The Other Fridas

This week’s review presents a collection of essays centered on Latin American women creators, spotlighting their work in multiple artistic mediums.

Posted on September 15, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

The Other Fridas: The Lives and Works of Latin American Women Artists

ed. by Luciana Namorato, Débora Thomé, and João Nemi Neto Lexington Books, 2025
276p bibl index, 9781666963045 $120.00, 9781666963052

The Other Fridas, a collection of 16 essays edited by Namorato (Indiana Univ.), Thomé (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil), and Nemi Neto (Columbia Univ.), grew out of an ongoing project to recover, document, and make accessible the lives and works of women artists from Latin America broadly defined. The volume’s five sections engage art as “Image,” “Text,” “Form,” “Movement,” and “Sound,” in the often ignored, if not erased, productions of women from the 19th to the 21st centuries. While some of the artists featured in the well-written and carefully researched essays—Lygia Clark, Violeta Parra, and Sonia Braga, for example—were never absent from the public eye or the critical and historical literature, many will prove to all but the most specialist reader new and, one hopes, welcome acquaintances. The essays grapple with the cultural forces that deny agency, creativity, and originality to women, especially women of color from the global south, necessarily but at times distractingly so. Nonetheless, The Other Fridas refines historical narratives while questioning historical practices, and it contributes significantly to the scholarship on women and the arts in Latin America.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: E. Douglas, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Latin American & Latina/o Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – English & American
Choice Issue: Aug 2025

Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of related titles:

• ¡Ay Tú!: Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros
• Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame
• Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media
• A History of Chilean Literature

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