Browsing by Subject "Latin American art"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

A Focal Point for Art: UT's Center for Latin American Visual Studies
(Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, 2011) Giunta, Andrea
Pan-American dreams : art, politics, and museum-making at the OAS, 1948-1976
(2012-12) Wellen, Michael Gordon; Giunta, Andrea; Barnitz, Jacqueline; Guridy, Frank; Reynolds, Ann; Smith, Cherise
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Organization of American States (OAS), a multinational political organization headquartered in Washington, DC, attempted to mediate U.S.-Latin American political and cultural relations. This dissertation traces how, in the United States, Latin American art emerged as a field of art historical study and exhibition via the activities of the OAS. I center my analysis on José Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru, two prominent curators who influenced the circulation of Latin American art during the Cold War. Part I focuses on Gómez Sicre, who served as head curator at the OAS from 1946 to 1981 and who founded the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976. I offer an analysis of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes, contextualizing them in relation to his contemporaries Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, and Jorge Romero Brest. I also discuss his efforts to build a network of art centers across the Americas, indicating how his activities fed into a Cold War struggle around notions of the “intellectual.” Part II examines the activities of poet and art critic Rafael Squirru, who served as Director of Cultural Affairs of the OAS from 1963 to 1970 and who theorized Latin American art in terms of the “new man.” I reconstruct how the phrase “new man” became a point of ideological conflict in the 1960s in a battle between Squirru and his political rival, Ernesto Ché Guevara. Throughout this dissertation, I indicate how Gómez Sicre and Squirru framed modern art within different Pan-American dreams of future world prosperity, equality, and cooperation. By examining the socio-political implications behind those dreams, I reveal the structures and limits of power shaping their influence during the Cold War. My study concentrates on the period from the founding of the OAS in 1948 to the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976, and I contend that the legacies of Pan-Americanism continue to affect the field of Latin American art today.
Reframing Latin America : curatorial practice and Latin American art since 1992
(2015-05) Winograd, Abigail Gena; Chambers, Eddie; Giunta, Andrea; Flaherty, George; Leoshko, Janice; Tejada, Roberto
This dissertation presents a comparative analysis of institutional policy towards Latin American art after 1992. Specifically, this study examines several concurrent phenomena: the increased visibility of Latin American artists in institutions, a rise in academic and scholarly attention, growing numbers of collectors, and an extraordinary growth in the overall art market in the 1990s that dramatically increased the value of Latin American art. Though the expanded interest in Latin American art was wide- spread, four institutions – The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), the Tate Modern, London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid – invested heavily in acquisitions and widely exhibited cultural production from the region. Though the impulse for strengthening institutional commitment to Latin America in Europe and North America resulted from factors arising from similar geopolitical and theoretical circumstances, these four museums approached developing their stake in Latin American art quite differently in a debate which was often contentious. Their rivalry emerged in an increasingly globalized art world, yet each institution remained committed to a notion of Latin America as a discrete cultural entity, the research and exhibition of which would allow each museum to assert its dominance as a leader in the field. In order to do so, each institution charted a different course marked by distinct aesthetic and curatorial choices that resulted in the establishment of competing maps (temporal, historical, and geographic) of Latin America. This involved a redrawing of the cultural maps which privileged a horizontal, transatlantic exchange over transcontinental or diagonal transatlantic dialogue. It also involved attempts to renovate or erase previously held notions of Latin American art as primitive, fantastic, or both. By emphasizing particular eras and styles, each case study institution created architectures of knowledge based on a particular idea of Latin American identity and culture. In doing so, they attempted to capture the symbolic capital inherent in defining a regional identity. The institutional and curatorial practice of these museums was emblematic of the confrontational and increasingly contentious debate regarding the relationship of Latin American art to modernity.
The São Paulo neo-avant-garde art, collaboration, and print media, 1970–1985
(2017-06-12) Binnie, Maria Teresa Rodriguez; Flaherty, George F., 1978-; Giunta, Andrea; Clarke, John; Lara, Fernando; Tejada, Roberto; Reynolds, Ann
This study analyzes artists’ dynamic experimentation with new printing technologies of mass media in São Paulo between 1970 and the early 1980s. This was a charged period in Brazil, marked by the rule of a military dictatorship and by a sudden economic growth that led to unprecedented commercial access to processes such as photocopy and offset printing, particularly in the financial hub of São Paulo. There, a singular artistic scene mined the formal and conceptual possibilities of mass print communication to generate works in multiples, to be handled as well as circulated inside and beyond gallery spaces. By analyzing the materiality of this corpus of works, this project unfolds the productive discrepancy they pose within narratives of Brazilian art under the dictatorship and of the international neo-avant-garde. As opposed to mail art or to canonical Conceptual art, these works did not act as mere traces of exchange or as text-based proposals. Rather, they centered on the visuality afforded by mass print media, on engaging the social and economic functions infusing these unconventional artistic supports, and on eliciting phenomenological encounters with the spectator. At a time when a growing distrust of technology and mass communication marked artistic discourse in Brazil and internationally, the São Paulo neo-avant-garde sought to democratize the production and reception of art objects precisely by utilizing the tools of mass print media. It is their “incorrect” use of these technologies that fueled their works’ political subversion and artistic critique.
