingual exhibition catalogue.
Given that the catalogue is an important aspect of the retrocollective and has played a
prominent role in conceiving of its logic and goals, that it can be downloaded at no
additional cost is notable.
For the duration of the exhibition, Mayer maintained the If you have doubts…ask
blog (Figure B25). Its inception was conceived of as a crucial component of the
exhibition. Its function was to document the object-based works presented in the
retrocollective, the (re)activations of performative and participatory work, the new
work created for the exhibition, and the educational programming. For the blog, Mayer

105
Mayer, “Las obras que se escaparon de la sala.”
121
wrote 82 texts. She describes it as a place where one can learn about “the work and
material in the exhibition, described and contextualized, as well as the dialogues
between various interlocutors, including the public.” As such, the blog serves as the
innerworkings of the exhibition for the public – those who attended in person and
those who only accessed it through the internet.
106
Furthermore, Mayer’s work for the
blog has been critical for the development of this dissertation.
For the dedicated viewer who clicks through the matrix of the blog, section by
section and article by article, there is much insight provided into the retrocollective
and its presentation of Mayer’s work – the “innerworkings” of the exhibition, indeed.
Because Mayer was updating the blog in real-time throughout the retrocollective, the
programming, events, and goings-on at the museum can be understood in a new light,
a different light than if they had only been attended in person. In this way, the blog
functions as a more expansive catalogue of the retrocollective. Although it does not
contain essays, or art historical jargon, it is able to touch upon the many ideas and
themes presented in the catalogue but in plain language. Moreover, it is written by
Mayer and in a reflective tone, so it begs different questions than the uniquely curated
essays in the catalogue. At times, the writings take the tone of a personal diary. These
qualities all further illustrate the importance of relating art and pedagogy given the
open, accessible, and didactic nature of El blog.

106
Mayer, “Inicio.”
122
The Editatón de mujeres artistas 2016 (2016 Editathon of women artists) was
organized during the exhibition with support from the Museo Universitario de Arte
Contemporáneo’s Expanded Campus program. While it was organized at the museum,
its work took place in the digital sphere on Wikipedia. It was part of a larger event
organized by Wikimedia, the third annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia editathon. On
March 5
th
, Mayer and participants gathered to create, edit, and add to 73 entries for
women artists in Mexico. In doing so, the event contributed to a larger direct
intervention into art, art history, history, and social practice. This event, the museum
website and digital catalogue, as well as El blog do not reside in the physical museum
space. Their function and access transforms the retrocollective into a multimedia
project. Each has endured in the digital sphere after the exhibition’s close. And so, the
retrocollective remains alive and active, if only in a different form.

Conclusion
Then, what distinguishes the retrospective from the retrocollective? Art exhibitions
notably hinge upon a network of relationships between artist(s), curator(s), and
museum or gallery. In this case, the retrocollective was the larger outcome of the
efforts of Mayer, Cordero, and the museum. Within their operational relationships,
especially that of Mayer and Cordero, a retrocollective logic was at play. This logic
differs from the ways in which artists and curators have often worked in the production
of art exhibitions. Cordero has explained this distinction:
123
I know of many cases where artists complain that curators are distanced from
their work, or curators complain that artists have strong opinions about the
decisions they make. In this sense, I really think that this [exhibition] was a
collective work process…it was more of a dialogue, actually, and this itself is a
feminist principle.
107

Her work with Mayer was not centered on a specific forced narrative of Mayer as artist,
as genius artist, as suffering artist, or even as feminist artist, although she is and has
defined herself as the latter. Instead, it was centered on a dialogue-based relationship
between she and Mayer and with the public; it was centered on an opportunity to
engage in conversation, listen, and learn. Mayer has noted that from the beginning of
the project, maintaining an educational aspect was important to her.
108
That
pedagogical intention is, for Mayer, what made the exhibition a feminist exhibition: “It
was not only its theme, or the works, but the manner in which it was conceived, the
context of an institution’s relation to education.”
109
As such, the relationship that was
fostered among the three teams of the museum’s educational programming department
became increasingly important. This is to say that the exhibition’s retrocollective logic
– the manner in which it was conceived, the manner in which it intervened in an
institution for the purpose of education – emphasized dialogue, conversation, and
education, and especially for Mayer and Cordero, this was rooted in a feminist logic. As
Chapter 1 has suggested, this collectivity seems to be more an intimacy.

107
Cordero, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 178.
108
Mayer, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 179.
109
Mayer, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 179.
124
Nonetheless, the retrocollective logic should be further elucidated. In the
preface of Desire and Excess, which examines museums in a nineteenth-century
context, Jonah Siegel asks, “If the walls of the museum were to vanish, and with them
their labels, what would happen to the works of art that the walls contain, the labels
describe? Would these objects of aesthetic contemplation be liberated to a freedom
they have lost, or would they become so much meaningless lumber?”
110
For Mayer and
Cordero and the logic with which they have lived and worked, the walls of the museum
need not support the work of art. Mayer has on many occasions emphasized that the
retrocollective exhibition, specifically, would not be an end in itself but a means to
something else.
111
She has also reiterated the point that the museum is not the proper
place for her work. Dialogue was an important aspect of the retrocollective so that it
could be as dynamic as possible.
Emphasizing this dynamism meant that Mayer and Cordero had to confront the
historical role of the museum, with which this chapter was opened. “Museums are like
the family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture.”
112

The museum-mausoleum connection has not been watered down since Adorno wrote
his essay, nor was he alone in recognizing the role of the museum. Mayer has explained
that for political artworks there is always the fear that they will lose their political

110
Siegel, xv.
111
She has noted this in “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’” (179) and on her blog for the
exhibition (Si tiene dudas…pregunte. El blog).
112
Adorno, 175.
125
energy and efficacy.
113
She echoes Adorno: “Now I am convinced that a political
exhibition or a retrospective in a museum becomes a grave, in a mausoleum.”
114
Indeed,
Mayer and Cordero’s logic would need to work against that, and it did. Mayer’s
retrocollective, as Griselda Pollock writes, is “an exhibition of an artist who is as active
and creative now, in this very moment, as she has been during a lifetime of work over
forty-plus years. The book is not closed.”
115

In the case of If you have doubts, ask, the content of its introduction and each of
its three main parts – in addition to the participatory nature of many of the artworks
included; the performances that were organized in conjunction with the exhibition; the
many forms of guided tours conducted; the conferences and educational programs that
were held; and its expansive online presence – helped the museum become dynamic
and active. It revitalized the typical decay of the museum turned mausoleum. This
manner of working, while practical, is atypical. Yet for the intentions of Mayer and
Cordero, and to honor their own feminist ethos, it was necessary.

113
Mayer, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 179.
114
Mayer, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 179.
115
Pollock, “Mónica Mayer: Performance, Moment, and the Politics of Life,” 122.
126
Chapter 3. The applied conceptual art project I Draw My
Line (1989–present) and its archive

Introduction
Mónica Mayer’s notion that “an artist’s work is more than producing artworks” takes
shape most notably in the archive that she has developed and maintained with her
partner Víctor Lerma.
1
Mayer and Lerma grew this archive out of their project Pinto mi
Raya (I Draw My Line), which began in 1989 as an artist-run gallery. The project has
assumed many functions in the art world, but most remarkable is its function as an
archive that began in the early 1990s. The archive of I Draw My Line is the focus of this
chapter. I Draw My Line’s form and function have challenged and expanded the
boundaries that constitute an archive, and artwork, and how those function in relation
to history and art practice. I Draw My Line may appear traditional in its collection of
materials (Figure C1), yet it navigates archival and artistic practice in innovative and
paradoxical ways. As this chapter suggests, the archive of I Draw My Line is more than a
collection of art material – it is an active function. Mayer and Lerma have repeatedly
emphasized that I Draw My Line is designed to lubricate the art system “so that it
functions better.”
2
The I Draw My Line archive exemplifies their notion of applied

