Rocío Maldonado and Georgina Quintana: Woven Fragments

• In Event: The other Fridas: Women, art and feminism in 20th-century Latin America

Abstract

The paper pieces together personal and formal relationships between these two contemporary Mexican artists in their individual four-decades-long production of painting, drawing, artist books, and sculpture. Maldonado, born in 1951, and Quintana, five years younger, met when they entered “La Esmeralda,” the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura, y Grabado as art students in the late-1970s. There, Maldonado and Quintana formed part of a generation that initiated a return and renovation of an expressive, aggressive figuration in drawing and painting that challenged notions of identity (whether gendered, national, or sexual) from both an introspective and critical perspective; this artistic tendency was later named “neomexicanidad” (neo-Mexicanism) by the late art historian Teresa del Conde. Maldonado and Quintana developed a close friendship and an exchange of artistic language. For two years (1981-82) they shared a studio on Chile Street in the historic zócalo district. Even so, as the 1990s ushered in NAFTA, increased Internet presence, and the dominance of the object and the conceptual in Mexican art, the neomexicanista tendency was abandoned by the artists. Since then, each one started to work independently, developing their personal languages, although yet were tied by common threads. Both artists continue to be committed to revealing, through their art, the interconnections between many worlds: the intimately feminine, natural, industrial, classical, and lo popular (craft), while remaining experimental in their approach to material and form.

Author

• Teresa Eckmann, University of Texas, San Antonio