Embroidery and transgression: gender issues in art of Rosana Paulino and Rosana Palazyan

Abstract

Is it possible to say that artistic objects, by virtue of their material attributes (and not just their authorship), have a “genre”? Textile arts, and in particular embroidery, seem to be the case of objects “naturally linked to feminine making”. The aim is to debate the way in which such invoices were, historically, feminized in the Western artistic world, as a result of the process of imposition of the academic system. Since the 16th century, academies began to bring together the training and consecration of artists. It is worth noting that this system established the “hierarchy of genres”, a classification system of artistic modalities that scaled them, establishing history painting as the “highest” modality, an almost exclusive domain of male artists, and condemning it as “low” the applied arts, seen as domestic and, by extension, feminine. With the advent of feminism, in the 1970s, artists such as the American Miriam Schapiro articulated a revaluation of “feminine” traditions with a political discourse denouncing the practices of gender discrimination operating within the discipline of art history itself. In Brazil, since the 1980s, there have been interesting proposals for the renewal of textile arts, notably, works such as those by Rosana Paulino and Rosana Palazyan deserve attention due to their ability to subvert the meanings traditionally linked to such “feminine” designs; Her embroidery provides new ways of looking and thinking, extremely critical of the hierarchies of genres (artistic and social) that prevail both in everyday practices and in the art worlds.