Polvo de Gallina Negra

Polvo de Gallina Negra (in Spanish: Black hen powder) was a collective founded by Mexican visual artists Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer in 1983, the first group of the feminist art genre in Mexico.

[1][2] For ten years, their activities included demonstrations, exhibitions, conferences, publication of texts, participation in media, performance, curatorship, and mail art.

Bustamante wrote, “[W]e grew while we built our families, so we had a lots of fun discovering that the social and cultural reality is penetrable.”[3][4][5][6][7][8] The 1970s were a time of complex sociopolitical change in Mexico, beginning with the crisis incited by the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968.

[10] Following the peak of the Generación de la Ruptura (The Breakaway Generation), the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of different artistic groups who openly criticized their predecessors as "elitist, apolitical and mercantilist.

"[6] These movements, known as The Groups,[4][5] explored activities like performance and non-object art, and used unconventional artistic supports (objects, photocopies) and exhibition spaces (streets, alternative galleries).

The first feminist organization of this second wave was Movimiento de Acción Solidaria (MAS, 1971) with which Mónica Mayer and Ana Victoria Jiménez sympathized.

[...] The deep class struggle we live, the racial prejudice and the oligarchic values create a social fabric where women are excluded from active roles and attacked directly simply because they are women.”[12]