What it Means to be a Woman: Inside "A Box of One's Own"

By Anouk Wijeratne

MFA artist Negar Farajiani (left) pictured with curator Letícia Cobra Lima (right) holding their personal boxes after Gather and Graft, an arts workshop in collaboration with the “A Box of One’s Own: Women Beyond Borders,” at UCSB’s Art, Design and Architecture Museum.

For Letícia Cobra Lima, a Ph.D. candidate and graduate curator of education at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, thinking outside the box involved hundreds of boxes. Cobra Lima curated the current “A Box of One’s Own: Women Beyond Borders” exhibit on display since January – a collaborative archive allowing women across the globe to transform small wooden boxes into expressions of cultural womanhood.

Cobra Lima recently expanded the project to a hands-on workshop, inviting visitors from the Santa Barbara community to bring their own boxes to adorn, and so actively participate in the exhibit.

“The museum can be this more informal environment of learning that makes it a very fertile space for creativity,” Cobra Lima said. “That’s what I’m really excited about right now.”

Her recent workshop “Bring Your Own Box” was a partnership between the AD&A Museum and UCSB’s Art History Club. Attendees could decorate their boxes with craftsy resources provided by the museum and gain firsthand experience with assemblage art – projects that utilize found objects. During an earlier workshop, “Gather and Graft,” in collaboration with the UCSB Reads program, Cobra Lima created her own box made of bark. Inside, she attached hyperlocal poppy seeds with water-based glue that could potentially sprout if planted. A mixture of innovation and resourcefulness often shapes her creative process, she said.

An array of boxes in the AD & A Museum’s “A Box of One’s Own: Women Beyond Borders” exhibit featuring the work of artists Lorraine Serena, Jaqueline Brito, Vera Tamari, and Leonor Rigau de Carrieri (left to right).

Agatha Hutton's "Endless Beauty" box artwork on display at the "A Box of One's Own" exhibit. It is a combination of wax, ribbon, and wood.

Cobra Lima described the “Women Beyond Borders” exhibit as a true collaboration among female artists around the world. The global collection accumulated over 900 objects by women in more than 50 countries. The recent workshops brought in local and campus collaboration, enhancing the ongoing exhibition.

Cobra Lima, a Brazilian native and visual artist, pursued her graduate studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her passion for Latin American art and feminist studies coalesced organically for the curation of “A Box of One’s Own.” She spent months organizing the extensive collection of intricately decorated boxes, handling repurposed shoes and miniature homes.

She said she was reviving a concept by Lorraine Serena, a local artist and UCSB alumna, who first created “Women Beyond Borders” in 1991. The box format was purposefully compact to allow for easy transportation and collaboration. Female artists across the globe gained recognition in their local museum spaces – often for the first time.

The boxes displayed in the "Women Without Borders: A Box of One's Own" exhibit at UCSB’s Art, Architecture & Design Museum, explore a range of mediums, including a repurposed shoe and carved figurines.

Cobra Lima divided the current collection into four constellations: body, home, craft and memory. Each section of the exhibit depicts boxes specific to the theme with an accompanying audio tour for clarity. Combining fine art with interdisciplinary academic theory became a holistic process of curation. “I don't think I could do it any other way,” she said. “I think no one can. There's always a level of intermingling disciplines.”

The collection’s title drew inspiration from writer Virginia Woolf’s famous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Cobra Lima said. Woolf’s piece emphasized that women’s unfettered artistic expression needs systemic freedom to flourish. The collective boxes of “Women Beyond Borders” became an adaptation of Woolf’s “room,” simultaneously individual and universal.

“[Woolf] is trying to answer the question, ‘What does a woman need, in the very minimum, to become a writer, to become an artist?’” Cobra Lima said. “The box is kind of the minimum for the art. It's all about giving people the tools they need to express their voices.”

Anouk Wijeratne is a third-year English Literature and Communication double major at UCSB. She wrote this piece for her Digital Journalism course.