1
Mayer, “Feminist Artist Statement.”
2
Mayer, “El archivo.”
127
conceptual art through its material collection and by developing archive-based projects
that are ultimately functional.
This study of I Draw My Line reveals collectivity at work in two ways: in the
archival, curatorial, record-keeping function of I Draw My Line’s archive and in the
collaborative nature of the project’s development. As with the projects that were the
focus of the previous two chapters, I Draw My Line is not the result of Mayer’s effort
alone. Specifically, this chapter considers the collaborative effort of Mayer and Lerma
through I Draw My Line. In doing so, it examines the evolution of I Draw My Line into
an archive and analyzes four projects that were created in and through I Draw My Line.
These projects are referred to as archival activations given that they are based in the
archive and, more often than not, engage archival materials. I Draw My Line becomes a
creative subject, and I refer to it as an entity that creates artwork and, indeed, draws
lines. To be clear, though, the artists who are working behind the scenes in I Draw My
Line are Mayer and Lerma. Therefore, I also use their names to refer to the active
subject of the archive. This instance of collectivity is the most intimate of the ones
discussed in this dissertation. Mayer and Lerma are partners in the archive, in art, and
in life. This intimate form of collectivity nearly ceases to be collective; it appears
lucidly as the partnership or the pair. Such a distinction between collectivity and
intimacy – and the point at which the former folds into the latter such that the latter
emerges as another form – while important, is reserved as a discussion for the next and
final chapter.
128
To momentarily return to the form and function of archives, in the Archives of
American Art Journal, Lucy Lippard has written, “Starting an archive is like raising
rabbits. No one is truly prepared for the ramifications.”
3
What are the ramifications of
starting an archive? In the short piece, Lippard departs from the unruly ramifications of
rabbits and archives to briefly recount a meeting on an art and environmental archive
for the Nevada Museum of Art in which someone described an archive as a cultural core
sample, like those geological samples of soil or ice that allow one to interact with what
is beneath the Earth’s surface. It is helpful to think of the archive not only in that way,
but also in the way that has been proposed by Mayer and Lerma. Instead of an archive
that digs up culture and exposes its underside, there is the archive that draws lines. The
ramifications of starting an archive are gestured to, especially in the case of I Draw My
Line, over the next few sections. This point is attended to in more detail in the
concluding chapter. To begin, I offer the below discussion of the context of the archive.

Context
Archive theory and practice
There are archives, and there is the notion of the archive. Archives are based in a
physical place, where governmental, social, or cultural texts and records are kept. The
term archive is derived from Greek, from which the general practice and concept

3
Lippard, “The Open Drawer: Archives for Archives’ Sake,” 11.
129
formed.
4
As Gabriella Giannachi has noted in Archive Everything, archives existed in
ancient Roman and Greek empires, and the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hebrews had
assembled archives too. In 1632, Baldassare Bonifacio explained this in his essay “De
Archivis,” which Lester Born has described as the earliest extant essay on the subject of
archives
5
and which other scholars have said marks the birth of archival science.
6

Bonifacio explained that ancient archives were preserved in the Egyptian city Sais, or so
said a priest according to Plato.
7
He mentioned the archives of the Greeks and the
Romans as well the libraries kept by most nations. These libraries were referred to as
archives of books. He cited the Hebrew library “which was in the temple where the
oracles of the prophets, the acts of the judges, and the deeds of the kings were
preserved.”
8
And even in 1632, Bonifacio suggested that “the institution of archives is
not as new as some have wrongly thought.”
9

Interestingly, T.R. Schellenberg proposed during his series of 1954 Fulbright
lectures that if the average person were asked why archival institutions are established,
especially by governments, they would likely respond, “What are archives and what are
archival institutions?”
10
Schellenberg continued by considering that “if the purposes of
an archival institution were explained to [the person],” the entire question about

4
Schellenberg, 3; 11–12.
5
Born, 226.
6
Giannachi, 6.
7
Bonifacio, 230.
8
Bonifacio, 231.
9
Bonifacio, 232.
10
Schellenberg, 3.
130
archives would probably be disregarded as another example of institutional
extravagance. He concluded, “As for the archives themselves…[the] final query would
more than likely be, ‘Why not burn the stuff?’”
11
Indeed, archival institutions are
ancient, and the practice of maintaining archives is no newer now in the twenty-first
century than it was when Bonifacio elaborated on archival theory and practice in the
seventeenth century. While archival practice and archives as such may not figure in
common parlance, as Schellenberg’s thought suggests, the notion of the archive has
remained present and so too has the drive to archive.
Instead of the verb “archive,” “save” or “record” or “preserve” are more
frequently used in common speech to describe what may be called archival practice. For
example, Alexis Ramsey begins her study of archival practice by declaring: “We save
and in doing so choose. We deem certain items worth of keeping and other items as
bound for the trash.”
12
Every person – to a greater or lesser extent –archives and so too
understands, if intuitively, the notion of the archive. Today, the archive is a significant
area of inquiry for many fields, from information and library sciences to literary and
cultural studies. While the former often asks how archives are formed, preserved, and
made accessible, the latter questions who builds them and for what purposes. Scholars
of literary and cultural studies have often been more concerned with archive theory,
which became increasingly popular during the 1990s and early 2000s, and as a result of

11
Schellenberg, 3.
12
Ramsey, 1.
131
the scholarship that emerged out of that interest the already ambiguous term “archive”
has taken on more meanings. The archive is as much a concept as it is a place; it is “a
repository for items from the past that have been saved, or an archive is a set of stored
documents and records, or the archive is a conceptual way of imagining the present’s
connection to the past.”
13

After Jacques Derrida’s 1994 lecture on the archive was published as Mal
d’archive: une impression freudienne in 1995 and then in English as Archive Fever in 1996,
it would go on to become one of the most frequently cited works on the archive.
Derrida’s reading of the archive is concerned with psychoanalysis, and its French
subtitle directly references Freud. More specifically, it seeks to understand the so-
called archive drive. Derrida builds on Freud’s work to suggest that the drive to archive,
or to collect, organize, and store, is linked to the death drive, which is further linked to
the pleasure principle. According to Derrida, the drive to archive reveals the archive’s
contingent nature, which as Marlene Manoff has noted, is one of Derrida’s most useful
contributions to archive theory. In other words, “the structure of the archive
determines what can be archived and that history and memory are shaped by the
technical methods.”
14

While Derrida’s Archive Fever has been instrumental in bringing the concept of
the archive into a the broader literary and cultural studies discourses, scholars such as

13
Ramsey, 2–3.
14
Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” 12.
132
Carolyn Steedman have not found Derrida’s theorization as helpful, noting that the
archive as metaphor is too broad. Steedman does not set out to critique Derrida, in fact
she has commended his work at various points, but she does contend that the idea of
the archive as well as the actual place of the archive are not like what Derrida proposes:
But the problem for us, using Derrida discussing Freud in order to discuss
Archives, is that an Archive is not very much like human memory, and is not at
all like the unconscious mind…The Archive is not potentially made up of
everything, as is human memory; and it is not the fathomless and timeless place
in which nothing goes away, as is the unconscious.
15

Why mention this debate here? To begin, it highlights the limit of the archive as
metaphor, which may be helpful to understand aspects of archive theory but is less
relevant for discussing archival practice, a point to which Mayer and Lerma’s own
archive draws attention. This is not to suggest that Mayer and Lerma altogether forgo
attention to metaphor in their archival practice. On the contrary, the name of their
archive – I Draw My Line, or Pinto mi raya in the original Spanish – is a compelling and
nuanced metaphor. Yet their archival practice, on the other hand, is quite pragmatic.
As this chapter indicates, such a relationship to metaphor and pragmatism is ultimately
connected to their notion of applied conceptual art.
In “Queer Archival Futures: Case Study Los Angeles,” Ann Cvetkovich has drawn
attention to some of the issues posed by the archive by considering art archives. In
particular, Cvetkovich interrogates the archivist’s responsibility by asking

15
Steedman, “The space of memory: in an archive,” 66–67.
133
What kind of archive [do] we want: a traditional archive with paper documents
and records, or one that uses ephemera to challenge what we mean by the
archive? Inclusion and assimilation into existing archives, or a separate (but
equal) archive? Or do we want an entirely different version of the archive?
16

She turns to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern
California (USC) as an example. Cvetkovich points out that from the vantage of
theoretical critique and queer approaches to archive theory, “visibility is not always
possible or desirable.”
17
The preservation of documents and records related to
traditionally marginalized groups is a goal of the ONE Archives, and as Cvetkovich
notes, the ways in which such materials are archived as well as the structure of the
archive itself must be interrogated given their influence on archival practice. That is,
archival theory seeps into archive practice and should be aligned with the goal of the
archive. Ultimately, Cvetkovich builds upon such proposals. After analyzing two public
exhibitions of the ONE Archives’ collection, she calls upon artists, archivists, and
artist-archivists to intervene in, critique, and transform archives.
Sue Breakell has further developed Cvetkovich’s call by turning to archives
related to the visual arts. Breakell speaks more generally about art archives and
emphasizes that contemporary art archives reflect “not simply the urge to deconstruct”
but also the urge “to build in a way that not only is not monolithic but also is inclusive;
and in a way that can accommodate the self-consciousness of this age.”
18
Breakell, like

