Dr. George F. Flaherty
Co-Director
Associate Professor, Latin American & Latinx Art
Department of Art and Art History
University of Texas at Austin
gflaherty@austin.utexas.edu
George Flaherty is Associate Professor of Art History and Co-Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). His research and teaching focus primarily on modern and contemporary art and architecture as well as film and video, centered in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States. His scholarly interests extend to Afro-Latin American/Latinx studies and postcolonial/subaltern studies.
Dr. Flaherty is currently conducting research for Cross-Border Renaissances: Race and Revolutionary Art between Mexico and Black America (working title). This book project examines circuits of exchange, affinity, and appropriation among artists and writers in post-revolutionary Mexico and the U.S. New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 30s.
His first book, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (University of California Press, 2016), investigated the spatial dimensions of the 1968 student-led democratization movement in Mexico City and its afterlives. This project received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Social Science Research Council, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and a Fulbright-García Robles grant to Mexico City, where he was a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Hotel Mexico was recognized with the Arvey Book Award from the Association of Latin American Art (ALAA) in 2017.
Dr. Flaherty’s scholarship has appeared in various journals, including Social Text, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (winner SAH Founders’ Award), and Art in Translation. He has also contributed to several anthologies and exhibitions catalogs, including La Raza (2020), The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture(2019), Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (2017), Genealogías del arte contemporáneo en México, 1952–1967 (2015), and Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (2014). La Raza was recognized with ALAA’s Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalog Award in 2021.
From 2012-2018 he was co-principal investigator, with Dr. Andrea Giunta (Universidad de Buenos Aires), of “Grounds for Comparison: Neo-Vanguards and Latin American/U.S. Latino Art, 1960-90,” a research and publication project supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. He has also contributed to curatorial projects at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, Autry Museum of the American West, Harry Ransom Center, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Dr. Adele Nelson
Co-Director
Associate Professor, Latin American Art
Department of Art and Art History
University of Texas at Austin
adele.nelson@austin.utexas.edu
Adele Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) and faculty affiliate at the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS). She received her BA in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Art Semiotics from Brown University and her MA and PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century art of Latin America, with a focus on the postwar and contemporary art of Brazil. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of art and social identity; the history of art institutions, exhibitions, and pedagogy; the close study of objects; transnational exchange; and theories of modernism and artistic activism.
Dr. Nelson is the author of Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil (Studies on Latin American Art series, University of California Press, 2022), the 2023 Antonio Candido Prize recipient for the best humanities book from the Brazil Section, Latin American Studies Association and a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title winner. The book highlights the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s and illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of local and international forms. It ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in the newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.
Her writings on art from Latin America have appeared in academic journals and international magazines, including Art in America, Art Journal, Artelogie, and ARTMargins, and she co-edited special issues for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture and MODOS: Revista de História de Arte. She has contributed to numerous museum publications and edited volumes, among them, Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain: International Cooperation in Art, 1945–1948 (Brill, 2024); Lygia Pape: Tecelares (Art Institute of Chicago, 2023); Volpi Popular (MASP, 2022); Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil (Fordham, 2021); Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958 (Guggenheim Bilbao, 2020); Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum of Art/The Art Institute of Chicago/Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016); and Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015). She also authored Jac Leirner in Conversation with/en conversación con Adele Nelson (2011; Portuguese edition, 2013) and contributed to the catalogue and helped to organize the award-winning exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (MoMA, 2008).
She co-edited the English and Portuguese editions of Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil, which showcases 10 contemporary Brazilian artists and new research by UT current and former graduate students, released in 2023 by Tower Books, an imprint of the University of Texas Press, and in 2024 by Cultura Acadêmica Editora, Fundação Editora da Unesp (State University of São Paulo). The publication grew out of the exhibition Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin (September 2022–March 2023). The project received The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Grant. You can read more about the exhibition here, visits and talks by some of its artists here, here, here, here, here, and here, research by UT Austin graduate students here, and see videos of Rosana Paulino’s talk here and seminars by Aline Motta and scholar Diane Lima here and here.
Dr. Nelson is currently working on a book about women printmakers in Brazil and their transnational and activist networks. Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Andrea Giunta
Founding Co-Director
Professor, Latin American and Contemporary Art
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Dr. Roberto Tejada
Founding Co-Director
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor, English and Art History
University of Houston
