Kay Gage, Leonor Fini, Micchaelina Wautier, Elisa Couni, Remedios Varo, Ángeles Agrela, Lorna Simpson, Toshiko Takaezu, Martine Frank, Rene Cox, Elena Asins, Victoria Aberg, Teresa Serrano, Luchita Hurtado, Giovana Fratellini…
None of these women or dozens like them appear in textbooks, because they are not part of the History of Art. But they are painters, photographers, filmmakers, sculptures, engravers… “There are women in all artistic disciplines, with works of the same quality as men who, however, have been ignored,” says María Jesús Manzanares, artist and teacher of Graphic-Plastic Techniques at the Sierra de Santa Bárbara Institute in Plasencia.
She is one of the teachers of the Baccalaureate of Arts that is taught in this educational center, the only one in northern Extremadura where it can be studied. And she is the architect of an initiative that seeks not only for her students to get to know the women artists who have been ignored throughout history, but also for society as a whole to do so.
«We have placed the portraits of the artists between the books; they must enter them even with a shoehorn»
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For three years, in her class, her students have been carrying out an art and research exercise: “The study of a woman artist, who later has to make a portrait with blue pen on white cardboard,” explains the teacher. So that they discover women artists who do not appear in books and whose work has been silenced or hidden over the centuries.
«We all know that the History of Art is incomplete and that the deficiencies continue in the textbooks, in the curriculum that is also studied», María Jesús Manzanares makes clear. “But something will have to be done to address these shortcomings and, for this reason, there are some teachers who insist that art students get to know the artists who have existed even if they have been ignored, because the quality of their work deserves it.” She is one of those teachers who fights to rescue the ignored and forgotten, «because it is not understood that they continue to be so, because they are women who should be part of the History of Art, because I hope that in the future we will not have to talk about gender in terms of art, but in the meantime we have to work so that these women do not continue to be forgotten».
Hence the exercise that for three courses has been posed to those who are studying the Bachelor of Arts, rescuing authors whose absences María Gimeno has already given a good account of, «when in a knife-in-hand performance he was putting all the authors who are missing from the book of EH Gombrich, which is the sanctum sanctorum of the History of Art».
To this woman and many others such as Diana Larrea, Concha Mayordomo, Concha Romeu or Paula Noya, who work to rescue the forgotten, “who are concerned with revealing the mysteries hidden in the warehouses of museums with a woman’s name”, they attending three courses the students of the IES Sierra de Santa Bárbara. “To those blogs, to those studios, because they are our sources, since none of these artists can be found in books.” And through them they rescue a name, a life and draw her face with a blue pen, and highlight significant aspects of her biography and her work on the back.
They are the portraits that later, until now, have been shown in the library of the educational center. The ones that now – more than 90 drawings made by 60 students of the institute – are exhibited in the municipal library, fitted along many shelves between the books, “to show that they should be part of them, that is where these should be. artists, even if it is putting their names, their faces, their works with a shoehorn».
The exhibition can be seen until April 8, for the first time open to society, “to let everyone know that the work of these women is just as important as theirs, to demand that they never have to sign a painting, photograph or sculpture with the name of others to be exhibited in museums or galleries”, concludes María Jesús Manzanares.
Along with the portraits in blue pen, “something we all use, an easy technique that gives a very attractive result”, the names of the students who have painted them: Aída Vaquero, Ángel Perianes, Samuel Rojo, Alejandra Rodríguez, Judith Lorenzo , Clara Chico, Dana Asensio, Miguel Díaz, Noelia Esther Paz, Nagore González, Pilar Miguel, Diana Blanco, Javier Manzano…. The future artists who are trained at the IES Santa Bárbara and who star in the unique exhibition that the educational center premieres in Plasencia, whose poster also sports the colors of the Ukrainian flag. To show from education and art “our rejection of this war and give a wake-up call: let a woman sit at those negotiating tables.”
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