Visual Testimony Fourteen Female Artist From Uruguay Share Their Lives Through Their Art At Jundt Exhibit

Clenched fists.

The O-shaped mouth of an anonymous woman.

A hand pressed against a window.

The haunting images - three photographs in red - depict the life of an artist, a woman, an exile.

These are the self-portraits of Diana Mines, a photographer in Uruguay. Like other women artists who grew up in this small South American country, her art was silenced for more than a decade.

Threatened with rape, torture and imprisonment, many were forced to leave their homeland - a country torn apart by a 12-year dictatorship.

Now, Mines’ art is a testimony to that era.

“Las (In)visibles - Women Artists of Uruguay” features 36 photographs and paintings by Mines and 13 other artists. The exhibit, presented in both Spanish and English, is on display through March 4 at Gonzaga University’s Jundt Art Center.

These are the works of rich and poor women, women who have doctorates and those who can barely write. They are daughters, mothers, wives, lesbians - artists who are proud to be feminists as well as those who can’t even say the word.

“Women artists in Uruguay are faced with a lack of female role models, a sexist education and a patriarchal system,” explained Stacey Wescott, a free-lance photographer in Seattle who started working with the women in 1989.

Wescott, only 24 at the time, was a University of Minnesota student studying Spanish, Latin American studies and photojournalism. Through a fellowship, she traveled to Montevideo, Uruguay, to find women artists and tell their story.

“I come from a world where my friends wore nose rings and had purple hair,” Wescott said during a phone interview from Chicago. “These women (in Uruguay) were so serious - they grew up in a dictatorship. At first they had little to say and were afraid to take risks.

“That’s why I wanted them to speak for themselves.”

Uruguay, a country with a population of 3.2 million, suffered under a military dictatorship until 1984, when Julio Maria Sanguinetti won the presidential election. While Sanguinetti’s government was criticized for its lack of economic reform, it did pave the way for cultural freedom.

But for those who lived during the dictatorship, their art - and lives - are forever influenced by the past. Never will they forget the thousands who were murdered or tortured. Nor will they forget the harassment, the death threats for practicing their art.

As a result, much of their work was “self-censored,” said many of the artists in a 90-minute documentary video.

“You speak of the end of dictatorship?” asked artist Lacy Duarte, referring to life after military rule. “We are still under a dictatorship, one which is more subtle culturally and economically, yet still able to kill even fantasies and imagination.”

Duarte, who didn’t paint for 28 years so she wouldn’t compete with her husband, now paints about solitude and death.

Besides the dictatorship, many of the artists also focus on women as subjects.

In “Novias Revolucionarios #11,” or “Brides of the Revolution #11,” Leonilda Gonzalez, who spent 15 years in exile because of her political convictions, shows the pain women endured during military rule.

The woodcut print emphasizes the terrified, hollow eyes of a woman in white. An orange cage hovers above her; in it sits an imprisoned black bird.

Gonzales again uses the same bride in “Novias Revolucionarios #5.” This time, she is nailed to a cross, her breasts and navel appearing beneath a translucent veil and gown. At her feet stand three other brides, but they face the opposite direction.

“Most of the women didn’t see themselves as artists,” said Wescott, who also photographed guerrilla groups in Colombia before her trip to Uruguay.

Nor did they see themselves as women, said the 31-year-old.

Many were “in denial about the inequalities for women,” she said. They were so trained by the dictatorship to not see themselves as individuals that they had forgotten about their womanhood.

Yet in that country, where horse-driven carriages are as common as cars, where poor street vendors coexist with fancy department stores, women activists - and artists - are slowly becoming involved at all levels, in feminist organizations, academic and research centers, battered women’s shelters.

Pilar Gonzales, for example, is one of the few whom Wescott met who uses her art to promote women’s causes. She also uses it to poke fun at men.

Her piece, titled “Mano en la Misa,” or “Caught With His Hand in the Cookie Jar,” is a mixed-media work on a 3-by-6-foot canvas. It is a giant caricature of an elderly man wearing a jacket but no pants - his hands casually resting upon the head of his penis.

“Men hardly ever appear in my artwork,” said the mother of two, who stopped painting and drawing for many years after she got married. “In general (men) are portrayed as small yet strong beings. It is the women who are always present and always accenting the erotic and the sexual.”

Wescott, who brought all the paintings and artwork with her when she flew back to the United States in 1991, never intended to curate a traveling exhibit. But she wanted to give something back to the women, she said, as well as share the beauty of their work.

“Las (In)visibles” means “The (In)visible ones,” with “las” indicating the feminine, she explained.

The title shows “the duel between societal circumstances which perpetuate Uruguay women’s invisibility and the artist’s own efforts and talents which promote her visibility,” Wescott wrote. “Present yet absent, allowed yet discriminated against, included yet excluded; this has been the world of women artists in Uruguay.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Exhibit “Las (In)visibles Women Artists of Uruguay” continues at the Jundt Art Museum at Gonzaga University through March 4. Stacey Wescott, the exhibit’s curator, will deliver a free public slide lecture at 5 p.m. Feb. 20 in the Jundt’s Lecture Hall. For more information, call Midge Collins at 328-4220, ext. 3011.