16
Cvetkovich, “Queer Archival Futures: Case Study Los Angeles,” n.p.
17
Cvetkovich, “Queer Archival Futures: Case Study Los Angeles,” n.p.
18
Breakell, 1.
134
Cvetkovich, is acutely aware of the contingencies posed by archival theory and practice.
Both scholars encourage artists and archivists, whose roles and practices can involve
similar actions, to remain aware of these contingencies and to act with them in mind.
Mayer visited USC’s ONE National Archives not long after Cvetkovich visited,
but for a different purpose. In 2016, the USC Roski School of Art and Design invited
Mayer to spend a few days at USC and present a lecture. Mayer’s lecture, “Art, Archives,
and Artist’s Archives,” introduced listeners to her work with archives.
19
As Chapter 2
explains, Mayer has collaborated with artists’ archives, based some of her own art on
archival materials, helped organize artists’ archives, and most notably, created with
Víctor Lerma the I Draw My Line archive. The documents, materials, and records of an
archive – as well as the processes and procedures for acquiring and maintaining such
documents, materials, and records – form the backbone of an institution of any size
that helps shape identity and inform culture. In the case of I Draw My Line, this relates
in general to narratives about contemporary Mexican art and feminism. However, such
an institution may also be something larger. Few are the independent artist archives
such as I Draw My Line and the university-sanctioned archives that prioritize the
collection of material related to marginalized groups in comparison to the libraries,
museums, and databases that function as archives. And indeed, decisions involved in

19
Mayer, “Art, Archives, and Artist’s Archives.”
135
the acquisition, organization, preservation, and access to the material contained in
these archives are not neutral.
I Draw My Line may appear traditional in its aggregation of materials. For
example, one of its first archival functions was as an hemeroteca or newspaper archive.
After considering the questions raised by Cvetkovich regarding the archive’s
contingency and ultimate function, one may feel that visibility is not an adequate,
necessary, or ethical goal. Is I Draw My Line’s archival impulse contributing to a
problem, and not a solution, in terms of Cvetkovich’s observation that “visibility is not
always possible or even desirable”?
20
To such questions, which this chapter intends to
answer, I briefly respond by drawing attention to Mayer and Lerma’s gesture of self-
reflexivity and self-consciousness – the archive’s name. The metaphor of drawing lines
is one of selection and decision making; it is also one of bridging. The archive of I Draw
My Line immediately says to those with whom it interacts, “I draw lines! I am an
archive!” In doing so, it draws attention to the fact that Mayer and Lerma are self-
aware and recognize the issues posed by the archive: they do not linger on the notion of
the archive, yet they recognize the profound paradox posed by the archive, and they
engage these issues through practice.

20
Cvetkovich, “Queer Archival Futures: Case Study Los Angeles,” n.p.
136
I Draw My Line begins
In 1989, Mayer and her husband Víctor Lerma established the I Draw My Line gallery as
a space run by and for artists. If, as Edward McCaughan has pointed out, it was
“[f]rustration with the politics and sexism of the Mexican and international art worlds’
schools, galleries, museums, markets, publications, and aesthetics” that motivated the
initial development of alternative art practices such as that of Black Hen Powder, and
then much later of Mayer’s retrocollective, it was the lingering reverberation of that
exclusion that would prompt Mayer and Lerma to open I Draw My Line’s doors.
21
I Draw
My Line created a new structure and practice for navigating that labyrinth.
I Draw My Line’s existence as an artist-run gallery only lasted a few years.
During this time, Mayer and Lerma organized exhibitions that would not have been
possible in other spaces. However, they wanted to better respond to the needs of
Mexican artists and do something more integral. Mayer has highlighted this integrity
when she discussed the gallery’s transition first to a social project and then to its
present function as an archive:
When we began the project in 1989, there was already a long tradition of
‘experimental’ or ‘alternative’ art in Mexico, which was just becoming
institutionalized…Things were going well, but we felt Pinto mi Raya could both
critique and facilitate this process. […] We were very critical of the Fonca, for
example, and formed a group called Los Abajofirmantes with other colleagues
that questioned how the first grants were given (without a project, the jurors
awarded themselves grants, etc.)…we felt we also had to build alternative
institutions, so we started projects like our archive…We knew the problems

21
McCaughan, “Navigating the Labyrinth of Silence,” 49.
137
these activities entailed, so we were in a unique position to facilitate the
relationship between the different actors of the art system.
22

Amy Sara Carroll has described this archival function of I Draw My Line as a “Herculean
collation of all the documentation of Mexican performance and conceptualism,”
suggesting not only that the archive provides evidence for collective and performance
art in a post-1968 Mexico City but also that the archive “recenter[s] it.”
23
Carroll’s
description is no overstatement. I Draw My Line has aggregated an impressive amount
of material related to contemporary art practice in Mexico. This material – the archive
in its traditional, typical form – has allowed for new histories to be told and new
encounters to be imagined. It is the aggregated evidence of a thriving art practice for
which the documentation was dispersed and scattered, not localized and curated. The
activations of this material – the projects based in and through I Draw My Line – have
indeed helped recenter those histories, old and new. These activations are the focus of
the next section, and I preface the section with a discussion of I Draw My Line’s name.
The name hints at the metaphorical gesture that underpins the archival logic of Mayer
and Lerma’s ongoing project.

22
Mayer, “‘Lubricating the System’ and other Feminist Curatorial and Art Dilemmas,” 226.
23
Carroll, 67.
138
I Draw My Line’s archive
What’s in a name
“¡¡¡Pinto mi Raya!!! Frase que, para la cultura popular mexicana, es un signo infinito de
valoraciones…escoja la suya” (“I draw my line!!! A phrase that, in Mexican popular culture,
suggests an infinite number of meanings…choose yours”).
24
In nomenclature, I Draw My
Line occupies a space of gesture: I draw my line, I draw a line, I mark my spot, I
demarcate, I delineate, I paint my streak, I set my limit.
25
“To draw the line” can refer
to gestural lines and traces drawn to form a shape or object, and at the same time, it
can refer to the act of drawing such lines and traces. The latter reference is the one
most emphasized in I Draw My Line’s activations given that they prioritize ongoing
action. In grammatical terms, the literal translation of “Pinto mi raya,” for which the
verb pintar is written in the present tense, includes the gerund form – I am drawing my
line, I am marking the spot, I am painting the streak, I am setting my limit.
While drawing a line and setting a limit can result in separation and distinction,
they also bridge – I am drawing a line between things. This is also to say, I am
connecting things. Carroll has noted this function of I Draw My Line when she
described the project as one that “drew the line resolutely incorporative, reimagining

24
Zúñiga, n.p.
25
There is also the song, “Voy a Pintar Mi Raya” (1999) by Bana Arkangel R-15. The bridge is as follows:
“Yo sé, que no fui para ti, y lo que sucedió se perdió en la nada/Es triste para mí, pero no importa ya, voy a
pintar mi raya (I know that I wasn’t meant for you, and what happened between us came to nothing/It’s
sad for me, but it doesn’t matter anymore, I’m drawing the line).”
139
borders as bridges.”
26
The activations discussed below serve to elucidate each of these
points. I Draw My Line distinguishes and selects material while also “reimagining
borders as bridges.” In doing so, it remains aware of the paradox rooted in archival
practice and hints at some of the subtler meanings suggested by its name.

Archival activations
This section examines four projects that were based in the I Draw My Line archive.
These projects were organized through I Draw My Line, by Mayer and Lerma, and often
built on, relied upon, and engaged with materials from I Draw My Line’s archive.
Furthermore, the documentation of these projects has itself been included in I Draw My
Line’s archive. In what follows, these projects are framed as instances in which the
archive has been activated and made live. While archives may largely be “about the
past,” they can and should be engaged in the present and in light of the future

.
27
In the
archival activations of I Draw My Line, Mayer and Lerma emphasize this point,
reminding their interlocutors that indeed, archiving, like collecting and remembering,
is a heterogenous practice. From organizing exhibitions to curating archives within the
archive, I Draw My Line’s archival activations reveal the importance of drawing the
line, with particular emphasis on the ongoing activity of the gerund.

