South and About! Spring 2021

April 19

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.

To register for the online event, please write to, fif204@nyu.edu

The Counter-Baroque: Transhistorical Expressions in Contemporary Latin American Art

Sara Garzón, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University

In the past three decades, we have seen an increasing interest among Latin American artists to appropriate the sensibilities of the Baroque period. However, what in the past has been called the Neobaroque in reference to hybrid and syncretic models, after the 1990s shifted into what I would like to term a “counter-Baroque” aesthetic. Using the works of Ecuadorian artist María José Argenzio (b. 1973, Guayaquil), I will discuss how, beyond a Baroque form, these contemporary artistic expressions demonstrate a critical engagement with a Baroque ethos. Enacted through tropes of excess, artifice, and theatricality, the Baroque ethos, while nascent in the sixteenth century, perdures today through the continuation of plantation optics, the performance of social stratification, and the theater of the body. Since Baroque culture combines the religious visual regimes that were cemented during the period of Spanish colonial rule with the disciplining optics of the colonial administration, the counter-Baroque aesthetic that I am interested in tracing incorporates an explicit critique of Baroque visuality, as this has been complicit with colonialism.

Stitching Worlds: Mourning and Solidarity through Collaborative Embroidery

Chloë Courtney, PhD Student, History of Art, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

In 2011, Mexican conceptual artist Teresa Margolles began a series of collaborative embroideries worked on cloths stained with the bodily fluids of murder victims. While Margolles has long confronted viewers with visceral evidence of systemic violence, this series of embroideries operates differently. Each project activates a community of participants who bring their own knowledge, experience, and trauma into conversation with the instance of violence the stained cloth represents. Further, participants respond to the material traces of this violence through the craft of needlework, honoring the victim through visual strategies particularly suited to embroidery.
Recent scholarship has examined how Margolles’s use of textiles manifests emotional labor, affect, and care in response to ongoing violence. In this paper, I further this discourse by attending to the specific textile knowledge and iconography of the embroidery Margolles created in collaboration with a Maya women’s advocacy group in Santa Catarina Palopó, Sololá, Guatemala. Drawing from decolonial theory, I trace how its cartographic iconography connects contemporary femicide with the hemispheric impacts of coloniality. Finally, I attend to the complex associations tied to craft in the Americas, and how the craft status of the embroideries nuance their function as vehicles for testimony and memorial.

Teresa Margolles, *Nkijak b’ey Pa jun utz laj K’aslemal/Opening Paths to Social Justice*, 2011-2015
78 ¾ x 78 ¾ inches
Embroidery on fabric previously stained with blood from the body of a woman assassinated in Guatemala City. Created with the participation of Mayan women members of the Asociación de Desarrollo de la Mujer K’ak’a Na’ (ADEMKAN): Bonifacia Cocom, Lucy López, Yuri López, Silvia Menchú, Claudia Nimacachi, Lucrecia Puac, Estela Tax, and Josefina Tuy.

February 8

To register for the online event, please write to, fif204@nyu.edu

Icon of the Hero: Tracing the expression of citizenship and nationalism through representations of Simón Bolívar in South America to José Marti and Che Guevara in Cuba

Gwen A. Unger, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University

The figure of the hero is present throughout the history of art, especially in Latin American painting during the period of independence in the nineteenth century. In this paper I explore the visual manipulation of hero figures Simón Bolívar, José Martí and Ernesto Che Guevara as symbols to propagate ideas of citizenship and nationalism. Focusing specifically on the work of independence era painter José Gil de Castro and Cuban pop artist Raúl Martínez I demonstrate how these artists created representations of national heroes that reflected socio-political ideologies of the time. Iconographies of the hero functioned as important stabilizing factors in periods of socio-political transition and potential uncertainty, as exemplified in the use of images of Bolívar, Martí and Guevara. These portraits, while painted by Gil de Castro and Martínez, are more akin to products of compromise between the artists and their subjects. Rather than a mirror reflection of a historical figure, each portrait demonstrates an imaginary hero inflected by regional, temporal and social contexts and aspirations. Gil de Castro’s paintings of Simón Bolívar emerge from traditions of viceregal portraiture, yet play with flattening and republican motifs to create an image of Bolívar as the modern, mestizo Pan-American liberator. Similarly, in the work of Martínez, I explore how his portrayals of Martí and Che Guevara as local heroes exemplify the average man, affirming the Cuban revolution as a product of peasant, guerrilla struggle against the institutional bourgeois elite. The portraits discussed in this paper mobilized heroes as icons under which to unify the constituencies of new systems of government, separating them as radically different from their predecessors, yet retaining familiar imagery as stabilizing elements.

Raúl Martínez, Rosas y Estrellas, 1972, oil on canvas, 51 x 45.5 inches, Farber Collection

Caribbean Syncretism: Belkis Ayón and Anna Ruth Henriques
Miquael Williams, MA Student, History of Art and Archaeology, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

The work of Afro-Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón and Jewish-Jamaican artist Anna Ruth Henriques engenders a discussion about the artists’ understanding of the relationships between the seemingly disparate peoples populating the Caribbean islands and the impact of ethnic, religious, and cultural blending on their identity and personal experiences. Despite the national and aesthetic differences between these artists, a parallel examination of their oeuvre reveals ample conceptual similarities. In their syncretic representations, Ayón and Henriques examine the impact of religious praxis on the Caribbean. Furthermore, through rewriting religious narratives—and foregrounding female figures—the work of Ayón and Henriques often provide intimately personal accounts and reflections. While both artists produce work that critically engages with the Caribbean’s hybridity and the female experience, their divergences are equally captivating and reflective of distinct personal experiences, cultural histories, and artistic practices.

Left: Belkis Ayón, Sikan, collograph, 1991. Image rights Belkis Ayón Estate. Right: Anna Ruth Henriques, The Book of Mechtilde, 1997. Image rights Anna Ruth Henriques.

South and About! Spring 2021

LATIN AMERICAN FORUM

ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM OF LATIN AMERICAN ART

DUKE HOUSE EXHIBITION SERIES

SOUTH AND ABOUT!

HUBER COLLOQUIUM ON IBEROAMERICAN ART

EVENTS CALENDAR