Can the art world, with its universal aesthetic reasons, declare itself outside the rules of the patriarchal regime? Is this field free of glass ceilings, mansplaining, and gender stereotypes? None of this seems to be corroborated when looking at the numbers of the social system: women have fewer awards, less presence in exhibitions and occupy, with few exceptions, subordinate places in art histories. Faced with this scenario, an intense movement of transformation is underway. Hand in hand with feminist and gender activism, from the 1970s on, art offered tools for a liberating imaginary and placed the female body as a privileged place of expression of a dissenting subjectivity. Feminism and Latin American Art presents a theoretical and quantitative panorama of the feminine scene in the visual arts and focuses on the intervention of artists who contributed to building an emancipatory imagination in Latin America. The work of the Colombian Clemencia Lucena, the Argentine María Luisa Bemberg, the lmography of Narcisa Hirsch, the formation of artistic feminism in Mexico and the production of Nelbia Romero and Paz Errázuriz in the dictatorial contexts of Uruguay and Chile are the landmarks of this story. Andrea Giunta covers in these pages the emergence of new themes –maternity, harassment, prostitution, divergent bodies– and new forms of representation, which challenge not only the differences between feminist art and feminine art, but also the relationships of power inscribed in the ways of seeing and showing.

This book tells the story of an ongoing revolution and it is proposed as an active intervention from knowledge. If even today the art universe replicates, under the forms of exclusion and invisibility, the different types of violence against women, restoring the political meaning of artistic feminism does not mean replacing a set of names in a system of power, but rather contributing to the opening a different understanding of the world.