26
Carroll, 67.
27
Hall, 92.
140
Critics, artists, and nutcases… (1995)
For this activation, I Draw My Line functioned as an organizational body and invited
prominent Mexican artists and critics to exchange roles and produce artwork and
critical texts. De crítico, artista y loco… (Critics, artists, and nutcases…) opened as an
exhibition on October 26, 1995 at the Centro Cultural San Ángel. Mayer and Lerma
initially invited around 50 critics and art researchers to take part in the project, and 36
of the invited ultimately created work for the exhibition. During the early 1990s in
Mexico City, the relationship between artist and critic was one of resentment on the
part of the artist given that the number of artists greatly outweighed the number and
power of critics, who often also served as curators and museum directors but were
underpaid. In fact, Mayer has noted that at the time, there were approximately 30,000
artists in Mexico City, but only 15 critics who published regularly.
28

In Critics, artists, and nutcases…, Mayer and Lerma inverted that relationship.
The number of artists who participated in the project as critics – including Felipe
Ehrenberg, Helen Escobedo, and Magali Lara – hardly represented 20% of all
participants.
29
The critics who participated as artists included Jorge Alberto Manrique
(Figure C2), Agustín Arteaga, Teresa del Conde, Juan Coronel Rivera, Lelia Driben,
Edgardo Ganado Kim, Alberto Híjar (Figure C3), Paloma Porrás, and Francisco Reyes

28
Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 126.
29
Pinto mi Raya, “De Crítico, Artista y Loco…,” n.p.
141
Palma.
30
This role reversal and the proportion of artists to critics helped draw attention
to and upend the myth of the critic as frustrated artist. In the materials that
accompanied the exhibition, Mayer and Lerma gave the show a subtitle: todos tenemos
un poco. In turn, the full exhibition name translated to Critics, artists, and nutcases…we
all have a little of each. Mayer and Lerma wanted to divest the notion of critic as
frustrated artist of its power and propose that “we all have a little of each.” About the
critics who Mayer and Lerma invited to participate in the project, Mayer noted that
some were artists and also writers, some had practiced art as a hobby, but most “had
never thought of producing art.”
31

Ultimately, the critics participated with good humor. Yet many artists were
offended and most refused to participate.
32
This activation demonstrated to Mayer and
Lerma how much work was to be done to legitimize oneself as an artist and to foment
mutual understanding between artists, activists, critics, and historians.
33
In this case, I
Draw My Line is an active bridge. Mayer and Lerma are drawing lines between art world
actors and participants. Felipe Ehrenberg’s work as critic for the project is especially
relevant here (Figure C4). In the preface of his critical piece for the project, published
in the November 10
th
daily of El Universal, he explained: “The country’s art culture is in
great need of reasoned information. Thus, I’ve always insisted that artists themselves

30
For the complete list of critics who participated as artists, see the exhibition description here:
http://www.pintomiraya.com/pmr/sobre-victor/item/153-sobre-una-obra-de-arte-de-mayer-lerma.
31
Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 126.
32
Mayer, “Fragments of a Correspondence,” 193.
33
Mayer, “Fragments of a Correspondence,” 193.
142
write about their work. My own situation led me to write. If I don’t write well, at least I
do it consistently. My writing, like that of all artists who write – a too small number
– serves as an effective complement to criticism.”
34
Ehrenberg reiterates what Mayer
and Lerma had set out to do in Critics, artists, and nutcases… as well as in I Draw My
Line more broadly, that is, reveal that the actors and participants in the art system are
crucial in and responsible for the impact and vitality of art in society or, in other words,
suggest that the necessary work must be done to “lubricate the art system so that it
functions a bit better.”

Siqueiros in the I Draw My Line archive (2002)
In 2002, Mayer and Lerma collaborated with the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and
collected the material that I Draw My Line’s archive contained on muralist David Alfaro
Siqueiros for Siqueiros en el archivo de Pinto mi Raya (Siqueiros in the I Draw My Line
archive). From the archive’s holdings, they published an artist’s book and two edited
volumes (Figure C5), one about political art from the archive and the other devoted to
Siqueiros’ work. The Siqueiros volume was also presented as an exhibition. Of the
materials that were displayed in the volume and the exhibition, there were 192 prints
that Mayer and Lerma altered, edited, and reimaged by integrating the artwork and
writing of Siqueiros that was held in their archive.
35
In conjunction with the volumes

34
Ehrenberg, “Crítica criticona criticada y criticable (I),” n.p.
35
Pinto mi Raya, “Siqueiros a tres voces,” n.p.
143
and exhibition, Mayer and Lerma were able to set up a small table at the exhibition
entrance in order to promote their archival materials about contemporary public art in
Mexico and about Siqueiros.
This project is first notable for the practice that emerged from it, one that would
become a crucial part of I Draw My Line’s function. According to Mayer, with Siqueiros
in the I Draw My Line archive, she and Lerma began to develop their formal archival
investigations and to nurture the position of publicizing these investigations and
sharing them with the public.
36
Second, Siqueiros may not be the figure who comes to
mind when one considers the artists and artwork included within I Draw My Line’s
archive. Yet, there is Siqueiros. As explained in Chapter 1 for the context of early
Mexican art collectives, Siqueiros was one of the tres grandes of Mexico’s muralism
movement. His ideological ties to communism and his beliefs about how it relates to
the artistic and the social would eventually lead to his disagreements with other
muralists and artists of the time, especially Diego Rivera. Siqueiros’ relationship to
collectivism is undoubtedly different than Mayer and Lerma’s, but he was also, like
Mayer, a writer. As Jennifer Jolly pointed out, Siqueiros’ art practice seeped into all
aspects of his life.
37
In this way, as an artist he was – to borrow Mayer’s words – doing
what he had to do.
38

36
Pinto mi Raya, “Mesas redondas y Ferias,” n.p.
37
See Jennifer Jolly, “Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau and Their Collaboration
at the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate” (2008).
38
Here, I refer to the citation, “As an artist one must do what one must do” (Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya:
Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 121).
144
This archival activation engages with the history of Mexican twentieth-century
art through a canonical artist, given Siqueiros’ involvement with muralism. At the same
time that it engages with such a history, however, it provides a point of departure from
which that history can be rewritten. How does Siqueiros relate to collectivism? How
does Siqueiros relate to feminism? What about Siqueiros’ practice is interesting for
performance and non-objectual art? These questions emphasize the heterogenous
nature of Mayer and Lerma’s project and of I Draw My Line. Moreover, they emphasize
the bridging capacity of the archive’s function.

Active archive (2011)
The model of organization and publication that grew out of the Siqueiros project was
adopted for other I Draw My Line projects, such as the 2011 project Archivo activo
(Active archive). For Active archive, Mayer and Lerma put together digitized compendia
of material from I Draw My Line (Figure C6). The material was organized based on
themes such as art education, culture, politics, installation, performance, and women
artists. After they compiled these mini-archives based on themes, they donated the sets
to over 20 libraries, universities, and art schools.
39
The final Active archive included
approximately 11,000 texts. When institutions acquired Active archive, Mayer and
Lerma would organize public programs to facilitate the process of understanding the

39
Pinto mi Raya, “ARCHIVO ACTIVO,” n.p.
145
archive’s context and the method in which it was developed. For example, when Mexico
City’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo acquired the archive in 2012, Mayer and Lerma
gave a performative lecture that allowed them to introduce the project as well as
explain the goals of I Draw My Line.
This extension of I Draw My Line’s materials and their circulation to art
institutions of Mexico City is an important action. It reveals Mayer and Lerma’s
commitment to pragmatism – if their local art institutions do not have sufficient
material on certain research areas, even though the material exists dispersed and
scattered, not only do they localize and organize it, but they also insert it into the
institutions. This action is pedagogical given the public programming organized in
conjunction with the donation. Furthermore, it is uniquely pedagogical given that
Mayer and Lerma have made their careers as artists and not as, in formal title,
academics or archivists, even if their view of the artist’s role includes activities taken
up by the academic and the archivist.

From the archive to your house (2013)
I Draw My Line’s approach to research, production, and circulation is further evident in
the 2013 project Del archivo a tu casa (From the archive to your house). In this case,
Mayer and Lerma use their archival materials and reactivate a handful of past projects
that were documented in the archive. For From the archive to your house, they produced
a set of quotidian objects to detail aspects of 10 projects and performances, including
146
Critic, artist, and nutcase… and Active archive. Some of the other projects were
presented in Mayer’s retrocollective.
40
The self-reflexive nature of this project is
multifaceted. Mayer and Lerma were engaging past projects that were largely
ephemeral in nature and for which I Draw My Line contained documentation, in order
to create stereotypical everyday objects, including mugs, notebooks, lanyards, candles,
and a toothbrush, that built upon the themes of those projects (Figure C7). While these
objects were first presented in an exhibition at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, they
were ultimately collected in the archive of I Draw My Line. Mayer has noted that
although the project appears contradictory in its aim, she and Lerma like this tension.
41

But what is this tension, exactly? It is the tension represented by the archive and
archival practice. It is also the tension of conceptual art and its application, as
discussed in the upcoming section. Importantly, and in relation to this project and the
three aforementioned projects, it is the tension between various roles and actors within
the art system. Where is the art world localized, and what happens when its materials
and documents are dispersed, or when they are organized? From the archive to your
house offers a demonstration of applied conceptual art as it maps the conceptual on the
quotidian. This tension might also be ironic. In this project, a toothbrush with the
handle imprint “arte a todas horas” (“art at all hours”) questions the functionality of

