Luis Vargas Santiago (PhD 2015) and Mari Rodríguez Binnie (PhD 2017) were recently awarded major awards in the disciplines of Art History and Latin American Studies. Vargas Santiago, a professor-researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, received a 2020 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art. Rodríguez Binnie, an assistant professor at Williams College, received Best Article in the Humanities award from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Abstracts of their winning projects can be read below.
Vargas Santiago, “The Afterlives of Zapata: A Revolutionary Icon in Mexico and the United States”
The book-length study examines how the image of Mexican Revolution agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata was gradually transformed into one of the most paradigmatic icons of the Americas. In theorizing “the afterlives” of Zapata in Warburgian terms, the project explores key stances of the representations of this hero in Mexico and the United States from 1910 to the present. The investigation focuses on select images that show the diverse mutations of Zapata’s icon, and its ability to embody varying social, political, artistic, racial, ethnic, and gender agendas across time. Looking at the intertwining of image-making and religious structures related to the invention and reinvention of narratives of modern Mexico, the study considers Zapata as part of an incessant visual diaspora between Latin America and the United States. Furthermore, it engages in a larger conversation around global art histories through the lenses of immigration and the cultural dispersion of images beyond nationalist constituencies.
Rodríguez Binnie, “Dissident Bodies: Materialising Xerographic Experimentation in São Paulo 1970-1985.” Third Text 33.6: (2019): 745-760
Between 1979 and 1984 São Paulo was the centre of a veritable boom in xerographic experimentation. The ardent turn to the photocopier on the part of many São Paulo-based artists was the culmination of a neo-avant-garde scene that had crystallised there since the beginning of the 1970s, during the most brutal years of the military dictatorship. Working individually, they coalesced in their appropriation of technologies of mass print media to create, in the midst of censorship and repression, dispersive and democratic works. However, these artists singularly harnessed the photocopier to simultaneously attack the parameters of canonical art and the oppressive measures of the regime that facilitated access to this very technology. This article materializes a significant and largely overlooked chapter of the conceptual turn in Brazil. It also maps a vital transition, from artists using xerography solely for its pluralizing capability, to developing xerography as a visual language in its own right – reorienting the machine’s function, and altering how viewers would approach these haptic works.
