Permanent Seminar in Latin American Art
“Matter Matters: Images and Materiality in Discussion”
Thursday, May 2, 2019 at 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
CLAVIS
Current Tinker Visiting Professor Gabriela Siracusano, of CONICET (National Research Council, Argentina), Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, and Universidad de Buenos Aires, will discuss questions and concepts around the material dimension of images and its link to cultural practices through an interdisciplinary approach.
Gabriela Siracusano is a Principal Scientific Researcher at CONICET (National Research Council, Argentina) and director of the Centro de Investigaciones en Arte, Materia y Cultura at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. She is also Professor of Theory and Historiography of Art at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. A Getty Scholar in 2016, Guggenheim Fellow in 2006-2007, and Getty Postdoctoral Fellow in 2003, she has also been a visiting professor and scholar at several universities including Columbia University, Cambridge University, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, and Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz, among others, and is currently a Tinker Visiting Professor at UT Austin. She is the director of several research projects concerning historical and chemical approaches to Spanish American Colonial art, such as “Materiality between Art, Science and Culture in the Viceroyalties (16th to 18th centuries)” sponsored by The Getty Foundation.
Her research and teaching focus on the material dimension of Colonial South American artworks, employing an interdisciplinary method that combines cultural art history, chemistry, and conservation. She is author of many books and articles including El Poder de los Colores (Buenos Aires, FCE, 2005; ALAA award 2006) and Pigments and Power in the Andes (London, Archetype, 2011). Between 2003 and 2011 she completed a project focused on the iconography of the Four Last Things in the Andean region, and published La Paleta del Espanto (Buenos Aires, Unsamedita, 2011). She is now working on a co-edited volume Materia Americana, together with Agustina Rodriguez Romero, which will gather together the most updated material studies on Pre-Columbian and Colonial artistic productions in the Americas.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and The Blanton Museum of Art.