40
Specifically, I refer to the performances Justice and Democracy, If you have doubts, ask, and I Don’t
Celebrate or Commemorate War. Chapter 2 provides a more detailed discussion of each of these pieces.
41
Pinto mi Raya, “Del archivo a tu casa,” n.p.
147
these objects, their relationship to art, and the way that they often circulate in museum
contexts.
42

Archive strategy
Applied conceptual art
What is most striking about Mayer and Lerma’s archive is that it is pragmatic, and yet it
does not overlook the paradox posed by the notion of the archive. As an archive, I Draw
My Line has fulfilled a demonstrated need for artists in Mexico City and Mexico at
large. For nearly 30 years, it has archived materials that were not yet aggregated. As a
result, it has helped inform the histories of contemporary Mexican performance,
feminist, and collectively-oriented art. In doing so, importantly, it has informed the
development of contemporary Mexican art history. Without it, this research would not
have been possible, for example, nor would that of much of the scholarship I have
mentioned in this dissertation.
The pragmatic aspect of I Draw My Line’s archive has allowed Mayer and Lerma
to take on dynamic roles as archivists. Interestingly, and as one might suspect, the
keepers of archives and libraries have not always been known as archivists and
librarians. In 1632, Bonifacio had already noted the changing names of such keepers: in
addition to being known as archivists (archivista) or librarians (bibliothecarius), they

42
Pinto mi Raya, “Del archivo a tu casa,” n.p.
148
were also known as custodians (custos), guardians of writing (grammatophylax),
chamberlains (camerarius), and keepers of papers (chartularius).
43
The root meanings of
these names are not unlike the root meaning of another name, one that Mayer and
Lerma have used for themselves and assumed quite literally in a few of I Draw My
Line’s projects – the role of the editor. In an issue of Performance Research edited by
Claire MacDonald and Bill Sherman, Mayer contributed an article about her archival
work with Lerma for I Draw My Line. In this article, she noted that her and Lerma’s
work has not been typical: “Sometimes it seems as though [at times] we are editors or
publishers, at others, curators or activists.”
44
The role of the editor, as MacDonald and
Sherman explained it in their preface to the issue, is a function of mediation. The editor
is elusive, “often invisible,” and works between the past, present, and future.
45

Moreover, they note that the editorial role is one of service. At the outset, this is
evident in Mayer and Lerma’s description of I Draw My Line’s project and its aims. As
Mayer has explained it, “Actually Pinto mi Raya can do anything as long as it helps us
reach our goal, which is to oil the wheels of the art system.”
46
Oiling the wheels of the
art system, or lubricating it to make it function better, as Mayer has put it elsewhere, is
a pragmatic, if humorous function of I Draw My Line. While its name points to the
metaphorical nature of their project and addresses the paradoxical notion of the

43
Bonifacio, 233–234.
44
Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 122.
45
MacDonald and Sherman, 1.
46
Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 122.
149
archive, Mayer and Lerma have not let their work rest there. As noted in the above
sections, they are not unaware of the issues posed by archival history and practice.
47
In
this way, the conceptual nature of their project, everything that the name and
theoretical gestures of I Draw My Line suggest, exists in tandem with the literal
archival practice. Thus, the applied nature of I Draw My Line outweighs its conceptual
nature.
This applied nature, the literal archive, was also of interest in Steedman’s
response to Archive Fever:
By far the most common reaction to “Archive Fever” among its English-speaking
readers has been the assumption that it has something to do with archives
(rather than with psychoanalysis, or deconstruction, or Sigmund Freud; or with
political and social misuses of power)…yet commentators have found
remarkably little to say about record offices, libraries, and repositories, and have
for the main part been brought face to face with the ordinariness, the
unremarkable nature of archives and the everyday disappointments that
historians know they will always encounter there…There is a kind of surprise in
such reactions, at encountering something far less portentous, difficult, and
meaningful than Derrida’s use of the concept of “archive” would seem to
promise.
48

Mayer has written that she and Lerma coined the term “applied conceptual art” to
explain their art practice, “to describe our artwork. It is a ritual. It is a process.”
49
She

47
When Mayer was working on a project for the archive of Olivier Debroise, she reflected: “Right now I’m
reading Encounters in a Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space, and the Archive by Griselda Pollock and
The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas by Diana Taylor, in addition
to texts from Art and Transverse Fissures: Archive and Action… including Jacques Derrida and Hannah
Arendt to Didi-Huberman. I feel like my brain is going to burst; it’s hard for me to understand the
theorists’ peculiar and complicated language. Also, I have no idea how the hell I’m going to put some of
these ideas into practice and plan an exhibition that is not soporific, that brings the general public
closer to Olivier and reveals the archive as an exercise of personal power” (“Archivitis Aguda,” n.p.).
48
Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust,” 1162.
49
Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 122.
150
has also written that they have been concerned with documentation, not only as
feminists and performance artists but also for the general development of local art
history. More poignantly, she has maintained, “As an artist, one must do what one
must do.”
50

I Draw My Line’s evolution from an alternative space for art exhibitions to the
home-based archived of contemporary Mexican art has managed to “secure greater
accessibility and preservation,” in Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda’s words, for the
documentation of contemporary Mexican art.
51
Their strategy of applied conceptual art
has been key in this regard. I Draw My Line’s archive and practice is partly based on
ideas of conceptual art, but it specifically emphasizes the practicality of its practice and
outcomes and seeks to propose solutions for identified problems. Similar to the
strategies that Mayer engaged in Black Hen Powder and in her 2016 retrocollective,
applied conceptual art, while nearing the function of militant art, manages to
distinguish itself: “[Mayer and Lerma’s] definition of applied Conceptual Art is close to
an idea of militant art, however, not of modernist utopias or New Left radicalisms but a
kind of militancy that actively inserts itself in the production and interpretation of
knowledge. It is conceptual in the sense that it broadens the definition of art to an act
of collecting and distributing information.”
52

50
Mayer, “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City,” 121.
51
Aceves Sepúlveda, 142.
52
Aceves Sepúlveda, 143.
151
Conclusion
Mayer has admitted, “On the one hand I realized the paradox and contradiction of two
artists who have dedicated themselves to making non-objectual, ephemeral, conceptual
work that have also taken as the central nexus of their proposal the archive, history,
and that necessity of durability that our work denies.”
53
To draw the line and set the
limit in this way, as well as to draw lines between things, is first to emphasize the
relationship between paradox and art practice. To echo Mayer’s proposition that “an
artist must do what they must do,” if what must be done is that an artist takes up
writing about their work, per Ehrenberg’s suggestion, or writing about others’ work, as
in Critics, artists, and nutcases…, or beginning an archive, then for Mayer and Lerma,
that work is not outside of art practice. The resulting imperative suggests that such
work should be done, especially if the goal is to lubricate the art system so that it
functions better. What machinery would not benefit from a bit of oil?
Of the three case studies that this dissertation presents, the archive of I Draw My
Line is the only project that is ongoing. Thus, the present and future-facing gesture of I
Draw My Line is important. As archivist Ann Pederson has observed, “[W]e may work in
environments which emphasize accountability or culture, but we must all comprehend
the totality, interdependence, and dynamism of the complete enterprise. There are no
clean dividing lines between ‘reconstructing the past’ and ‘documenting the present,’

53
Mayer, “Archivos de arte y arte sobre archivos.”
152
between ‘current,’ ‘regulatory,’ and ‘historical’ recordkeeping, or between ‘public’ and
‘private’ or institutional’ and ‘collecting’ domains. All are necessary, concurrent, and
ongoing facets of the same whole.”
54
In other words, and even with drawing lines to
distinguish or to bridge (Figure C8), the resulting paradox is generative, and much
future work remains.

54
Pederson, 453.
153
Conclusion. From collectivity to intimacy
I do not mean to tire you with inconsequentialities, which I mention only to give you a
complete view of my nature, and which I believe will cause you to laugh; but, señora,
what can we women know but kitchen philosophies? As Lupercio Leonardo so wisely
said, one can philosophize very well and prepare supper. And seeing these minor
details, I say that if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written a great deal more.

–Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

This dissertation has intended to provide a study of three of Mónica Mayer’s projects –
an artists’ group formed in the 1980s, a retrospective exhibit mounted in 2016, and an
ongoing art archive that began in the 1990s – and to demonstrate the diverse forms of
collectivity in each project while indicating the continuity of Mayer’s involvement in
each. However, after examining each project in detail, the juxtaposition of these three
projects as presented in this dissertation has revealed the incongruities between
collectivism in theory and collectivism in practice. As noted at the outset of this
project, collectivism has held different meanings at different times, especially within
twentieth-century Mexico and into the twenty-first century. The three main chapters
of this dissertation have suggested that collectivity often emerges not in mass or as an
ideologically-driven group goal. Instead, and in the case of Mayer’s art practice, it more
strongly emerges as a form of intimacy. Mayer’s collective practice is instructive for
nurturing intimacy and humor and not rejecting paradox.

