UC Berkeley

My dissertation examines the work of the contemporary artist Patricia Belli against the backdrop of inter and postwar Nicaragua. By tending to gendered materialities and themes within the artist's oeuvre, such as the relationship between bodies and textiles, the dissertation considers how Belli’s works mobilize feminized intertextualities and practices of repair that intervene in the aesthetic discourses of this time, including the tenets of modernismo, within visual and literary vanguards. Returning to Nicaragua toward the end of the Sandinista revolutionary project (1979-1990), I situate her work amid social-political transitions. This was a period marked by shifting political ideologies, the fall of the Sandinista party, the victory of the right in the elections of 1990— which saw the first woman president in Nicaragua, Violeta Chamorro (1990-1997)—and the rise of neoliberalism in the country, amplified by Arnoldo Alemán’s presidential term (1997-2002).

Following Belli’s oeuvre, my dissertation focuses on the artist’s commitment to crafting unruly bodies by exploiting the possibilities and conditions of gendered materiality. Through her work, I engage how bodies take on more expansive meanings, exceeding the limits of normative corporeal forms to include political and social bodies. Utilizing mending as a craft-based technique and feminist strategy, I examine how Belli unravels patriarchal discourses and the tenets of national aesthetics by recasting bodies as uncontainable forms. I mobilize mending through multiple registers– mending is both an act of fixing as well as an act of undoing. In the expanded field of Belli’s work, mending is subversively deployed to bring different parts together, dissemble what is whole, and create new parts out of old parts. In this way, mending is both an act of violence as well as a gesture of rehabilitation, renewal, and regeneration.

The dissertation unfolds to reveal critical moments in Belli’s career while situating her work within a larger historiographic, social, and political context. Each chapter examines the evolution of her material and conceptual interests to consider the ways in which her work assembles and disassembles disciplined notions of containable bodies. While taking a monographic approach, the project also places Belli’s work in conversation with other Central American women artists from this period, whose works recodify gendered labor and everyday objects into conceptual, feminist interventions, to consider the rise of feminist formations within contemporary Central American art.