Guindhá Casa Taller

Located about five miles northwest of the city center in Oaxaca, Guindhá Casa Taller is a printmaking workshop run by three women artists: Merecedes López, Soledad Vázquez and Viridiana Carmona. As a group of emerging artists, their practices together include the sharing of resources and technical skills, exhibition making and educational outreach. Past programs of Guindhá Casa Taller have included wood engraving demonstrations, participation in local feminist festivals, and activities with member artists as well as visiting artists.

Casa Guindha Taller strategically provides a space for women printmakers in Oaxaca, and in doing so, breaks the perceived traditional roles of women while providing an outlet for art that engages subjects which range widely from natural phenomena to the spiritual and social issues including poverty, femicide and violence against women, immigration and family dynamics.

Among the many points of reference for the work Guindhá Casa generates are the 1968 student movements in Oaxaca when female artists were largely kept anonymous and established art collectives (“grupos”) to make themselves and their art visible - following the achievement of women’s right to vote only in 1953; and the many women artists in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980 who sought to incorporate women’s experience into their practices - such as Monica Mayer’s interactive Tendedero de Historias, 1978, in which women participants expressed their private struggles with notes pinned up on clotheslines in public spaces.

Regionally, the medium of printmaking in Oaxaca is marked by the influences of locally emphasized techniques: woodcut stamping and engraving, graffiti and stencils. Historically, printmaking as a medium has been male-dominated in Oaxaca, largely due to the excuse of perceived difficulty and many demands in women’s lives under the normative patriarchal structure, such as child rearing and homecare. [i] Printmaking, like any art form, takes time to learn, and today women in Oaxaca claim a notable presence in the world of printmaking – and often can be found working in collectives and group workshops to hone their crafts, socialize and share access to large tools such as a printmaking presses.

Contributors: Lenore Alexander, Grace Donahue, Caroline Griffis

// Photos appear courtesy of the artists and Guindhá Casa Taller unless otherwise noted.