Latin American Forum, Fall 2018
November 28th
Pop América: New Figuration in Brazil and Beyond ca. 1960
Image courtesy of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Place: Lecture Hall, Institute of Fine Arts.
Time: 6:30 p.m.
The Latin American Forum is excited to present “Pop América: New Figuration in Brazil and Beyond ca. 1960,” a panel discussion addressing the complexity and diversity of the Pop phenomenon in the Americas. The panel features a conversation between Dr. Esther Gabara (E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor at Duke University); Dr. Claudia Calirman (Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice); and Brian Bentley (Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts). The event takes the exhibition “Pop América,” curated by Dr. Gabara at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and opened on October 4, 2018, as a starting point to problematize the label ‘Pop” in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing especially on the case of Brazilian New Figuration.
Esther Gabara is the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual culture, she teaches a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses that bring together research, theory, and practice and introduce students to scholarly and artistic genealogies in the Global South. Gabara was the faculty guest curator of the exhibition, Pop América, 1965-1975, which will travel from the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, 2018), to the Nasher Museum of Art (Duke, 2019), and the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern, 2019). Pop América was awarded the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize for curatorial innovation. Recent publications include essays for Un arte sin tutela: Salón Independiente en México, 1968-1971 (MUAC/UNAM, Mexico), La Raza (Autry Museum of the American West), and Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery). She published the monograph, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (2008, Duke University Press), and is completing a new manuscript, “Non-Literary Fiction: Invention and Intervention in Contemporary Art of the Americas.”
Claudia Calirman is Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, in the Department of Art and Music. She is the author of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Duke University Press, 2012), which received the 2013 Arvey Book Award by the Association for Latin American Art. She is a recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and has curated several exhibitions, including Basta! Art and Violence in Latin America (Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College, 2016). She is the author of “Pop and Politics in Brazilian Art” for the International Pop exhibition at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis.
Brian Bentley is a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art of the Americas at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where he received his MA in 2013. He is currently writing a dissertation on Brazilian New Figuration and New Objectivity, 1963–1970. Bentley holds a BA Honours in Art History from McGill University and held Curatorial Assistant positions at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum. He served as a curatorial researcher at El Museo del Barrio and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and co-curated Intimate Matters, an exhibition of work by NYU Steinhardt BFA students, in 2016. His writing is published in Paulo Bruscky: Artist Books and Films, 1970-2013 (Another Space, 2015). He was a research assistant for Carolee Thea’s On Curating II: Paradigm Shifts – Interviews with Fourteen International Curators (D.A.P., 2016) and Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2015). He is currently co-organizer, for the fourth time, of the annual IFA-ISLAA Symposium for Latin American Art.
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October 10th
Complexities and Complicities of the Gaze:
A Conversation between Milagros de la Torre and Shelley Rice
Image courtesy of Milagros de la Torre and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Place: Lecture Hall, Institute of Fine Arts.
Time: 6:30 p.m.
In this conversation, Milagros de la Torre and Prof. Shelley Rice (NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the Department of Art History) will talk about the artist’s career in the field of photography and the development of her artistic practice. Placing as a central theme the complexities of the gaze, the speakers will explore some of the topics developed in the artist’s work dealing with the construction of memory, and how these processes form individual and collective identities in Peru and other Latin American countries.
Milagros de la Torre is a New York-based artist working with the photographic medium since 1991. Her images involve critical research on the history and conceptual procedures of photography. Since her first solo exhibition in 1993 at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), she has been awarded several fellowships, grants, and prizes. Among them, the Rockefeller Foundation Artist Grant, the Romeo Martinez Photography Prize, and the Young Ibero-American Creators Prize for her series The Lost Steps (1998). Besides, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), The Dora Maar Fellowship from The Brown Foundation (2014), The Peter S. Reed Foundation Award in Photography and was the recipient of the Merited Person of Culture Award given by the Ministry of Culture, Peru (2016). In the year 2012, Prof. Edward J. Sullivan curated ‘Observed’, her first retrospective exhibition, presented in the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), and the Americas Society in New York.
Shelley Rice is a Professor at Tisch School of the Arts and the Department of Art History, College of Arts & Sciences, in New York University. Critic and historian, Shelley Rice has lectured on photography and multi-media art in the USA, Europe, South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa. She has published many books and is also a photography and art critic with numerous essays published in several journals as Art in America, Art Journal, Études Photographiques, among others; her regular columns have appeared in The Village Voice (1976-77), Soho Weekly News (1978-79) and Artforum (1980-82). Currently, she works for the online magazine of the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, where she served as the Invited Blogger in 2012 and where she has been, since 2014, host of the radiophonic talk show The Meeting Point.