This article was published in conjunction with the opening of Encajeras (1964), the first solo show by Beatriz González. The text’s author, Marta Traba, cofounded the MAM in December of 1962, and served as the institution’s director. This article, published in the Bogotá-based magazine Revista La Nueva Prensa, captures a pivotal moment in the launching of González’s career. This text exemplifies the intimate relationship between the artist and Traba, who was pivotal to González’s education, artistic development, and professional advancement. They became acquainted in 1957 when González took a course taught by Traba on the Italian Renaissance; the class inspired her to enroll in an MFA program at the Universidad de Los Andes (1959), where she studied painting under Juan Antonio Roda and art history under Traba.
Beatriz González (b. 1938) is a Bogotá-based Colombian artist. Her career spans six decades—from the early 1960s to the present—and includes painting, drawing, and screenprinting, often incorporating curtains, recycled furniture, and everyday objects. González refers to herself as a “provincial” artist, and appropriates and reinterprets images from mass-media and, in some of her earlier works, well-known European artworks; therefore she has often been associated with the Pop Art movement, a position that she overtly rejects. Her work, indeed, does not deal with consumer culture, but is a chronicle of Colombia’s dreadful history (including an interminable civil war that began in 1948) as well as an investigation of the taste of the middle class, especially for European artworks. Her production exposes the uneven relationship between her own country and the hegemonic centers of both cultural and artistic production, Europe and the United States, revealing a legacy of colonialism. Besides her expansive artistic oeuvre, González has worked as a curator, museum educator, and art writer.
Bogotá-based Marta Traba (b. 1923, Buenos Aires; d. 1983, Madrid) was an Argentine cultural critic and art historian from the 1950s to the 1960s. She began her career writing for Ver y Estimar, the art magazine founded by the director of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Jorge Romero Brest. During the early years of her career, Traba championed Modernism in an effort to unify Latin American artists and to legitimize their work on the international scene. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, she adopted leftist ideologies following her political exile from Colombia. In 1968, because of her open opposition to the government of president Carlos Lleras Restrepo, she was forced into exile and lived in Montevideo, Caracas, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Washington, DC, and Paris, teaching at local universities and writing art criticism. At that time, Traba published a key book: Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970, which presents the theory of “art of resistance.” She quickly became critical of “cultural imperialism,” thereby encouraging artists to anchor their production within their country of origin. She was distrustful of experimental art, such as Pop Art, happenings, and Conceptual art, and considered them uncritical imports from the United States. As a result of her ongoing advocacy, Traba increased international awareness of Latin American artworks and artists who embraced their regional specificities and resisted universal aestheticism. One such artist was Beatriz González, who, incidentally, was an art history student of Traba’s at the Universidad de los Andes from 1959 to 1962.
