2023 Latin American Speakers Series // Latin American-Canadian Art Projects

Curatorial Projects

The Latin American Speakers Series seeks to articulate and discuss issues of identity and intercultural dynamics in contemporary Latin American art that have evolved in the globalized art scene. Themes and questions of representation, international artistic-cultural interaction, power and marginality have and continue to be at the forefront of each lecture.

Tatiana Flores

Thursday, March 30, 2023 7:00pm EST

Hosted on Zoom. Recording available on virtual site.

Tatiana Flores

Looking Back on Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago:

In 2017, Tatiana Flores curated a major survey exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art for the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA/LA, a funding initiative to support exhibitions of Latino and Latin American art in Southern California museums and art institutions. Presented at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago included over eighty artists from the Caribbean islands and their diasporas and employed an archipelagic approach, inspired by the writings of Édouard Glissant and other Caribbean thinkers. It sought to expand both the continental bias and the conceptual borders of “Latin” America by featuring artists from the non-Hispanophone Caribbean. In this talk, Flores will discuss the exhibition through the lens of decolonial thought, curatorial activism, and antiracist advocacy.

About the Speaker

Tatiana Flores is Professor in the Departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Director of Rutgers’ Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities. She is the author of the award-winning book Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (2013) and curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (2017). A 2017-18 Getty Scholar, Flores received the 2016 Arts Writers book prize from the Andy Warhol Foundation and was the 2007-2008 Cisneros Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She previously served as president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History.

Andrea Giunta

Thursday, May 18th 2028,7PM ET

Hosted via Zoom. Recording available on virtual site.

Andrea Giunta

After Radical Women: Challenges to Dismantle the Colonial Artistic Canon

In 2018, the last presentation of the exhibition Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1960-1985 closed at the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. The exhibition opened a new vision of Latin American art and provided an account of its shortcomings concluding that the canon of Latin American art had not only excluded women, but also Afro-descendant and Indigenous artists. The year of the pandemic produced an institutional and curatorial shift that has had an impact on biennials, museum collections and the art market. How has this come about? To what extent is it the result of active institutional actions or does it respond to the need to renew curatorial and artistic markets? Has the presence of women artists, artists of non-binary identities, Afro-descendants, and Indigenous, managed to transform the canon of Latin American art? Problematizing and revising the limitations of the art world has become a central task in the curatorial and historiographical projects for Andrea Giunta and she will reflect and discuss her approach and preoccupations since the notable co-curated exhibition Radical Women.

About the Speaker

Andrea Giunta is a writer, curator, Senior Researcher at CONICET (Argentina), and Professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires. Curator of León Ferrari’s retrospective exhibition (Buenos Aires, CCR, 2004; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2006); co-curator of Verboamérica (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano [MALBA], Buenos Aires, 2016); and Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (Hammer Museum, LA; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2017–18). In 2020, she was Chief Curator of Bienal 12 Mercosul, Feminine(s). Visualities, Actions y Affects (Porto Alegre, Brasil). Her recent books include Feminismo y arte latinoamericano (Siglo XXI, 2018), Contra el canon (Siglo XXI, 2020), Rethinking Everything (delpire&co, 2021), The Political Body. Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America Art (UCPress, 2023).

Claudia Calirman

Thursday, October 26, 2023 7pm ET

Hosted on Zoom Recording available on virtual site.

Claudia Calirman

Feminist or Feminine?

While Brazilian women artists in the 1960s and 1970s were hailed as key figures in the country’s art scene, and enjoyed a unique position in terms of visibility and prominence, they still faced adversity and constraints because of their gender. Although many of them repudiated the term feminism, they still employed feminist strategies. They addressed women’s emancipation in their work. This rejection was influenced by a complexity of issues: the view of the military dictatorship as the only enemy; the country's patriarchal structure; the sexist attitudes of cultural agents; the disdain from the Left and the Right for the feminist cause. Furthermore, the feminist movement was considered an enterprise orchestrated by the United States, and rejecting this movement was considered an anti-imperialist gesture. This talk will give a nuanced account of the adversities and contradictions faced by these artists, even if they admittedly didn’t feel discriminated against because of their gender.

About the Speaker

Claudia Calirman is the Chair and Associate Professor of Art History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Chair of the Department of Art and Music. She is the author of Dissident Practices: Brazilian Women Artists, 1960s-2020s (Duke University Press, 2023). The book gives a nuanced account of how these artists responded to authoritarianism, engaged with trauma in the aftermath of the military dictatorship, fought against gender inequality, and advocated for LGBTQ+ rights. Her first book Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Duke University Press, 2012), analyzes the intersection of politics and the visual arts during the most repressive years of Brazil's military regime, from 1968 until 1975. It received the Arvey Award by the Association for Latin American Art. Calirman is a recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and was a Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Calirman has curated several exhibitions, including Dissident Practices (The Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York); Berna Reale: Right Now (Nara Roesler Gallery, São Paulo); Basta! Art and Violence in Latin America (The Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York); and Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, not Represent! (Americas Society, New York).