SOUTH AND ABOUT!

With the aims of opening informal communication channels among graduate students of the New York Area focusing on topics related to the arts of Latin America and the Caribbean, IFA Latin America has created South and About! This workshop series is structured as a student-run initiative striving to open a casual space for dialogue and peer-to-peer feedback on the work in progress of emerging scholars in our field. Our thematic focus is broad and welcomes interdisciplinary methodological approaches, including, but not limited to, temporal and geographic proposals of an innovative nature. Through this lens, we seek to foster and strengthen further interconnections within our communities via creative intellectual exchanges.

We will meet on the dates specified below from 6:30 to 8:00 PM in the Basement Seminar Room at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

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November 6

South & About! is a student-organized research workshop on the arts from Latin America and the Caribbean. This program invites graduate students and emerging scholars in art history and related disciplines to participate in informal discussions amongst their peers.

Black Art and Modernization in Brazil: Arthur Ramos’s Study of Afro-Brazilians through Medicine, Education, and Art 

Lynne Lee, PhD Candidate, Rice University

In the first half of the twentieth century, intellectuals and technocrats in Brazil spearheaded a national eugenic movement to whiten their population as part of their modernizing endeavors. In this context, medically trained scholars investigated the culture of Afro-Brazilians whom they sought to reform through various disciplines. Among them, Arthur Ramos (1903-1949), a multidisciplinary scholar originally trained in forensic medicine, published in 1949 “Black Art in Brazil,” one of the first texts analyzing Afro-Brazilian religious artifacts as art. His collection of Black art comprises over 140 objects used by Afro-descendants in Brazil and Africa. This paper investigates how Ramos, a protagonist of modernization in 1930s-40s Brazil, instrumentalized Black art to validate claims of Afro-Brazilians’ cultural inferiority and promote eugenic policies that sought to eradicate “undesirable” traces of their cultures.

Although Ramos rejected biological determinism, he considered that Afro-Brazilians were still trapped in a primitive mentality and had to be modernized with the help of educators and physicians. Throughout the 1930s, he directed state-sponsored interventions in schools in Rio de Janeiro to teach mental hygiene and ensure children’s growth into model citizens of a modern Brazil. By parsing Ramos’s educational and medical publications alongside his writings on Afro-Brazilian art, I unveil unsuspected connections between ideals of mental health promoted in the former and aesthetic standards applied in the latter. Ultimately, I demonstrate how these seemingly unrelated studies are animated by the shared ambition to transform Brazil into a modern state according to European models.  

Transnational Surrealisms: Re-positioning Violeta Parra’s Arpilleras

Cristalina Parra, MA Student, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

This essay studies the work of Chilean artist Violeta Parra (1917-1967), who, from the 1930s through the 1960s, was inspired by folklore, migration, social upheaval, and the tension of the rural/urban in Latin America’s modernizing 1900s. While Parra’s work as a singer-songwriter is internationally recognized, both her career in the plastic arts and her role in the transnational Surrealist movement need further exploration. In the early 1960s, when she already had a flourishing international career as a musician, Parra began making songs that paint themselves, or “canciones que se pintan.” The artist took up painting, sculpture, and embroidery as mediums to represent the themes she had previously only explored musically. Engaging the creative political tools of the Surrealist marvelous, Parra kept folklore at the center of her practice to create a defiant artistic expression against the loss of Latin American cultural heritage. Parra’s early life in the Chilean countryside inspired the themes of her pieces. Parra’s adult life in Paris and the connections Europe facilitated with Surrealists like Roberto Matta and Alejandro Jodorowsky inspired her style. Violeta’s 1964 exhibition in the Musée d’ arts décoratifs of the Louvre was the apogee of her career in the visual arts. The poster she embroidered for the show depicted a giant eye, and it was quintessentially Surrealist. The works on show followed the Surrealist trend, and they depicted Latin America’s ancestral images: musicians, rural ceremonies, animals, festivities, and spiritual scenes. Parra’s thick wool stitches on burlap, delicate macramé, and vibrant paints bring Latin America’s modernizing 1900s to life. To elevate our understanding of Parra’s visual arts and reposition the artist within the conversation of transnational Surrealisms, this essay will examine three pieces that were exhibited both in Parra’s 1964 Louvre exhibition and in the 57th Venice Biennale: Combate Naval I (1964), El Circo (1961), and El Árbol de la Vida (1963).

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October 2

South & About! is a student-organized research workshop on the arts from Latin America and the Caribbean. This program invites graduate students and emerging scholars in art history and related disciplines to participate in informal discussions amongst their peers.

Anagrammatic Production: Lea Lublin’s Fluvio Subtunal (1969)
Jonathan Mandel, PhD student, Princeton University

In December 1969, officials in Argentina’s military government converged on the cities of Santa Fe and Paraná to celebrate the completion of an ambitious infrastructure project: the Túnel Subfluvial Hernandarias, a tunnel providing the country’s first roadway across (or rather, beneath) the Paraná River. As part of a week of festivities, the artist Lea Lublin was invited to produce the work Fluvio Subtunal, a multisensory environment created in an empty department store in central Santa Fe, which she described to the press as a “parallel tunnel.” This paper takes Lublin at her word and treats Fluvio Subtunal as an infrastructure project in its own right, drawing from Brian Larkin’s formulation of infrastructure as “promising forms” through which political rationalities are rendered sensible. By attending not only to the formal dimensions of the work, but also to the assemblage of institutions and individuals that Lublin forged in order to realize Fluvio Subtunal, this paper brings into focus a political tactic that can be described as “anagrammatic” in the artist’s reordering of the political rationality promoted under the Onganía regime.

Black Atlantic Ecologies: Marriage, Portraiture, and World-Making in Black and Indigenous Mexico
Bianca Morán, PhD student, The Graduate Center, CUNY

What does a new world identity tell us about the construction of Blackness and the social worlds created to sustain Black life in Mexico? How does indigeneity, both African and American, challenge notions of Latinidad? Through reading the images in Tony Gleaton’s oeuvre alongside earlier images of the African diaspora in Mexico, I hope to articulate a genealogy that both marks the presence of Afro-descendants and highlights the endurance of Black and indigenous life in the midst of coloniality. I situate Gleaton’s image within the scholarship of colonial Mexico, early twentieth-century Mexican portraiture, and contemporary data on Afro-Mexicans. I am interested in thinking about marriage and social life alongside indigenous and Black world-making, and the role of portraiture in an effort to unsettle data. Through the conceptual framework of the shoal, as articulated by scholar Tiffany Lethabo King, I hope to outline the concept of Afro-Atlantic ecologies as intimate and intricate systems of co-existence and convergence between indigenous people of both Africa and the Americas. Mexico operates as the environment that shapes an Afro-Atlantic ecology which aims to illuminate the ways in which Africans and their descendants find ways of living and life in community with indigenous people of the Americas. Specific to this study is the role of marriage, both cultural and ceremonial, in defining the spaces where an Afro-Atlantic ecology emerges. Instead of relying on a scientific approach to investigating ecology, I am thinking here of how these systems are represented visually, and what these images offer the historical record that may otherwise go uncaptured. Importantly, I want to consider portraiture as an intervention and to situate portraits as a mode of visualizing life and the networks of living.

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