By Dalya Benor
In the spirit of the exhibition and as a homage to the Latin American artists that pushed the boundary forward in their transformative work, Document spoke with three emerging Latina artists based in New York City today, who can trace the concepts, approach, and heritage of their work to the radical women on display at the Brooklyn Museum. These include mixed-media artist Rose Salane, who is of Peruvian-Italian heritage, Colombian sculptor Diana Rojas, who creates objects that serve as a commentary on the materialism of our culture, and Colombian painter Maria Berrio, who addresses femininity and its connection to nature in mythological tableaus. With women’s rights and feminism primarily taking a backseat to larger socio-political issues of the time, “the show is so important in providing the context, year by year—what type of military regime was in the country and how did people feel,” Salane explained, whose mother grew up in Peru. “She was always under a military regime. They didn’t have menial things.”
The artwork in Radical Women is shown in a broader context that pays respects to the artists that have been left out of cultural discourse, despite opening up new artistic boundaries. The work done by these women lives on in a tangible way today. The show centers on the concept of the radical woman artist in “their use of the female body for political and social critique and artistic expression.” How does this translate to today? Is it the way you dress, your views on politics, the way you carry yourself through the world? Is it merely acting out of the tidy lanes society prescribes? For some, it is as simple as having the agency to create, and for others, the idea of radicalism involves making work that is just as shocking as the issues which they rail against. For Salane, radicalism lies in the democracy of her work and “being able to reach many different audiences,” she says. “I don’t like work that is specific to the art world, or one type of person. This is where the conversation starts—the diversity in the art world is so minimal.” And for Rojas, radicalism means “doing what you want to do for you. It’s important to do what you feel strongly and passionate about—I think that’s what those women did.”
