Scales of seeing : art, Los Angeles, PST:LA/LA

This dissertation explores the relationship between art, representation, and Los Angeles by way of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA—the 2017 Getty-led arts and culture initiative that explored the artistic relationship between Los Angeles and Latin America. Foregrounding four of its more than seventy art exhibitions, I specifically examine how Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in LA, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 unburied stories that are integral to both Los Angeles and Latin America’s past and present. While different in the genres, time periods and artists they featured, these shows shared concerns on migration, identity, the body, and visibility. In doing so, they underscored the under-acknowledged role that marginal artists play in questioning what Los Angeles is, who belongs to it, and how it will continue to be represented. Thus, I particularly engage my case studies as visual narratives that fracture the ways in which the city has come to be imagined by the predominantly white networks of representation, as well as by a racist and sexist art historical canon that has obliterated entire artistic communities. By shedding light on these shows’ contributions—via analyses of their curatorial strategies and close readings of the artworks in display—I document their relevance in combating the erasure of memory, which is ultimately the erasure of the city’s so-called minorities. For this, I ground my study in Visual Cultural Studies, Latina/o/x Studies and American Studies, which together broadly comprise feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, museum studies, urban studies, among others. Additionally, my dissertation demonstrates how Latina/o/x and Latin American curators, artists and researchers alike work to find the cracks through which change can percolate in institutional settings closely tied to corporate interests and urban development. Ultimately, my aim in foregrounding these shows as recuperative practices is to illuminate how art—even when staged within the context of contemporary mega-exhibitions and top-down initiatives—demands the creation of a new historiography.