154
The artists’ group
Chapter 1 has examined the formation of Mexico’s longest-running feminist artists’
group, Black Hen Powder, and three of its projects in particular. While the group was
formed in 1983 by three women, it was most active as a two-woman group. As
suggested in the end of the chapter, Black Hen Powder’s activity is best described as the
activity of the couple, the pair, the partnership. This finding is interesting given that
the group is named a group, or a collective, and forms an important part of Mexico’s art
historical movement known as the generación de los grupos (group generation). Thus, an
understanding of collectivity as it functions in the case of Black Hen Powder is of an
intimate collectivity, or of intimacy. Black Hen Powder provides the first instance of
Mayer’s collective art practice in which collectivity is not what it seemed at face value.
As such, Black Hen Powder adds a new understanding to the notion of the artists’ group
and its relation to collectivity. It provides an instance of collectivity that manifests,
through its feminist goals and artistic practice, as intimacy. In addition, the strategic
humor employed by Black Hen Powder should not be overlooked. The three projects
studied in Chapter 1, Peace means respecting the rights of others’ bodies, Women artists,
or we’re looking for a wife, and Mothers! engage humor and entangle it with history,
allowing Black Hen Powder to intervene into art, visual culture, and social and political
life. These three projects are, in part, an attempt to revise history and visual culture.
Black Hen Powder provides a compelling example of the engagement between artist
and artist, objectual and non-objectual art, traditional art spaces and non-traditional
155
spaces, and artist and viewer. This intimacy extends to the relationship between the
social and artistic. Moreover, and importantly, it permeates the relationship between
Mayer and Bustamante, who prioritized their practices as feminist artists during a time
when feminist activists shunned art and activist artists shunned feminism. Lastly, one
of the most intimate gestures of Black Hen Powder was Mayer’s and Bustamante’s
pregnancies. Although they often touted prop bellies or overemphasized their
pregnancies to make poignant statements, they were pregnant during Black Hen
Powder’s activity and usually spoke of their pregnancies, if facetiously and with humor,
as conceptual art projects.
In this way, Chapter 1 raises a question that is carried on through each
subsequent chapter – what does collectivity look like in Mayer’s collective practice, and
how does it function? If collectivity in theory manifests as intimacy in action, then
what is the significance of calling the group a group, the collective a collective, and
what does that suggest for the collective-oriented logic of Mayer’s 2016 retrospective?

The art retrospective
The retrospective differs from the retrocollective, and this difference suggests a
variance in logic. As Chapter 2 has indicated, in the case of Mayer’s 2016
retrocollective, which was by and large the outcome of the efforts of Mayer, Cordero,
and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, where the exhibition was
mounted, the logic of the operational relationships, especially that of Mayer and
156
Cordero, is said to be collective. Mayer and Cordero have noted this in the exhibition
catalogue, and scholars such as Erin McCutcheon have discussed it in publications that
followed the exhibition’s close. Cordero described the logic as one of collective work, of
a dialogue.
1

Cordero’s work with Mayer was centered on a dialogue-based relationship
between she and Mayer as well as with the public. Notably, the logic emphasized the
opportunity to engage in conversation, listen, and learn. Again, it is difficult to
determine whether this logic, form, and function are indicative of collectivism and
collectivity. The importance of dialogue, conversation, and listening, in addition to the
fact that Mayer collaborated closely with Cordero as the curator, and that together they
engaged intimately with the museum staff as well as many public attendees, here too
suggests that intimacy is what emerges from Mayer’s collective practice. This is to say
that the exhibition’s retrocollective logic, in practice, generated intimacy. The way in
which Mayer’s practice was organized and presented, and the ways that she engaged
with her colleagues and the public, was more nuanced than collectivity, at face value,
suggests. As with the case of Black Hen Powder, collectivity is not exactly what it
initially seemed.

1
Cordero, “La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’,” 178.
157
The archive
In Chapter 3, collectivity is most notable as a process and metaphor. The chapter
examines the archive of I Draw My Line, which Mayer established together with partner
Víctor Lerma in the early 1990s. While the project has taken on various functions over
its decades of activity, its function as an archive is what distinguishes it from many of
Mayer’s other projects. The archive, in the most general sense, is an outcome of
collectivity given that the archive is formed by the process of collecting – selecting and
collecting. Although the I Draw My Line archive is traditional in some of its practices,
the ways in which Mayer and Lerma have navigated it and presented it as applied
conceptual art further draw attention to its distinct nature.
While their archive has functioned as a repository for collected art writings and
art objects, especially given its early life as a newspaper-based archive, its collectivity
– similar to the collectivity taken at face value in Black Hen Powder and Mayer’s 2016
retrocollective – is not what it seemed. What first appeared as collectivity is in fact an
intimacy, and this is more prominent in the case of I Draw My Line than in the previous
two case studies. Although the I Draw My Line archive is large and has continually
expanded throughout its existence, it is housed in an intimate space – Mayer and
Lerma’s own house in Mexico City. This is a space that had been in Mayer’s family,
suggesting a matrilineal line. Furthermore, Mayer’s closest colleague and partner in
developing I Draw My Line, and especially the archive, is Víctor Lerma – her husband
and with whom she has three children and remains married. Indeed, Chapters 1 and 2
158
have glimpsed at the intimate inner-workings of a few of Mayer’s close artistic
relationships, but it is difficult to deny the intimacy at work in she and Lerma’s
relationship. And, to be sure, drawing lines in this sense is conjugal in nature. While
conjugality is collective and involving more than one being, it remains an intimate
form of collectivity. As noted in Chapter 1, such collectivity is not that of the crowd or
the mass. It is the collectivity of the pair, the couple, and, indeed, the family.
With these three case studies and their summaries and conclusions in mind, an
important question emerges. Why collectivity? If what seemed to be collective about
Mayer’s art practice – in form and function – has revealed itself has intimacy, why
preserve the name? In another life, this project might aptly become “The intimate
practice of Mónica Mayer, 1978–2018.” However, an exclusive focus on intimacy would
foreclose some of the analyses that brought the most tension to the surface, those of
the group, the collective logic of her 2016 exhibition, and those of archive drive. An
exclusive focus on intimacy might have overlooked what has become a nuanced
relationship between collectivity and intimacy. This relationship is mentioned in the
subsequent section as the ground for future research.

Toward intimacy
When Felipe Ehrenberg spoke about the generación de los grupos, he recalled the
following: “What the groups sought in the collectivization of art, perhaps without
159
consciously recognizing it, was a model for life.”
2
Much earlier in Mexico’s history, as
noted in the epigraph to this conclusion, Sor Juana wrote of a model of life that gleaned
philosophy from the kitchen: “one can philosophize very well and prepare supper.”
3

The suggestion of a model for life, from Sor Juana to Ehrenberg, reveals a concern for
the relationship between forms of artistic practice and forms of living. What do these
forms have in common? The intimacy between these forms might be the ultimate
gesture of Mayer’s collective art practice. From Black Hen Powder, which referred to
itself as a group – with all the ties to collectivism and the history of collective in
Mexico – but followed a practice of intimacy, especially given that unlike most groups
it only consisted of two people, to the retrospective that was framed as a retrocollective
– which also played with language and emphasized collectivism to suggest a way of
curating and organizing – but in practice revealed its operation as an intimate one
between a few primary actors, and lastly, to the archive – which has been developed
with Mayer’s most intimate collaborator, Lerma. The archive, unlike the retrocollective
and artists’ group, does not gesture toward collectivity in nomenclature. These three
projects, in the order in which they are presented as case studies for this dissertation,
gain momentum in the intimacy of their form and function. They also gain momentum
in their practicality. As Mayer has noted of I Draw My Line’s archive, it is an example of
applied conceptual art. The notion of applied conceptual art has strong ties to the

2
Ehrenberg, 127.
3
de la Cruz, 110.
160
political value of personal experience, as emphasized by feminist art practice –
especially that with which Mayer engaged during the 1970s and 1980s in Mexico City
and in Los Angeles.
With Lerma, Mayer organized and carried out through I Draw My Line’s moniker
the project Nuestras banderas or Our flags, which was formed from two smaller projects,
Nuestra bandera (Our flag) (2003) and Yo no celebro ni conmemoro guerras (I don’t
celebrate or commemorate wars) (2008–to date). The documentation for these projects
was included in Mayer’s retrocollective, as noted in Chapter 2. However, Our flag, which
was first performed in 2003, is mentioned in more detail here – in light of the
conclusions offered up to this point in this project – as a final example of intimate, if
collectively-oriented, art practice. For the performance, the tattered Mexican flag that
hung in front of Mayer and Lerma’s house in Mexico City for over 15 years was repaired.
Together with participants, Mayer and Lerma mended the old flag, and Mayer has noted
that participants willingly engaged in the process of repair – sewing the flag with gusto
(Figure D1). Even though at the time “many people felt that the country was in ruins,”
they worked together and toward something in the process.
4
A flag symbolizes so much
to many and so little to many others. It is visual, social, and political by nature, and
Mayer and Lerma have approached it with intimacy in Our flag. Blindly support the
flag? Burn it? Here, they focus on nuanced repair in a collaborative effort to mend

4
Mayer, “Nuestras banderas.”
161
something. The first-person plural possessive “our” in the title further emphasizes the
intimate action of their mending (Figure D2) – it is personal in the first-person, it is
collaborative in the plural, and it is action-based in its possessiveness.

