Comic

Lotty Rosenfeld

Disobedient Spaces

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces is a companion volume to the first US retrospective of Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld (b. 1943, Santiago; d. 2020, Santiago). The title references "disobedient space" as feminist space, an approach that emerged from extensive research and dialogue between the two curators/editors, Julia Bryan-Wilson, a professor at Columbia University, and Natalia Brizuela, a professor at UC Berkeley. The book contextualize Rosenfeld's solo work as well as her collaborations with Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), positioning the artist as a crucial node in a Latin American network that merged activism with poetry. In her wide-ranging feminist art practice, Rosenfeld celebrated the imagination as the antidote to systems of control, be they patriarchal, dictatorial, capitalistic, or colonial. Framed through the lens of care, feminist friendship, and solidarity across difference, the exhibition highlights these aspects of her practice as central to her conceptual strategies. The show also emphasizes an unprecedented range of materialities used by Rosenfeld-including rarely seen intaglio prints, collages from everyday materials, book covers, and serigraphs with thread. Disobedient Spaces foregrounds lesser-known works of intimate collaboration, illuminating Rosenfeld's relationships with fellow artists and activists. The curators explore how the artist circumvented attempts to police thought, behaviors, and language through the ambiguities inherent in art before, during, and after the Pinochet dictatorship in her native Chile.