Contemporary Art Museum
Oaxaca, Mexico
October 17 – December 4, 1998
Fernando Solana, Director
Mari M. de Olguin, Coordinator, La Casa de Mujer
Shirley Chernitsky, Curator
Cynthia Martinez, Curator
Rowena Galavitz, Curator
Justina Fuentes, Coordinator
Mary Heebner, Contact
The success of WBB in Oaxaca has been wonderful, every time I pass the museum it is jammed with people visiting the exhibition.
– Mari M. de Olguin
The Women Beyond Borders exhibition in Mexico brought together artists from different socio-economic classes for the first time. Women from small villages in Mexico who work in crafts and don’t normally see themselves as artists came together with prominent artists from the big cities. After the great success of the exhibition, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca decided to start collecting women’s art at the museum. Margarita Dalton, a Mexican poet and anthropologist wrote the statement below for the exhibition.
AN EFFORT OF PEACE AND HARMONY
Oaxaca Museum of Contemporary Art
Margarita Dalton Palamo Ph.D., Anthropologist – MEXICO
Women Beyond Borders tells much more about the human condition than all of the peace agreements that have been signed in the world today.
Women Beyond Borders comes forth as a flame that ignites the mountain. The artists started working knowing beforehand that their work would travel around the world. Therefore we find extraordinary labor of hundreds of women joining their wills to discover something that we all have in common; the desire to express deep feelings through art.
The women artists have united themselves to declare with their art, with their sensibility, and creativity, that they share a common universe. They participate in a planet that expands and joins us as sisters and brothers beyond the borders of political differences, religious ideologies, and aesthetics. Beyond everything, there are similarities in all human beings. There is a humanist dimension without borders.
Women Beyond Borders is an effort for the peace and harmony that must prevail in the world. An effort that synthesizes the desire to unite and to combat the real enemies of all women: hunger, sickness, injustice, inequality and pain in all their representations.
The will that moves mountains has become a reality, “The dream of a common language”, as Adrienne Rich stated. The language of art in these boxes expresses the feelings of each woman who participated in the exposition and as a whole is the expression of millions of women in their daily reality. Women Beyond Borders tells much more about the human condition than all of the peace agreements that have been signed in the world today.