Between intimacy and paradox
That each of the analyses presented in the chapters, in addition to that of Our flag,
reveal an increasingly intimate form and function at work in Mayer’s collective art
practice is an unexpected finding. Yet this points toward another notion that has
surfaced and resurfaced throughout these studies – paradox. To arrive at paradox may
be the final gesture of this dissertation. This project began out of a desire to investigate
the form and function of collectivity in Mayer’s art practice, and what emerged is not a
definite collectivity. Instead, it is an intimacy. In content, intimacy has permeated
Mayer’s artistic practice through many forms and projects not studied in detail in this
dissertation. Many of the drawings and collages that Mayer created in the 1970s, most
of which were displayed in her retrocollective, represented intimate content through
direct and explicit language, often building from practices of the personal journal and
diary. In fact, Mayer’s forthcoming book Intimidades…o no. Arte, vida y feminismo
(Intimacies…or not. Art, life and feminism), combines hundreds of Mayer’s writings –
from diary entries and letters to unpublished articles – from a 40-year period. In the
162
press surrounding the announcement of Intimacies, Sonia Sierra aptly surmised, “It is
likely that Mónica Mayer has written more texts than she has created works of art.”
5

After understanding the nuances of Mayer’s practice and the degree to which she
engages intimacy as well as dialogue and humor in her revisions of the artistic and the
social, and after reading about her perspectives on feminism and contemporary
Mexican art practice, that paradox would emerge as a salient concept at work in her
practice makes sense. What appeared as collectivity became intimacy, and the
prominence of Mayer’s visual and performative art practice might have been
overshadowed by the prominence of her writing, as noted above by Sierra. Paradox
might even permeate the way that intimacy manifests, which is relevant for
understanding some of the various facets of Mayer’s artistic practice as presented in
the previous chapters:
In an intimate context people feel free to say anything, to share their inner
secrets. Trust permeates the conversation. This interchange may be an utterly
free flow of conversation because the conversants already know each other
intimately and there is no need (indeed no possibility) of censuring or hiding
what is innermost. Paradoxically, along with this free flow of conversation, the
more profound the interpersonal intimacy, the more that can be left unsaid. The
need to be explicit, the effort to explain, the urge to fill in the silence––all
become muted in ever deepening levels of intimation where the slightest gesture
or facial expression may express more than enough.
6

5
Sierra, n.p.
6
Kasulis, 28.
163
These two understandings of intimacy in human life echo María Laura Rosa’s
understanding of intimacy in an artistic context, as she has noted, “Intimacy is
exhibited as an uncertain and ambiguous place.”
7

Points of departure
This research has followed in the footsteps of many remarkable scholars with whose
writing I have been fortunate to engage. As Black Hen Powder is the most popularly
researched project of the three I presented here, my analysis of it only adds to already
dynamic scholarly debate. Mayer’s 2016 retrocollective has not been studied at length,
so this project provides a step in the direction of sustained, in depth engagement of the
Mayer’s and Cordero’s retrocollective logic. Third, the I Draw My Line archive has been
studied and mentioned in the literature more frequently than the retrocollective, but
not in as much detail as the scholarship on Black Hen Powder provides, for example.
Thus, this project offers a compelling point of departure for future research on Mayer’s
collective, or intimate, art practice.
Given the emergent intimacy that has been revealed from this investigation of
collectivity in Mayer’s art practice, a subsequent study could depart from a thesis of
intimacy in Mayer’s art practice and focus in more detail on the relationship between
intimacy and feminism as well as forms of living and forms of artistic practice, as have

7
Rosa, 15.
164
been practiced and theorized from Mexico and Mexico City, specifically. When Mayer’s
forthcoming Intimidades…o no. Arte, vida y feminismo (Intimacies…or not. Art, life and
feminism), the publication of which has been delayed due to the global pandemic, is
published, its analysis will surely add valuable insight to such a study.
This dissertation has only considered three examples of Mayer’s collective art
practice, and Mayer is one of many artists who have been part of collective and feminist
art practice in Mexico and Mexico City in particular. A future project might include
more breadth in its analysis by including more projects from Black Hen Powder and
more projects from I Draw My Line’s archive. This research would indeed require much
more time and space than a dissertation or even a book. Another future project could
place Mayer’s work in the context of her collectivist- and feminist-oriented artists and
colleagues – as much of the scholarship that I have mentioned in this dissertation has
done – and do so with an emphasis on collective and intimate artistic practice.
Although this analysis only considers the 40-year period between 1978 and 2018,
I hope that readers begin to draw connections between these case studies of collective
practice and the unexpected emergent intimacy and other artistic practices, prior to
1978, after 2018, and practices that do not yet exist. Such connections could provide
greater insight into an understanding of collectivity in Mexican art practice throughout
the twentieth century as well as before and after it. Furthermore, these connections
could shed light on the function of intimacy between forms of artistic practice,
especially those of a feminist-orientation, and forms of living. I also hope that this
165
dissertation can broaden the perspective of contemporary understandings of the
artists’ role and their relationship with paradox. Indeed, a study of Mónica Mayer’s
collective art practice provides the ground from which to consider the condition of
paradox as a generative experience.

166
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–––. “Celebración.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica
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–––. “Concepción y separación.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva
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obra/hacia-otra-erotica/item/74-concepcion-y-separacion, accessed November 15,
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–––. “¿Cuevas se alinea con las artistas feministas?” El Universal, February 5, 1991.

–––. “De arte y pedagogía en una exposición feminista.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una
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–––. “De la vida y el arte como feminista/A Personal History of Feminist Art Activism
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–––. “Diario de las violencias cotidianas.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición
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173
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–––. “Huesitos.” Si tiene dudas…pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica
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–––. “Justicia y democracia.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
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174

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obra-en-su-habitat-natural, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Las vírgenes.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica
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obra/feminismo-y-formacion/item/14-las-virgenes, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Lo normal.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica
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obra/feminismo-y- formacion/item/16-lo-normal, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Los naufragios del cuerpo.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva
de Mónica Mayer, November 16, 2016, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/la-
obra/lo-personal-es-politico/item/80-los-naufragios-del-cuerpo, accessed November
15, 2019.

–––. “Maternidades secuestradas.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición
retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer, January 11, 2016,
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maternidades-secuestradas, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Miel para atrapar moscas.” El Universal, October 1, 2004.

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–––. “Nuestras banderas.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
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obra/lo-personal-es-politico/item/86-nuestras-banderas, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Performance parásito.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
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obra/introduccion/item/25-peformance-parasito, accessed November 15, 2019.

175
–––. “Piezas para periódico.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
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conovoca- a-la-bienal-olga-tamayo, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Pinto mi Raya: Drawing the Line in Mexico City.” Performance Research, vol. 7
no. 1 (2002): 121–128.

–––. “Por Amor al Arte.” Pinto mi Raya, n.d.,
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accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Recorridos especiales.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
Mónica Mayer, January 28, 2017, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/eventos-
educativos/recorridos-especiales, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. Rosa chillante: Mujeres y performance en México. México: CONACULTA-FONCA,
2004.

–––. “Si tiene dudas...el tour.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
Mónica Mayer, June 16, 2016, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/la-obra-
viva/si-tiene-dudas/item/64-si-tiene-dudas-el-tour, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “Tapices.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer,
January 13, 2016, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/la-
obra/introduccion/item/17-tapices, accessed November 15, 2019.

–––. “The Revolution of the Comadres.” Trans. Elaine Bolton. In n. paradoxa, vol. 10
(July 2002), 37–43.

