Celebrating Women FROM THE PUBLISHER
Twenty-five thousand Swazi virgins dance for the Queen Mother. People who have had near-death experiences in Spain ride in open coffins and thank Santa Marta for their lives. Half-a-million Bolivians pray to Mother Earth and the Virgin Mary for cell phones, sewing machines, televisions, and Tudor houses. Polish girls float wreaths of wildflowers on the river. Berber divorcﾽes invite Moroccan shepherds to marry them. In Thailand, an entire city honors the women who saved their ancestors from invaders. Couples from across the world race over obstacles in Finlandﾽs World Wife Carrying Championships. In China, seafaring families ride in boats as a tribute to the Goddess of the Fishermen. And in the United States, women represent each of the fifty states in a competition for the famed title, Miss America.
In Celebrating Women, photographer Paola Gianturco trains her eye on the worldﾽs most vibrant festivals that honor women as goddesses, warriors, lovers, healers, and athletes, among many other roles. These moving celebrations, idiosyncratic to their indigenous roots, take the form of parades, parties, competitions, and religious ceremonies. Gianturco spent five years photographing seventeen festivals in fifteen countries across five continents. Collected for the first time ever in a single edition, Gianturco provides insightful text describing the specific occasions and detailing their historic and cultural significance, culled from her extensive interviews with musicians, dancers, vendors, mask makers, costume designers, journalists, priests, governors, and spectatorsﾽnot to mention a bona fide princess and king.
Exhibition to appear at One Market, Concourse Lobby, San Francisco, October 4ﾽDecember 17, 2004. This is the first exhibition to be curated by the International Museum of Women, San Francisco.
Author tour across the United States, OctoberﾽNovember 2004
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