Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces

One of the most important feminist artists of the 20th century, and one of the best-known within Latin America, Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) is renowned for her extensive practice with printmaking, video, and site-specific installation. Through these media, Rosenfeld crafted political gestures that contested the militarization of everyday life and revealed the invisible code at the heart of the world’s market-based economies. A Chilean artist, she also worked collaboratively with Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) during the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-1990.

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces, the first solo retrospective of Rosenfeld’s practice in the U.S., illuminates her many contributions to critical dialogues about public space, from large-scale video projections to her iconic street intervention One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (1979), in which she crossed the white directional lines of roads. The exhibition contextualizes her collaborative work with CADA as well as her solo endeavors, positioning her as a central hub in a larger network of the Latin American “escena de avanzada” (the advanced scene/avant-garde scene) that merged activism with poetry, creating spaces for creative resistance. The exhibition also demonstrates Rosenfeld’s influence on younger artists in Chile, as her conceptual rigor and aesthetic subtlety provides a lesson to those seeking tools for how to intervene within dominant systems of power.

CO-CURATED BY

Natalia Brizuela, Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese and Faculty Director and Chair of The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University