María Aranís was a Chilean painter, belonging to the generation of women at the beginning of the twentieth century who consolidated female access to the modern system of the arts There is scarce surviving information about her biography and career. The appearance of a body of production among women of the period presents us with corporality as a political issue through which artists constructed their identity. La Negra (1931) responds to this angular momentum. Painted in Paris, it reveals the artist’s interest in addressing female experiences alongside the unified struggle for women’s demands, wage improvements, public health, and universal suffrage. This intersects, however, with the conjugation of social class and ethnic group present in these issues: white and middle-class women versus the experiences of racialised, working-class, and peasant women. It is precisely in this period that multiclass meetings in Chile are reinforced, with the appearance of the Popular Front and the MEMCH (Movement for the Emancipation of Women in Chile) in which various female and feminist agencies participated, creating ties of belonging in a new paradigm within the history of women.
This is the first time the work of María Aranís is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Gloria Cortes Aliaga
