Focus on MUMA : Museo de Mujeres Artistas mexicanas

MUMA: A new kind of museum of women artists

Drawing on a long-time multidisciplinary bond and friendship, the representatives of MUMA, Museum of Mexican women artists – through its founder, the visual artist and photographer Lucero González – embody a gathering of novel initiatives in favour of the representation of female figures in the history of art. Prompted by the heritage of activism and gender studies, this virtual museum testifies to the proactive approaches of Latin-American personalities in the art world, working towards the acknowledgement and promotion of female artwork in the 20th and 21st centuries.

MUMA, Museo de Mujeres Artistas mexicanas was created in 2008 at the instigation of Lucero González, a committed feminist activist, thanks to an award she received from the Sociedad Mexicana Pro Derechos de la Mujer A.C. Semillas.¹ This virtual museum offers to “dis-cover” – by taking away the veil that concealed them for so long – a gallery of artists’ portraits, a complete range of visual expressions that pays tribute to the great artists active throughout the last two centuries. MUMA’s interactive platform functions as a critical and scientific interface, rather than a simple display of artwork. It includes innovative reflections and aesthetic museum strategies that combine the will to bring visibility to the heritage of women’s art and the necessity to integrate the accessibility provided by social networks to maximise their promotion across the border and abroad. Far from offering only “dematerialised” contents, the museum has developed strategies to valorise their contents by constituting an online database of archives and discussion documents on the productions of México’s women artists.

“Nowadays,” says Lucero González, “a growing number of women graduate from art schools all over the country and yes, we can now confirm that at least 50% of these students are women. There is a considerable production of artwork in the fields of photography, video, painting, performance art, installation, art-action, street art, and public art… Faced with this blatant absence and this lack of archives accounting for the work created by Mexican women artists, I seized the opportunity and necessity to build this missing heritage.”²

MUMA offers a resolutely new understanding of museography in that it creates a semantic link between the artists and their works, thanks to an interactive gallery that presents artists in alphabetical order (“artistas” section), as well as critical and aesthetic documentation that provides exhibition texts specially written for the website. The museum’s consultative steering committee (made up of reputed historians, art critics, artists, and curators),^[meets once a year to organise three annual exhibitions. There can be two types of exhibitions: virtual exhibitions essentially created by and for the MUMA website, or itinerant exhibitions shown at temporary venues, such as the University of Guanajuato in 2012 or the Museum of Modern art in México D.F. in 2015.

Thinking in the “present”: the discursive genealogies of several generations of visual artists

Studying the museographic spaces dedicated to women artists in Mexico calls to attention the blatant lack of diversity in major cultural institutions, whether Latin-American or around the world. Virtual museums and other archive platforms focusing on women’s art reveal the institutional gulf and how deliberately ill-aware they are of the principle of equal representation of men and women in their programmes. In this respect, MUMA defends the promotion of archives on women artists, discussional and approached in relation to present times through problematized exhibitions. The compilation of older works stands alongside those of a new generation of artists, often still students or recent graduates. This artistic lineage is the focus of the virtual exhibition based on the article “A propósito de identidades: todo sobre mi madre”, written by Magali Lara (b. 1956 in México) for MUMA’s 7^th anniversary. Drawing inspiration from the concept of the “maternal continent” developed by Julia Kristeva, Magali Lara’s corpus readily associates Louise Bourgeois with the work of Minerva Ayón (b. 1985), a young artist who channels her own mother’s illness through the creation of very large textile pieces.

The under-representation of women artists in Mexican cultural institutions

But the initiative of creating MUMA also reflects a deep questioning of the reason for the existence of such a museum these days. For decades, as shown by Cynthia Silvana Gesualdo⁶ – a researcher specialised in museums and the issue of the institutional visibility of Mexican women artists –, Mexican cultural institutions have consistently ignored the fundamental principle defended by the 2009 Torréon Declaration, which pointed out, via the INTERCOM (International Committee on Management), the responsibility of museums in the promotion of marginalised groups, encouraging them to respect equality between individuals regardless of beliefs or origins. As early as 2011, Gesualdo’s study compared the men/women ratio in the country’s major official cultural institutions, such as the Museo Nacional de San Carlos (MNSC), the Museum of Fine Arts of Mexico, also known as Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes (MPBA), and the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), out of a total of 244 temporary exhibitions held between 1995 and 2011.

