DOMESTICANX ON VIEW IN EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO

Curated by El Museo curator Susanna V. Temkin, DOMESTICANX brings together seven intergenerational artists whose practices address the private sphere through works related to healing, spirituality, decoration, and the home.

DOMESTICANX ON VIEW IN EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO

The show is inspired by the concept of “domesticana,” first theorized by artist, scholar and critic Amalia Mesa-Bains in the 1990s. Proposed as a Chicana and feminist response to the male-dominated “rasquachismo,” domesticana shifts the defiant and expressive inventiveness of rasquache culture to the specific experience of working-class women. Drawing from Mesa-Bains’s own acknowledgement that all “terminologies must remain porous, sensibilities never completely named, and categories shattered,” DOMESTICANX expands the artist’s original theory through the lens of contemporary Latinx intersectionality.

"Revisiting a critical, if underrecognized theory in Latinx art history, DOMESTICANX celebrates the aesthetic sensibilities of the domestic from a contemporary queer, feminist, and intersectional perspective. In this show, I am interested in exploring cross-generational dialogues that center the home, family, self-fashioning, and spirituality as emancipatory spaces," said Susanna V. Temkin, Curator of El Museo del Barrio.

The show encompasses paintings, textiles, ceramics, and installation –including a reconceived artwork by Mesa-Bains, first presented at El Museo del Barrio in 1995– and features works by veteran artists Mesa-Bains, Nitza Tufiño and Maria Brito, as well as alongside the first museum presentations by emerging artists Amarise Carreras, Cielo Félix-Hernández, Joel Gaitan, and Misla. Representing different backgrounds, genders, and generations, the seven artists presented in DOMESTICANX reflect sustained and continuing responses to Mesa-Bains’ exhortation to “undo the wounds of patriarchy and colonization”.

Related Topics