Tour of the exhibition “Here We Are! Women in Design 1900–Today” with the Education Team
This exhibition explores over a century of design history shaped by women whose innovative vision contributed to the evolution of the discipline. In this first virtual class, we delve into the curatorial approach of the show and reflect on the many ways in which design operates as a visual, material, and cultural language.
Who wrote the history of design? Why do we know so little about its key figures? What challenges did women designers face in different times and contexts?
Led by Fundación Proa’s Education team, we launch a new series of online classes with a special tour of the exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design 1900–Today, produced by the Vitra Design Museum and Fundación Proa. This first session introduces the curatorial framework and invites us to reflect on the diverse ways design manifests itself as a visual, material, and cultural expression.
The exhibition brings together key figures of modernism, contemporary creators, and women who were excluded from dominant narratives for decades. The show recovers both individual and collective trajectories and highlights how social, political, and economic conditions shaped access to education, production, and recognition within the field of design.
Through a selection of works from the Vitra Design Museum collection, we examine how design interacts with changes in everyday life, technological progress, and the historical processes that defined each era. In addition to engaging with the exhibition content, this session offers insight into the work of the Vitra Design Museum—an internationally renowned institution in the field of design and architecture.
Women and Argentine Design in the 20th Century
Led by Fundación Proa’s Education team, this session explores the work of women who challenged the boundaries of a historically male-dominated field. Based on research by Silvia Fernández and curated by Fundación Proa, we reflect on the transformative power of design in everyday life.
What was happening in Argentina during the 20th century, while the languages of modern design were taking shape in Europe? What opportunities did women find to enter, resist, and persist within a professional and academic field traditionally defined by men?
This online class invites us to explore the history of women in Argentine design, through the local section of the exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design 1900–Today, produced by the Vitra Design Museum. This chapter, developed by Fundación Proa with academic guidance from Silvia Fernández, offers a response to questions as elusive as they are essential.
Far from being a closed inventory or a totalizing narrative, the research opens a space of visibility for individual trajectories that nevertheless reveal shared tensions: the need to build authorship, negotiate institutional boundaries, and intervene in everyday life through objects.
In this one-hour session, we highlight the contributions of entrepreneurs, innovators, and artists who helped shape 20th- and 21st-century Argentine design, tracing the lines and forms that defined their material worlds. The ceramics of Colette Boccara, the glasswork of Lucrecia Moyano, the furniture of Susi Aczel, and the urban equipment designed by Diana Cabeza are just a few of the many possible entry points into this ever-expanding field.
Women in the First European Design Schools
This session proposes a critical review of key 20th-century institutions —such as the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, Loheland, and the Ulm School— based on the questions they left unanswered: What bodies, voices, and materials were excluded from the official narrative of design?
Through the careers of designers like Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, and Varvara Stepanova —all featured in the exhibition Here We Are! at the Vitra Design Museum— we will explore the relationship between technique and the body, manual labor and political thought, form and emancipation.
Amid objects, textiles, lamps, and toys, this class aims to activate new readings on the role of art education in shaping design as a professional discipline. At the intersection of archives and the present, we propose to view the school as a space of resistance, transmission, and political imagination.
Training to Create, with Larisa Mantovani
In this class historian Larisa Mantovani invited us to reflect on women’s access to education and suffrage in early 20th-century Argentina—two key debates that shaped their entry into the worlds of art, design, and labor. Through cases such as Lucrecia Moyano and the vocational schools, the class explored how the first female designers were trained in a context where that title did not yet exist, and how applied arts began paving the way for their professional recognition.
Larisa Mantovani
PhD in History from UNSAM, with a degree and teaching certification in Arts from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She specializes in the social history of applied and decorative arts in Argentina, with a focus on the intersections between art, technical education, and industry during the first half of the 20th century. Her postdoctoral research at CONICET examines the promotion of textile education, production, and exhibitions between Buenos Aires and northern Argentina (1910–1943), through the analysis of educational initiatives, artistic and industrial exhibitions, and training networks for artisans and workers. She teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and has received fellowships from CONICET, the Getty Foundation, the Corning Museum of Glass, the American Ceramic Circle, and Argentina’s Ministry of Culture. She was curator and researcher for the exhibition Lucrecia Moyano. Design, Art, and Argentine Industry at the National Museum of Decorative Art and is the author of El pueblo tiene derecho a la belleza (Miño y Dávila, 2023).