Dissident Practices Calirman

D I S S I D E N T P R A C T I C E S T I C E S

Brazilian Women Artists, 1960s–2020s

Claudia Calirman

April 264 pages, 98 color illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1940-4 $26.95tr/£22.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1677-9 $99.95/£90.00

Claudia Calirman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Music at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles, also published by Duke University Press.

Dissident Practices

Brazilian Women Artists, 1960s–2020s CLAUDIA CALIRMAN

“Claudia Calirman’s feminist perspective illuminates a wide range of recent Brazilian artists both emerging and established. Creatively conceived, clearly written, and compellingly argued.”—JULIA BRYAN-WILSON, author of Fray: Art and Textile Politics

“Woven across time and artistic mediums, Dissident Practices provides a complex multivocal, intergenerational, and multidisciplinary art historiography of practices of creative resistance against all forms of subordination and oppression: gendered, political, social, racial, and artistic, from the perspective of singular women artists from Brazil. This is a country that has witnessed some of the most brilliant artists in the history of modern and contemporary art, but their memory has often been erased. This book—without being a survey, without unifying categorizations of gender or feminism—provides a relational, open-ended, situated perspective of the powerful contributions of Brazilian women to contemporary art, in the context of radical political and social conditions.”—CECILIA FAJARDO-HILL, art historian, curator, and writer in modern and contemporary Latin American art

In Dissident Practices, Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present, covering the period from the military dictatorship to the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, the social changes of the 2000s, the rise of the Right in the late-2010s, and the recent development of an overtly feminist art practice. Though they were lauded as key figures in Brazilian art, these artists still faced adversity and constraints because of their gender. Although many of them in the 1960s and 1970s disavowed the term feminism, Calirman gives a nuanced account of how they responded to authoritarianism, engaged with trauma in the aftermath of the military dictatorship, interrogated social gender norms, and fought against women’s objectification. By battling social inequalities, structures of power, and state violence, these artists create political agency in a society where women remain targets of brutality and discrimination.

Also by Claudia Calirman

Brazilian Art under Dictatorship Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles

paper, $25.95/£21.99 978-0-8223-5153-5 / 2012