Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces (on view November 7, 2025–March 15, 2026) is the first US retrospective of the acclaimed Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld (b.1943, Santiago; d. 2020, Santiago), who encoded political gestures within her printmaking, video, and site-specific installations as forms of creative resistance during the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet. Emphasizing materiality, feminist care, and solidarity across difference, the exhibition’s curators, Natalia Brizuela and Julia Bryan-Wilson, celebrate Rosenfeld’s conceptual rigor and aesthetic subtlety as lessons relevant to resistance to dominant systems of power beyond this specific historical moment. They explore how the artist circumvented attempts to police thought, behaviors, and language through the ambiguities inherent in art before, during, and after the Pinochet dictatorship in her native Chile.

Encountered by the curators at the artist’s archive, many of the works are on public view for the first time, offering the opportunity to see Rosenfeld’s work across a variety of materialities including archival documents, intaglio prints, collages from everyday materials, book covers, serigraphs with thread, and photographs spanning the years between 1970 to 2019. Documentary videos, often using montage techniques with appropriated footage, are well represented in this exhibition that references “disobedient space” as feminist space. The retrospective includes several iterations of Rosenfeld’s best-known work, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [One mile of crosses on the pavement] (1979), initially performed on Santiago’s Avenida Manquehue, in which the artist used white tape to turn dashed road lines into crosses. It was replicated in various locales, including in front of the Chilean Presidential Palace (Palacio de La Moneda). 

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces foregrounds the artist’s centrality in conceptual and activist art practices in Latin America, positioning the artist as a crucial node in a Latin American network. To broaden our understanding of Rosenfeld’s wide range of practices, the exhibition intentionally highlights lesser-known works of collaboration, illuminating Rosenfeld’s relationships with fellow artists and activists. Along with her individual work, the exhibition foregrounds Rosenfeld’s collaborations with the experimental novelist Diamela Eltit and the public interventions of Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), where she was a founding member. CADA developed the highly visible slogan NO+ (“No mas/No more”) in 1983, which was quickly replicated across Chile as a call for protest against the Pinochet dictatorship. The convergence of art, activist gestures, and symbols, is informed by the succinct compression of poetry structures.

Rosenfeld was also a member of Escena de Avanzada, a group of avant-garde artists and writers who frustrated authority through semantic disruptions and visual interventions, avoiding direct confrontation but setting an example for the mass demonstrations that would slowly erode the authority of Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. In the bleakest of times, Rosenfeld’s critical, oppositional artistic voice kept alive spaces for dissent, and influenced the cultural and political imagination that ultimately set the stage for successful large-scale resistance movements.

About the Curators
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 co-curator of the online platform “Waldemar Cordeiro: Bits of the Planet” (2024–ongoing).

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies and core faculty in Columbia's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Bryan-Wilson is Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), where she co-organized the major group exhibitions Women’s Histories, Histories of Dance, and Queer Histories. Her show Louise Nevelson: Persistence, was an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale in 2022, and in 2024 she served as the President of the International Jury of the 60th Venice Biennale.

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces is made possible, in part, through generous financial support from Teiger Foundation, and the collaboration of the Fundación Lotty Rosenfeld. The illustrated scholarly publication expands on our current understanding of Rosenfeld’s wide-ranging art practice, and includes new texts by multiple authors that engage feminist lineage and collective resistance.