Sandra Leandro: Silence and invisibility in art as an utopian women empire

What drives someone to silence and invisibility? Is this the opposite of an empire or really a protective island? Could it be a way of being against the dominance of the male gaze? This lecture wants to focus on Utopia of the 1st women movement and compare nineteenth and twentieth centuries portuguese and other european women artists with high and low visibility.
The Portuguese painter Isabel Boaventura (1870-1925) is an interesting case study because until 2012 no dictionary recorded her, no book mentioned her, she didn’t appear in any catalog, she wasn’t found on Google… Is she a fictional figure? Isabel Boaventura never displayed her paintings in public. Why did this happen? Was it her option? At the time she lived in, several women displayed their work in private or public exhibitions and often had a dominant presence in those events, but with few exceptions their historic legacy is still almost unknown. I would like to compare Isabel Boaventura with other case studies: the very well known French painter Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899); Josefa Greno (1850-1902) with her tragic love story and liberation through painting; the enigmatic Aurélia de Sousa (1867-1922), among others.

Sandra Leandro is an Assistant Professor at Universidade de Évora. PhD and MA in Contemporary Art History from Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL). Researcher at the Institute of Art History (UNL). Organizer of the Ist International Congress “Art and Gender”? (Lisboa, 22-24 Outubro 2014).