–––. “Tres días seguidos de protestas desde la maternidad.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte:
una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer, May 9, 2016,
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secuestradas/item/57-tres-dias-seguidos-de-protestas-desde-la-maternidad, accessed
November 15, 2019.

–––. “Una jornada completa.” Si tiene dudas...pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva de
Mónica Mayer, October 24, 2016, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/la-obra-
viva/una-jornada-completa, accessed November 15, 2019.

176
–––. “Weaving Ties of Mutual Understanding, Shaping Publics: A Conversation with
Mónica Mayer about Art and Social Practice”, with Pablo Helguera. In Mónica Mayer: Si
tiene dudas...pregunte: Una exposición retrocolectiva, 169–177. México, D.F.: Museo
Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, 2016.

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–––. La lógica feminista de ‘retrocolectividad’: una conversación con Mónica Mayer y
Karen Cordero Reiman.” #ERRATA, no.17 (enero–junio 2017): 174–190,
https://issuu.com/idartes/docs/errata_17_mayo_28-, accessed October 30, 2019.

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–––. “De Crítico, Artista y Loco.” Pinto mi Raya, n.d.,
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loco, accessed June 8, 2020.

–––. “Del archivo a tu casa.” Pinto mi Raya, August 14, 2014,
http://www.pintomiraya.com/pmr/component/k2/item/214, accessed June 8, 2020.

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180
Appendix A

Figure A1. Black Hen Powder’s first performance, Maris Bustamante and Mónica
Mayer, 1983 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

181

Figure A2. Black Hen Powder’s receta in FEM 9, no. 33 (April–May 1984).
182

Figure A3. Lourdes Grobet, Recintos sagrados, 1983.

183

Figure A4. Magali Lara, untitled, n.d.

184

Figure A5. Ana Victoria Jiménez, untitled, 1978.

185

Figure A6. The fifth carta of the project, Maris Bustamante and
Mónica Mayer, 1987 (pintomiraya.com).

186

Figure A7. Detail of the cartoon created for the fifth
carta, Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer,
1987 (pintomiraya.com).

187

Figure A8. Screenshot, Nuestro mundo, “Madre por un día,” 1987.

Figure A9. Screenshot, Nuestro mundo, “Madre por un día,” 1987.
188
Appendix B

Figure B1. The documentary and participatory installation of El tendedero for the 2016
retrocollective exhibition (www.pintomiraya.com).

189

Figure B2. Mónica Mayer, El tendedero, 1978 (pintomiraya.com).

190

Figure B3. Mónica Mayer with El tendedero, Los Angeles, 1979 (pintomiraya.com).

191

Figure B4. The participatory installation of El tendedero, as it began to transform
into El megatendedero for the 2016 retrocollective exhibition. Photograph
by Oliver Santana, courtesy of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo.

192

Figure B5. Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma for Performance parásito during Probador:
resignificando las fronteras del cuerpo, Cas Vecina, Mexico, 2011
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

193

Figure B6. The last tweet of the #180dudas project, July 31, 2016
(twitter.com/muac_unam).

194

Figure B7. Poster designed by Mónica Mayer for Cartel
para mesa redonda sobre arte feminista,
1976 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

195

Figure B8. The collage A veces me espantan mis fantasías,
with the current drawn (left) and open (right). Mónica Mayer,
1977 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

196

Figure B9. Mónica Mayer, Tapices (Tapiz para un amigo, Tapiz para un seductor y Tapiz
para un violador), 1978 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

197

Figure B10. Mónica Mayer, from the series La dolorosa, 1978–1979
(Museo de Mujeres Artistas Mexicanas).

198

Figure B11. Mónica Mayer, from the series Lo normal, 1978
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

199

Figure B12. María Rodríguez Cruz, from the series Si Peña fuera mujer, 2015.
© María Rodríguez Cruz

200

Figure B13. Participant during one of the Maternidades secuestradas reactivations at
Mayer’s museum retrocollective, 2016 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

201

Figure B14. Mónica Mayer, Separación, 1982 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

202

Figure B15. Mónica Mayer, Tres y Cuatro, from Algo como el agua, 1990
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

203

Figure B16. View of the documentary installation for Huestios, 2016
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

204

Figure B17. View of installation for Pinto mi Raya archival projects, 2016
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

205

Figure B18. Cover of Raya, vol. 19 no. 9, 2009 (pintomiraya.com).
206

Figure B19. Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma, Yo no celebro ni conmemoro guerras, 2008
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

207

Figure B20. Installation view of Justicia y democracia, 2016
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

208

Figure B21. View of El apapacho estético in progress at the museum, 2016. Photograph
by Antonio Juaréz (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

209

Figure B22. View of El megatendedero as responses were added throughout the
exhibition, 2016 (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

210

Figure B23. El megatendedero during the Una jornada completa performance, 2016.
Photograph by Lana Desastre (colectivolanadesastre.wordpress.com).

211

Figure B24. Julia Antivilo during her recorrido especial of the retrocollective, 2016
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

212

Figure B25. Screenshot of the home page of Si tiene dudas…pregunte: el blog, 2019.

213
Appendix C

Figure C1. Archival material from Pinto mi Raya’s early days (pintomiraya.com).

214

Figure C2. Drawing made by art critic Jorge Alberto Manrique
for De crítico, artista y loco… Drawing on folder, 8x10 inches,
1995 (pintomiraya.com).

215

Figure C3. Work from art critic Alberto Híjar for the same exhibition, 1995
(pintomiraya.com).

216

Figure C4. Critical text written about the same exhibition by artist Felipe Ehrenberg,
published in El Universal, 1995 (pintomiraya.com).

217

Figure C5. Cover of the edited volume based on Pinto mi Raya’s
holdings on Siqueiros. Pinto mi Raya, 2002 (pintomiraya.com).

218

Figure C6. Archivo activo comes in a box containing 10 DCDs, organized by themes
developed around Pinto mi Raya’s material, totaling approximately 11,000 texts. Pinto
mi Raya, 2011 (pintomiraya.com).

219

Figure C7. Printed accompaniments for objects presented as activations
for Del archivo a tu casa, 2013 (pintomiraya.com).

220

Figure C8. Pinto mi Raya’s digitally drawn logo, which suggests the conjugal nature of
drawing lines that are intertwined at points and separate at others (pintomiraya.com).

221
Appendix D

Figure D1. Víctor Lerma and Mónica Mayer, Nuestra bandera, 2003
(pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

222

Figure D2. Víctor Lerma and Mónica Mayer for Nuestra bandera, 2003. Photograph by
Antonio Juárez (pregunte.pintomiraya.com).

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation has studied three projects of the Mexican feminist artist Mónica Mayer to demonstrate the diverse forms of collectivity operating in each. Mayer is a prolific artist who has been active since the early 1970s in Mexico City and in national and transnational contexts. In the 1970s, many artists and feminist activists in Mexico City had adopted the collective as an organizational form with political ends, and many maintained that art and gender were unrelated. For art collectives, gender concerns were outweighed by class concerns. For feminist activists, artistic action had no place in political action. Despite this resistance, Mayer would eventually bridge these concerns and cofound Mexico’s longest-running feminist art collective, Black Hen Powder. This dissertation considers the collective in conjunction with two of Mayer’s other projects that have prioritized collectivity and related feminist practice to artistic and political action. In addition to Black Hen Powder, Mayer’s 2016 retrospective exhibition, If you have doubts...ask, which was officially named a retrocollective, and the archival project I Draw My Line, which Mayer began in the 1990s with her partner Víctor Lerma, are examined. Close analysis of each of these projects has revealed not the dogmatic collectivity that might be found in other areas of collective and artistic practice or in the ideologically-inflected work of artists, writers, and thinkers who often engage with similar issues and themes. Instead, these three projects have gestured toward intimate action, albeit under the name of some collectively associated work, such as the group, the retrocollective, or the archive. This projects suggests that for Mayer, collectivity in theory and in nomenclature are different than collectivity in practice.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Jordan, Amanda Grey (author)

Core Title Mónica Mayer's collective art practice, 1978–2018

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Media and Culture)

Publication Date 10/16/2020

Defense Date 08/24/2020

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

Tag archive theory,collective art,collectivity,feminism,intimacy,los grupos,Mexican art,Mexican feminist art,Mónica Mayer,OAI-PMH Harvest,retrocollective

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Norindr, Panivong (committee chair), Jones, Amelia (committee member), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), Steinberg, Samuel (committee member)

Creator Email agj1090@gmail.com,agjordan@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-383518

Unique identifier UC11666176

Identifier etd-JordanAman-9040.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-383518 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-JordanAman-9040.pdf

Dmrecord 383518

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Jordan, Amanda Grey

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