Uncontainable Zapata : iconicity, religiosity, and visual diaspora
(2015-12) Vargas Santiago, Luis Adrián; Flaherty, George F., 1978-; Giunta, Andrea; Chambers, Edward (Eddie); Cordova, Cary; Gonzalez Mello, Renato; Guernsey, Julia; Tejada, Roberto
This dissertation examines the iterations and scatterings of the icon of Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Mexico and the U.S. during the twentieth century. In theorizing Zapata as an uncontainable icon, this project interrogates its irrepressible nature, shifting from one realm of signification to another as part of an incessant diaspora of images between Mexico and the U.S. Looking at the intertwining of image-making and religious structures surrounding the invention and reinvention of narratives around modern Mexico, this project unfolds the diverse and often contradictory mutations of Zapata’s icon, and its distinct ability to embody diverging political, gender, racial, and ethnic agendas across borders and time. Performing close readings of select visual and filmic works, each chapter focuses on the dominant ideologies, the local, national and geopolitical values, and the myriad affects permeating the social activations and uses of Zapata’s icon. Chapter One considers the tensions between visualizations of historical Zapata that he promoted himself during the 1910s through photographic means and the contemporaneous negative representations in cartoons and newspapers that rendered him as a barbarian Indian, a rapist and disrespected revolutionary charro. Chapter Two analyzes how post-revolutionary intellectual elites, particularly muralist Diego Rivera, gradually converted the late Zapata into the consummate hero of a nationalist and socialist program that, drawing heavily on Catholic forms, served to reconcile the country’s diverse ethnic and political factions, while encompassing its various cultural backgrounds through the homogeneous idea of mestizaje. Chapter Three concerns the scattering of his icon on U.S. soil: first in Anglo-American contexts, where he served to reinforce forms of American exceptionalism during the Great Depression and Cold War America, and then within the Chicana/o movement where his icon served Indo-Hispanos in New Mexico and Mexican-Americans in California to embody and promote complex ideas of race, belonging, citizenship, and nationalism. Finally, the dissertation considers the case of modern Zapatistas in Chiapas, as a call to challenge the internal limits, as well as the external borders, of our discipline so as to engage a transnational art history of the Americas.
¡Viva el Blanton!
(2006) LLILAS Staff
Working around : Lea Lublin, Marie Orensanz, Mirtha Dermisache, Margarita Paksa and the active spectator, 1968–1983
(2023-07-20) Detchon, Julia Watt; Flaherty, George F., 1978-; Giunta, Andrea; Nelson, Adele; Reynolds, Ann; Adams, Beverly; Lindstrom, Naomi
This dissertation studies four women artists working between Buenos Aires and Europe in the 1970s: Lea Lublin, Marie Orensanz, Mirtha Dermisache, and Margarita Paksa. During the military dictatorships of that decade, artists developed conceptual tactics – including performance-based works, coded uses of language and environmental installations – to critique the regimes in power. At the same time, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, an interdisciplinary gallery established by Jorge Glusberg in Buenos Aires, championed conceptual art from Latin America, presenting the work of Lublin, Orensanz, Dermisache, and Paksa alongside North American and European practitioners. This dissertation compares some of the conceptual tactics developed by these artists during the Long Seventies in an effort to highlight their contributions to the convergent histories of feminism and conceptualism in Argentina. Connected by the ambitious international agenda of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, and by personal friendships, Lublin, Orensanz, Dermisache, and Paksa each made work that responded to shared experiences of political and gendered domination while adapting nimbly to the specific cultural environments of Europe and the Americas. I therefore give careful attention to how their aesthetic strategies functioned across these varying environments. My analysis of these artists’ work, in its many forms, proposes a reading of conceptual art that hinges on the fundamentally reconfigured relations between artist and viewer taking place at the time. Focusing on “active spectatorship,” rather than on its dematerial or linguisitic qualities, this dissertation locates conceptual art’s criticality in its reliance on viewers that enter into it as embodied process. By opening not just the interpretation but also the creation of art to collaboration, I argue, these artists aimed their critique at the level of everyday life.