Lotty Rosenfeld, Moción de Orden (Point of Order), 2002. Video projection. Courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld Foundation

Disobedient Spaces, co-curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Natalia Brizuela, will be the first US retrospective of Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld (b.1943, Santiago; d.2020, Santiago). Rosenfeld was a key member of the “Escena de Avanzada,” a group of Chilean artists who attempted to mobilize their society under Augusto Pinochet’s repressive regime, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. She was also a founding member of the experimental Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), which produced ambitious public projects that disrupted daily life under the dictatorship and heightened awareness of social and political injustices under the regime. 

Documentation of Lotty Rosenfeld’s action Una Herida American (An American Wound) in front of the White House, Washington, DC, 1982. Courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld Foundation

The survey will document a range of works, from large-scale video projections on the sides of buildings to iconic public interventions to evidence of Rosenfeld’s influence on a younger generation of feminist activists. Works include Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement) (1979), in which Rosenfeld used white bandages and tape to alter traffic lines in front of the Chilean Presidential Palace—an action that questioned state authority—and NO+ (“No more”), a phrase developed with CADA that was taken up across Chile as a call for protest during the dictatorship.

An advertisement for International Women’s Day in Chile featuring Lotty Rosenfeld’s signature and the slogan of Movimiento Unitario Mujeres por la Vida, No + Porque Somos + (No More Because We Are More+), 1986. © C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones de Arte). Courtesy Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago

 The curators will contextualize both her solo work and her collaborations with CADA, positioning Rosenfeld as a crucial node in a Latin American network that merged activism with poetry. They will frame her practice through the lens of care, feminist friendship, and solidarity across difference, highlighting these as central to her conceptual strategies by foregrounding lesser-known works of intimate collaboration, illuminating her relationships with fellow artists and activists, and commissioning new texts that engage feminist lineage and collective resistance. The exhibition will also feature performances by contemporary artists whose work is influenced by Rosenfeld and engages directly with her practice.

Natalia Brizuela is Class of 1930 Chair of the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She co-curated Contemporary Indigenous Media (2022) with Kathy Geritz at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); The Matter of Photography in the Americas (2018–19) with Jodi Roberts at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University and the Houston Center for Photography; and Nuno Ramos: No Sé (El Templo del Sol) (2014) at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires. Along with Rachel Price and Ian Alan Price she is a cocurator of the online platform “Waldemar Cordeiro: Bits of the Planet” (2024–ongoing). Brizuela has published numerous monographs and edited volumes. Most recently, she co-edited Listening to Others: Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Cinema (2024) with Krista Brune. She has received multiple grants for her academic research from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University. She is also Curator-at-Large of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), where she co-organized the major group exhibitions Women’s Histories/Feminist Histories (2019), Histories of Dance (2020; canceled due to COVID-19), and Queer Histories (2024). Bryan-Wilson curated Louise Nevelson: Persistence (an official collateral event at the 59th Venice Biennale), and with Andrea Andersson, she co-curated the touring exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen (2017–19), organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Her books include Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009); the award-winning Fray: Art and Textile (2017); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (2023). She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019 and served as President of the International Jury of the 60th Venice Biennale. 

Kaegan Sparks, Natalie Dupêcher, Mississippi Museum of Art