Rosa Rolanda was a multidisciplinary artist whose varied practice included choreography, photography, and painting. Although Rolanda described herself as a neo-figurative artist, it can be argued that Tehuana (1940) is influenced by the political project of Mexican Muralism – which often portrayed idealised depictions of Indigenous children, to embody a “pure” Mexican identity – and its modern style of figuration. Rolanda depicts a young girl with large almond-shaped eyes, deep brown skin, and rounded facial features. The subject, a girl from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, wears a huipil, the traditional garb of Indigenous Zapotec women. Some consider the Zapotecs a matriarchal society, and Rolanda, like her friend Frida Kahlo, wore the huipil as a symbol of feminist resistance in a patriarchal twentieth-century Mexican society. A hummingbird, an important symbol in Mayan creation myths, hangs like a pendant around the subject’s neck. This use of precontact iconography is characteristic of Mexican Modernism, in which many artists looked to indigeneity to create a revolutionary and culturally decolonised Mexican identity.
This is the first time the work of Rosa Rolanda is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Diego Chocano
