January 27, 2025, Filed Under: UncategorizedLecture (Feb. 6, 4:30pm): Lynda Klich, “Wrought Lessons: Woodcarving and the Neocolonial in Mexico” Wrought Lessons: Woodcarving and the Neocolonial in Mexico Dr. Lynda Klich Associate Professor, Hunter College, City University of New York Thursday, February 6, 2025 ART 1.120 4:30pm Free and open to the public During the Mexican state’s revolutionary reform project of the 1920s, a colonial revivalist culture emerged in which artists embraced wood carving in the form of woodcuts and applied arts in the built environment. This talk explores the role of carved wood works in furthering the ideologies of the ruling elite, revealing the classed and raced tensions in postrevolutionary society. Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Escultura y talla directa, 1928. Woodcut. Detail from bench in Casa José Guadalupe Zuno library, c. 1926. Carved by Juan Hernández. Lynda Klich is an art historian specializing in modernism and teaches classes on the art of Latin America from the colonial period to the present day at Hunter College, CUNY. Her book, The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) explored transnational networks among Latin America and Europe and the relationships between culture and politics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and modernism and popular culture. The Noisemakers received the Phillips Collection Book Prize (2016). Klich’s second book focuses on neocolonialist aesthetics and race in 1920s-30s Mexico. She also is curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection, the subject of various collaborative projects with the MFA Boston. Klich received her MA from Hunter College and her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