In addition to the predictable results in terms of disparity in monographic exhibitions and extremely low participation of women during the collective exhibitions organised by these three institutions, Gesualdo also noticed a clear decline in the number of monographic propositions over the past 20 years. For example, MUNAL (Museo Nacional de Arte) has held no solo exhibition for a woman artist since 1992, against 22 dedicated to male artists. The results of the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, which was founded in 1968, are even more alarming: in 44 years of existence, there have been no monographic exhibitions of women artists, against 21 dedicated to men. The Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes (MPBA) counts 10 monographic exhibitions of women artists against 60 for male artists. More recently still, the artist Mónica Mayer simply exposed the sad conclusion shown in the form of diagrams on the walls of the Carrillo Gil Museum during the exhibition Ejercicios exploratorios II. Creadoras contemporáneas en la colección MACG⁷ : only 15% of the 336 artists in the Carrillo Gil collection are women, among whom only 25% were granted a monographic exhibition between 1977 and 2016.

Continuity and performativity of the archive
A feminist archive presented “in the future”

The major issue here, in turns materialised and dematerialised by the archive interface, consists in evading the order established by the official history of art, instead nesting in performative interstices and showing, over and over, celebrated or regrettably little known works, in order to revivify a bedrock of knowledge about feminist art in general, and Mexican feminist art in the specific case of MUMA. Other reiterative initiatives and conservation measures have been launched this past decade, prompted by the vast innovative potential provided by the Internet in the 2000s: Re.act.feminism#2⁸, an itinerant exhibition inaugurated at the Montehermoso Kulturunea cultural centre in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), which gave the public the opportunity of watching on request over 70 video documents on feminist performances from all over the world; and more recently the Australian platform Future Feminist Archive⁹. Each of these initiatives is the result of a will to improve contributive platforms and the promotion of the works of contemporary women artists by giving the archive performative and dialectic value.

Virtual vs. “in situ”: a focal point of curating

An important issue today is the ethical problematisation of the contributions and challenges of the virtual field in order to crystallise the exchange and contribution networks around women’s art. In October 2010, the symposium “Women: Museum. Between Collection Strategy and Social Platform”¹³ organised by Elke Krasny at the Vienna City Library, tried to raise issues inherent to the dichotomy between museum strategies and social platforms. The symposium was held only a few months after MoMA’s own, “Art Institutions and Feminist Politics Now”, and established connections between the specificity of contemporary artistic practices, the place of women artists in institutions, and the role of feminist heritage in curatorial practices.

From a broader point of view, what gives the virtual feminist museum its maximal expression of societal commitment is the “event-encounter”, a concept developed by the feminist theorist Griselda Pollock¹⁴ :

“The virtuality (…) concerns the creation of a different kind of archive that can deepen the understanding of art practices, not for their representational function, but as sites of creative difference, as poetic events, ever waiting to be read in the spaces they open up once we weave new webs of connection and conversation and thereby allow new encounters.”¹⁵

A plural art: revisiting the militant multidisciplinary approach
The archival palimpsest as a method, (a) memory(-ies) of the collective: the operational modes and circularity of discourses on art

MUMA also involves an interlocking of curatorial projects that demonstrate a practice of the artistic and critical palimpsest. Karen Cordero¹⁶ and Mónica Mayer strive to combine these research issues in their respective disciplines, but with a collective, not to say “retro-collective”¹⁷, ambition. Another MUMA protagonist, the performer Lorena Wolffer, questions gendered social relationships through the subject of violence against women.¹⁸ In Evidencias (Evidence), a virtual exhibition at MUMA, Lorena Wolffer collected everyday objects used to commit various acts of violence against women – “stigmatic” objects, pieces of evidence given by victims of violence or by their relatives when they were no longer there to testify. In 2015, the exhibition Expuestas: registros públicos, organised at the Museum of Modern Art in México, included a wall of objects collected during its previous presentation of Evidencias, juxtaposing the “evidence” given by female victims of violence and showing it to the general public.

In this respect, through the artist’s approach and the first presentation of Evidencias, MUMA proposes a first reflection phase, while also challenging the presumed “bell jar” traditionally associated with the exhibition space – a linear system that presents a faultless discourse, just as the work of art is perceived as a “finished product”. Thus the virtual exhibition becomes a medium, a means rather than an “end” per se. The tribute and reiterative activation process took a new turn when Lorena Wolffer presented the exhibition Documentary altercations. Revision of performances by women artists at MUMA, in which she associated Mexican feminist action-art pieces with scalable and critical resources. Based on the inescapable conclusion that any performance document inevitably alters the original action, Wolffer encouraged five Mexican women artists to interpret the documents and archives about their own work: