Eli Bartra – författare

Intends to engender Mexican folk art and locate women at its centre by studying the processes of creation, distribution, and consumption, as well as examining iconographic aspects, and elements of class and ethnicity, from the perspective of gender.

The aim of this book is to engender Mexican folk art and locate women at its centre by studying the processes of creation, distribution, and consumption, as well as examining iconographic aspects, and elements of class and ethnicity, from the perspective of gender.

This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses).Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it.Contributors Eli BartraRonald J. DuncanDolores JulianoBetty LaDukeLourdes RejÓn PatrÓnSally PriceMarÍa de JesÚs RodrÍguez-ShadowMari Lyn SalvadorNorma ValleDorothea Scott Whitten

This book is a mosaic or quilt of folk art around the world, from polychrome clay figures made in Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla (Mexico) to the baskets Maori women create in New Zealand, from Japanese lacquer work and decorated paddles to black dolls in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The creative impulse found in three continents, four countries, and four geographical regions are juxtaposed to make up a harmonious whole. The book carries out a detailed dissection of a variety of ethnic, racialized, and gender representations in their contemporary forms.

This book is a mosaic or quilt of folk art around the world, from polychrome clay figures made in Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla (Mexico) to the baskets Maori women create in New Zealand, from Japanese lacquer work and decorated paddles to black dolls in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The creative impulse found in three continents, four countries, and four geographical regions are juxtaposed to make up a harmonious whole. The book carries out a detailed dissection of a variety of ethnic, racialized, and gender representations in their contemporary forms.

This open access book begins by setting out a conceptual, political, historical, and personal framework that serves to anchor the Mexican visual culture it goes on to address. To this end, it also provides a brief overview of feminist thinking from the late nineteenth century to the present day, which has nourished these visual artists. The notion of uprootedness runs through the entire work, as does the idea of nomadism and nomadic-critical subjects. Eli Bartra addresses loosely defined traditional, modern and contemporary art, including photography and film, as components of the visuality of this corner of the Global South. The book goes beyond recognised figures such as Frida Kahlo, who have dominated Mexico’s visual culture almost exclusively, though it does not dismiss them. It thus offers a visual mosaic that presents the work of photographers, filmmakers and a few artists whose creativity has no qualms about crossing boundaries; one comes from China, another looks out over the Mediterranean, another is based in Guanajuato, another lives in Querétaro, and there is even a European who walks the desert in northern Mexico, unearthing wounds.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a standard CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective