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April 5, 2022, Filed Under: news, Visiting Scholar

Keynote lectures by Esther Gabara and Anna Arabindan-Kesson at the 2022 ISLAA Forum (April 22, 2022)

ISLAA Forum: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop

Please save Friday, April 22, 2022 for the launch of the ISLAA Forum: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop, the first of three annual dissertation workshops for emerging scholars organized by CLAVIS and sponsored by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

We invite you to join us for brief presentations by the seven workshop participants on their dissertation projects and keynote lectures from Dr. Esther Gabara (Duke University) and Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton University).

The keynotes will be delivered in person at UT and livestreamed here.

A reception will follow the keynote lectures.

FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2022

3-5:30pm CST

ART 1.102 and livestream

Photo portrait of Esther Gabara

Dr. Esther Gabara

Associate Professor of Romance Studies & Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Duke University

 “Motifs in Non-Literary Fiction: Walking in Spirals Under Neoliberalism”

This lecture sets out how contemporary art practices of walking have taken up the literary motif to create what I call non-literary fictions. Learning from influential Indigenous movements as much as Brazilian Lygia Clark’s foundational work, Caminhando [Walking, 1963], Antonio Caro and Francis Alÿs have employed the motif of walking across Colombia and Mexico and beyond. Their repeated rehearsals of walking never quite arrive at performance, and so invent fictional times and spaces that evade neoliberalism’s demand to produce and its well-honed capacity to profit from artistic creativity.

Photo of ambulant vendor in Mexico City street
Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes [Walkers], 1992-2006. As published in Ojarasca, monthly supplement of La Jornada, February 2013.

Esther Gabara is associate professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of two monographs: Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), and Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism(University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2022). Gabara was the curator and editor of the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Pop América, 1965-1975 (McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 2018-2019), which was awarded the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize for curatorial innovation, the Association for Latin American Art Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award, and an honorable mention for the Alfred H. Barr J. Award for Museum Scholarship by the College Arts Association.

Photo portrait of Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Assistant Professor of Black Diasporic Art, Princeton University

“Plantation Imaginaries: Mobile Forms and Forms of Enclosure”

My talk is concerned with the historical production and circulation of the plantation as a physical space, and one that was imaged through particular, connected, modes across the British Empire. Examining how the plantation comes into view through the convergence of art and medicine, I also consider how contemporary artists ‘return’ to the plantation as a means of redress, and a space for reimagining new forms of relation.

Watercolor of a plantation
William Berryman, View of Lucky Valley Estate Buildings, Clarendon, 1810, watercolor.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Born in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia and worked as a Registered Nurse before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her first book, published with Duke University Press, is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World and she is also the director of the digital humanities project Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism.

Organizers: Dr. George Flaherty, Associate Professor of Art History & Director, CLAVIS and Dr. Adele Nelson, Assistant Professor of Art History & Associate Director, CLAVIS.

The workshop is generously supported by ISLAA, UT’s Art History Division Lecture Series, CLAVIS, and LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections.

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