La mulata y sus máscaras - Galería Isabel Hurley

Marisa González
La mulata y sus máscaras (1975-1976)

29th setember 2023 – 10th november de 2023

This work dealing with violence towards women was undertaken in the USA and is representative of the period in which several different incipient interests converged in the 70s in North America: technology, feminism and the politics.
It was created in 1975 in Washington DC and forms part of the extensive series generically entitled Violencia mujer (Violence Against Woman) It comprises various photographic sequences of the faces of fellow colleagues at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington D.C., and of the feminist professor of art Mary Beth Edelson in New York. All the participants in this collective project dramatized the violent scenes in response to the tortures suffered by women during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile.

The series bore the titles La Descarga and La Mulata.
La Mulata deals with the identity of a woman, in this case a woman of mixed race, and is directly linked with lack of identity, concealment and the many faces of an undefined identity.
In the words of the artist:
“My colleague Liz Williams was a very pale-skinned mulatto with very negroid features, thick lips, broad flat nose and curly Afro hair. She suffered serious problems of racial identity and was confused. Was she white or was she black? She felt white among the blacks and black among the whites.
I made a photo performance with her and we combined our artistic skills to create this collective project. She sculpted the masks of her own face in different mediums, masks which hid and questioned her true identity while I and my camera interacted with her and her masks.”
Rereading of archive: The original photographs developed in 18 X 24 cm. format date from 1975-76. Four decades later they were enlarged to 100 X 76 cm each in 2014 for an exhibition at Tabacalera in Madrid which was completed with a minute-long loop projection of a succession of these images. This selection of 9 images extracted from La Mulata series was shown for the first time in the retrospective exhibition Registros Domesticados, at Tabacalera, Madrid, in 2015; and from there travelled to the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, in 2016. It will shortly be shown at IVAM, Valencia.