Erin L. McCutcheon – Department Art & Art History

This talk centers on a series of works created by Polvo de Gallina Negra (PGN), the first feminist art collective in Mexico, that sought to challenge local constructions of motherhood during the 1980s. Despite the significant presence of PGN’s work in global surveys of feminist and Latin American art, a key aspect of their practices has rarely been considered in depth: their exaggerated performance of the “pregnant” body, both real and imagined, in public space. Situating their work within the context of local feminist debates, Dr. McCutcheon articulates how PGN offered a transformative visual encounter with the pregnant body that subverted reductive images and social meanings of pregnancy, motherhood, and feminists in Mexico. By strategically working through “pregnancy,” she contends their practices effectively re-signified the pregnant body as an artistic object, political agent, and symbol of feminist futurity. This research is drawn from Dr. McCutcheon’s current book project, which examines the ways this post-1968 generation of artists utilized motherhood as a means to directly shape histories of art and activism in Mexico City.