Diseño en femenino. México presente

Ana Elena Mallet & Pilar Obeso

Diseño en femenino. México presente offers an approach to the design created by four generations of women, allowing us to follow their paths—their contributions, ideas, political and labor stances, their social and professional networks, designs, and creations—in order to better appreciate their advances and achievements.

Drawing on the exhibition held from December 2022 to April 2023 at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, this publication includes pieces by both domestic and foreign designers who worked in Mexico from the modern period to the second decade of the twenty-first century, as well as the work of Indigenous creators from the twentieth century to the present day.

Rather than a historical retrospective, Ana Elena Mallet and Pilar Obeso—experts in Mexican design and the exhibition curators—have emphasized, reviewed, and documented the work of a community of women who opted to make design their profession and their way of life. At the heart of this project is an aspiration to make the feminine visible and accompany its expression of rejuvenated meanings to overturn design dogmas, recontextualize women’s work, and expand our vision of this discipline.

The authors have been pioneering in addressing the work of over one hundred female designers in Mexico through a feminist approach, thus provoking reflections on the feminine in creation so as to revalorize it not as an exclusive attribute of women, but as a way of being in the world.

Ana Elena Mallet is an independent curator specialized in modern and contemporary Latin American design. She is a distinguished professor at the Monterrey Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, Art and Design, a guest curator of the modern and contemporary design collection of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), and a member of the acquisitions committee for the Architecture and Design department of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has curated many art, fashion, and design exhibitions, including: Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980 (MoMA, 2024), A Handmade Modernism: Artisanal Design in Mexico, 1952–2022 (MUAC, 2022 and Conarte Monterrey, 2023), Design in a Feminine Key: Mexico 1940–2022 (Franz Mayer Museum and Casa de México en Madrid, 2023), and Clara Porset: Design and Thinking (Museo Jumex, 2020).

She is the author of Life in Art: The Writings of Clara Porset (Alias, 2020), Felix Tissot: The Eternal and the Modern (Fauna, 2020), Mexican Chair (Arquine-Conaculta, 2017), and Bauhaus and Modern Mexico: Design by van Beuren (Arquine-Conaculta, 2014), among other publications. She is currently working on a book about Mexican design in the twentieth century and an exhibition on the history of ceramics in Mexico.

Pilar Obeso is a textile and fashion designer with a Master’s in Fashion Management from Centro. As an administrator and curator of modern and contemporary Mexican design projects and exhibitions, she has collaborated with a variety of museums and institutions, such as Casa de México en España, the National Museum of San Carlos, the Franz Mayer Museum, the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), the Purpose of the Object Museum (MODO), Palacio de Hierro, and Cinépolis. She teaches at Centro and the Monterrey Institute of Technology and has participated in international seminars at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris. She was awarded the British Council’s Crafting Futures design residency (2019–2020) and received a grant from the Young Creators Program (2017–2018). She is currently working on an exhibition on the representation of women in art, fashion, and pop culture from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Art | Design
Paperback
24 x 18 cm
192 pages
Four color printing
380 gr
Spanish edition
140 images
ISBN Spanish pending
Publisher: Fauna