Gabriel Pérez provided an overview of the development of cultural art institutions in Nicaragua, highlighting their enterprise to depoliticize artistic practices and preserve dominant structures.
This critical art history is divided into two parts: first, a historical overview following the development of art institutions from the last 40 years; and second, an examination of grassroots efforts in critical art management, emphasizing self-governance, experimentation, feminist education, and political commitment.
In recent decades, an explosion of critical interventions from multiple fields has emphasized the return to the archive as one of the key axes from which central problems of the culture and history of the Americas are thought about, read, and discussed. However, studies on critics and artistic practices have, to different extents, always been anchored in and in conversation with the archive.
This set of presentations sought to reflect on the way in which Latin American studies have positioned themselves...
Taking as its point of departure the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s notion of the “organic line,” a line of space that appears between a painting and its frame, a door and its lintel, or tiles on the floor, art historian and theorist Irene Small tracks the emergence of the concept in Clark’s work circa 1954. But it also comprehends the organic line as a generative conceptual tool, one that does expansive aesthetic, epistemological, and political work well beyond Clark’s immediate context. Mobilizing a rich...
Many scholars have traced the momentous historical consequences of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), seeking to redraw Euro-American maps of the revolutionary era, complicate the relation of imperial center to colonized periphery, and historicize modern categories of race and nation. But research into the varied and vibrant musical cultures of colonial Saint-Domingue and the Haitian revolutionary period, and the subsequent global dispersion and transformation of these cultures, are sparser, especially when it...
