Jennifer Sales recognized by 2020 MFAH Marzio Award

CLAVIS PhD student Jennifer Sales was awarded an honorable mention for the 2020 Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in Latin American and Latino Art, sponsored by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Marzio award recognizes and publishes new scholarship in the field of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art by emerging scholars. The selection committee reviewed close to 20 submissions, a record number.

Sales’s essay “Broadening the Social Field: Ivens Machado’s Obstáculos e Medidas (1975) in the Área Experimental, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro,” foregrounds issues of race and sexuality in her examination of the understudied work of Ivens Machado in 1970s Brazil. The committee was particularly impressed by the number of documents cited by the author, including critical primary source publications such as the short-lived, alternative journal Malasartes (1975–77). Sales analyzes Machado’s contribution to issue no. 3 (April–June 1976), which he co-authored with Anna Bella Geiger and Paulo Herkenhoff, alongside his early artistic experimentations with drawing, installation, performance and video art. Sales uses Machado’s early work as a lens to put pressure on the concept and rhetoric surrounding the “experimental” in the critical discourse of the Brazilian neo-avant-garde, arguing that his work centering his body and other racialized bodies demands a queer and critical race theoretical framework often lacking in analyses of cultural production during os anos de chumbo (leaden years) and Brazilian history and culture more broadly.

The essay will be published in ICAA’s Working Papers in early 2022.