Polvo de Gallina Negra (in Spanish: Black hen powder) was a Mexican group of feminist art founded by the visual artists Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer in 1983 and was the first group of this genre in Mexico. For ten years their activities included demonstrations, exhibitions, conferences, publication of texts, participations in media, performance, curatorship, mail art and, especially –as Maris Bustamante wrote, “we grew while we built our families, so we had a lots of fun discovering that the social and cultural reality is penetrable”.
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Context
1970s decade in Mexico wew deeply complexes on sociopolitical facts, marked by the crisis incited by the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968. In the field of arts, the sociopolitical situation “defined a plastic language that looks for the narrow relation between the village, the politics and the art”.
Afterwards of the peak of the Generación de la Ruptura, in the 1960s and 1970s were born different artistic groups in open criticism to this movement because they see them as "elitist, apolitical and mercantilist". These movements known like The Groups. explored activities like performance, non object art, and used artistic supports (objects, photocopies) and different spaces of exhibition than the conventionals (streets, alternative galleries).
In these years, the feminist movement in Mexico experienced a renaissance promoted in his majority by university half class and urban women from Mexico City. The first feminist organisation of this second wave was Movimiento de Acción Solidaria (MAS, 1971) in which sympathized Mónica Mayer and Ana Victoria Jiménez. They arose afterwards the National Movement of Women (MNM, 1973), the Movement of Women Liberation (1974), the Mexican Feminist Movement (MFM) and the Coalition of Feminist Women, which in 1976 coordinated to the MNM, MFM, La Revuelta and the Colectivo de Mujeres. Several artists joined these organisations "contributing with their creativity in demonstrations banners and with actions"”.
Specifically, “in Mexico, the rise of the phenomenon of the groupal feminist art derives, on the one hand by the cultural critical process, opened by the Liberation of women movement and his influence on some artists; by other, like result of the feminist art course (1982-1984) taught by Mónica Mayer in the Academy of Saint Carlos (ENAP-UNAM)”.
Like a consequence of these meetings, were formed important groups of feminist art in Mexico: Tlacuilas y retrateras (1983-1984) integrated by Ruth Primes, Consuelo Almeda, Karen Lamb, Ana Victoria Jiménez, Lorraine Loaiza, Nicola Coleby, Marcela Ramírez, Isabel Restrepo, Patricia Torres, Elizabeth Valenzuela and Mónica Mayer, whose visual project more important was La fiesta de quince años (The Party of Fifteen Years) (1984); Bio-art (1983-1984) conformed by Guadalupe García, Laïta, Rose Go Lengen, Roselle Faure and Nunik Sauret, whose creations oscillated between the painting, the fashionable design, the performance and the recorded; and Polvo de gallina negra (1983-1993) whose work turns around the constant questioning of the women role in Mexico and the construction of the feminine image in the mass media as well as a complaint of violence against women and machismo.
Polvo de Gallina Negra was born in 1983 as a group focused in art and feminism, initiated by Maris Bustamante, Mónica Mayer and Herminia Dosal, and sustained by the two first in the successive years. Polvo de Gallina Negra faced harsh opposition from other groups which considered his foundation as stereotypically or radical due their feminist perspective.
The name of the group derived from a powder used by Mexican witchcraft against the evil eye, so
We know that evil eye are made to women... if we are feminists and if we are feminist artists, get worse! So we said we will call themselves "Polvo de Gallina Negra" in the name, the remedy...