Date of Award

2026

Document Type

MA Project - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Project Type

MA Project - Curatorial Proposal

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Art Business

First Advisor

Betsy Thomas

Second Advisor

Maria Sancho-Arroyo

Abstract

“Worldmaking of Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, and Dorothea Tanning” is a curatorial proposal conceived as a historical exhibition that weaves a conversation among the works of multidisciplinary surrealist women artists, British-Mexican Leonora Carrington (1917- 2011), Argentinian-Italian Leonor Fini (1907-1996), and American Dorothea Tanning (1910- 2012). Centered on their visual language, the exhibition aims to illuminate how their artistic practices inaugurated expressive strategies that did not exist before, thereby allowing them to disrupt the art-historical tradition of representation and notions of the feminine, self-identity, beauty, desire, and power. This exhibition brings together selected paintings spanning 1937 to 1952 to examine how these three female artists associated with surrealism constructed alternative systems of knowledge, arguing that no neutral or objective description or version of the world can be regarded as the true one1. While Surrealism has often been framed as a movement devoted to dreams and the unconscious, the expressive practices of these artists extend beyond the visualization of psychic imagery. Their works propose symbolic cosmologies in which the psyche, the body, and mythological structures operate as sites of inquiry. As the visitor moves through these spaces, the invitation is not to try to decode the works, but to enter them—to experience how these artists constructed realities in which women could generate knowledge, power, and meaning on their own terms.

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