It’s not your fault: The Art Corner with Maca Fe
How women are ignored from art history and creating new body parameters with Argentinian artist Maca Fe.
Today, we start with an exercise:
You probably know the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, but do you know this painting from Sofonisba Anguissola (do you know who Anguissola even is?)
You probably know many of Van Gogh’s paintings, but do you know this painting by Suzanne Valadon?
And you may have heard countless times about Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings but do you know about Leonora Carrington?
If you have answered No to most of these questions “It’s not your fault” says Maca Fe, an Argentinian artist and art historian who created this exercise to highlight inequality in the way we study art history. She sat with us in the Art Corner today to tell us about her work and explain what she discovered studying art history, especially when it comes to women artists. “Of the biggest museums in the world, only 5% of the artists that are exposed are women,” she tells me. Maca is a contagious ball of energy, she mixes her ironic ways with an incredible knowledge and assertiveness that is admirable. With her, you laugh and learn.
She began to study art history at the same time that she began her journey into feminism. She tells me feminism was a safe space for her at a moment when she was beginning to discover and accept her body, but also as she questioned patriarchal systems.
Yet, her two worlds clashed “ In art history, we mainly study men. White European men” she says matter of factly, “We should almost change the name because we’re not studying art history, we’re studying European art history”. Observing this as she began her studies, she also started to ask: How can I be a feminist and not study women in art? “When you study art history, women begin to appear only around the 20th century, essentially after Friday Khalo, as if women had never held a paintbrush was before that time” she points out.
“But so many incredible painters existed before her that are undervalued in art history.” What if we only studied women, would we know the same things? “Yes. In terms of structure, technique. Sometimes even the material is the same!” she exclaims. Not to undervalue the work of masters like Da Vinci or Dali, she tells me, but they were not working alone. “For every painter, there is also a woman painting next to him, so why not study both?”.
Museums create narratives, and so do curriculums. “I always had a love-hate relationship with the museums. Because I love art, but I find museums patriarchal and always exposing the same narratives,” she tells me. She also adds that men artists tend to be in the permanent collections, whereas women get “slots”, and are exhibited periodically. “It’s not your fault if you don’t know most of the names mentioned in the game at the beginning, because most of the women that did paint could not even show their work, let alone teach it,” she continues “I find it exhausting to visit museums where 99.9% of the works are painted by men, making the few works painted by women invisible. The need for temporary exhibitions where only women exhibit exists because, it seems, there is no possibility of incorporating them into the permanent exhibitions.”
When it comes to her work, Maca is extremely adventurous. She tells me that at school she always felt that the way that art was being taught felt very confining and she wanted her art to pour through those edges. “I like to paint sexual and sensual characters, bodies with desire” she tells me “and it’s not about the shape of the body, but the desire, the spirit, like a third eye”. The characters in her work bypass body parameters; you can find a green-skinned woman with three eyes, a sexy lingerie model with one leg (inspired by the amazing Cherrie Louise), or an androgynous Madonna.
I ask her how she began to make this art and she tells me that there was a time when she did not feel confident with her body, “I used to always hide in pictures, make sure a friend of mine was in front of me and you couldn’t see the whole of me”, but as she grew up and took care of what made her feel uncomfortable, she began to love her body, and discover her erotic self. “I love being naked and drinking a glass of wine, so I began to just look at myself in the mirror and paint that,” she says, “and I felt that that was beautiful. I liked what I saw. I was free” So this is what Maca did, she freed the characters in her imagination and made them real, creating whole new possibilities for women to see themselves within art.
As a parting question, I ask Maca to tell me one of the artists that have most inspired her, and she shares with me the work of Marta Minujin. Throughout her illustrious career, Minujin has consistently challenged societal norms and gender expectations through her innovative and provocative artworks. As a feminist, she has fearlessly explored themes of female empowerment, equality, and the subversion of patriarchal structures. Maca tells me about her revolutionary work “Parthenon of Books” installation, created during the Argentine military dictatorship. In 1983, shortly after the fall of the dictatorship, Minujin designed a Parthenon, a symbol of patriarchal authority, with 30,000 books that had been confiscated or censored during the oppressive regime’s rule. The display aimed to highlight the significance of knowledge, the dangers of censorship, and the importance of reclaiming intellectual freedom in a society that had endured a dark period of authoritarianism. The artwork garnered international attention and remains an enduring symbol of courage and defiance against dictatorship.
The importance of Maca’s work lies in recreating a history of art that has been omitted from the mainstream, and working to create this new narrative is immensely important in today’s world. Reclaiming histories is part of the narrative change world that is needed to fight oppression.
