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 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 Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). 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 transnational exchange between Latin America, Europe, and the United States; the close study of objects; the history of art institutions, exhibitions, and pedagogy; and theories of modernism.
Dr. Nelson is the author of Jac Leirner in Conversation with/en conversación con Adele Nelson (Fundación Cisneros, 2011), which appeared in Portuguese translation in 2013. Her writings on art from Latin America have appeared in international magazines and academic journals, including Art in America, Art Journal, Artelogie, and ARTMargins. She has contributed to numerous museum publications, among them, Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958 (Guggenheim Bilbao, 2020), Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afetiva de la forma (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2017), Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum of Art/The Art Institute of Chicago/Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016), Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015), and Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia exata (Itaú Cultural, 2014). She also contributed to the catalogue and helped to organize the award-winning exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (MoMA, 2008).
Her current book project, Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil, is in press with the University of California Press and will appear in the Studies on Latin American Art series in Fall 2021. The book studies how the practice and theory of abstract art developed in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s in close relation to new modern art institutions. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, UT Austin, and Temple University, where she was an assistant professor of art history from 2012 to 2016.
She is co-organizing, with MacKenzie Stevens, the exhibition Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil for the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin (September–December 2022). The project received The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Grant. You can read more about the exhibition here, recent visits and talks by some of its artists here, here, and here, research by UT Austin graduate students here, and see a video of Rosana Paulino’s talk here.
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
