ISLAA Forum 2024 ISLAA Forum: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop The University of Texas at Austin April 4-6, 2024 KEYNOTE TALKS Thursday, April 4 3:30-5:30PM (CDT), ART 1.102 Open to the public, followed by reception Click here for livestream Click here for workshop program, including participant bios View of the Josef Albers’ exhibition Homage to the Square at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. December 1964. MAC USP Archive. “Policies of Attraction: Intensified Artistic Approaches between the United States and Brazil” Dária Jaremtchuk Universidade de São Paulo This lecture will analyze the policies of attraction implemented by sectors of the United States government in the Brazilian artistic and cultural environment during the 1960s and 1970s. The purposes of these strategies were explicit: to reverse – within Latin America and not just Brazil – the negative image of the United States, and to make the country a hegemonic reference in the artistic field. To achieve the expected results, exclusive projects and activities were launched, including personal and institutional exchanges, the organization of literary, artistic, and cultural events, the promotion of English language learning, book translations, theater festivals, and the circulation of cultural exhibitions and art shows. This presentation will discuss some cases focused on visual arts. In summary, this analysis aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between culture and politics during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Dária Jaremtchuk is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of São Paulo. In 2019, she received the Fulbright Brazil Distinguished Chair at Emory University. Her current research primarily focuses on the artistic exchange between Brazil and the United States during the 1960s and 70s. In 2023, she published Políticas de atração: relações artístico-culturais entre Estados Unidos e Brasil nas décadas de 1960/1970 (UNESP/FAPESP). Additionally, she served as the editor of Arte e política: aproximações (Alameda Press) in 2010 and launched Anna Bella Geiger: Passagens Conceituais (EDUSP) in 2007. She is a Research Productivity Fellow at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and also one of the coordinators of the thematic project “Institutional geopolitics: art in dispute in international circulating exhibitions in Brazil (1948-1978)” funded by FAPESP. Miguel Lawner, La COMPINGIM, 1976. Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile “The Politics of Public Writing in Dictatorship” Camilo Trumper University at Buffalo (SUNY) This presentation, drawn from a new book project, explores the politics of writing in dictatorship. It investigates the politics of writing and re-writing, of producing, circulating, and reading text in a political context defined by censorship, silence, erasure, and exile. It explores often-clandestine, often-unspectacular forms of political organizing and association, mapping the connection between distinct forms of dissent, in Chile and in exile, that were tied together by the political practice of writing, by the line of the pen. It ranges across distinct forms of writing, or inscription—prison writing, schoolhouse writing, street writing, and archival writing. In so doing, it proposes a history of dictatorship and dissent that speaks to contemporary forms of protest in Chile and Latin America. Camilo Trumper is an Associate Professor of Latin American History and founding director of the Latin American Studies and Students Initiative at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). His first book, Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile (University of California Press, 2016), was awarded the 2018 Latin American Studies Historia Reciente y Memoria Section Best Book Award, the 2017 Latin American Studies Southern Cone Studies Section Best Book Prize, the 2017 North England Council of Latin American Studies Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, and received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 Southern Historical Association Latin American and Caribbean Section Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize. His second book project, “Writing in Dictatorship: Politics, Exile, and Archives in Chile, 1973-1990,” explores the multiple practices of writing to offer new insight into the everyday experience of power and contest under Pinochet in Chile and abroad. DISSERTATION PRESENTATIONS Friday, April 5 9AM-12:15PM + 2PM-5:00PM DFA 2.204 Open to the public Details forthcoming Afternoon session followed by reception SESSION I Each presentation followed by discussion 9:05 Lynne Lee Rice University Black Art in White Narratives: Early Afro-Brazilian Art History at the Crossroads of Science and Aesthetics 9:40 Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolivar Institute of Fine Arts, New York University The Idea of Hispanoamérica in the Visual Culture of Mexico and Colombia (1920-1940) 10:15 COFFEE BREAK, Dean’s Patio in DFA 10:45 Joseph Shaikewitz Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Incongruent, Incomprehensible: Trans Femme Visualities in Latin America, 1900–1960 11:20 Alhelí Harvey University of Texas at Austin Experiencing Enchantment: A Cultural Ecology of Place in New Mexico 12:00 LUNCH BREAK SESSION II Each presentation followed by discussion 2:05 Lucía Laumann Universidad Nacional de San Martín/CONICET Las grabadoras. Formación gráfica, prácticas y derroteros institucionales de las mujeres en Buenos Aires a mediados de siglo XX 2:40 Lucy Quezada University of Texas at Austin Shaping the Official Field: Art and Power during the Civilian-Military Dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile 3:15 COFFEE BREAK, Dean’s Patio in DFA 3:45 Jennifer Leite Sales University of Texas at Austin The Experimental: Reimaging Art and Pedagogy in 1970s Brazil 4:20 Letícia Cobra Lima University of California, Santa Barbara Assembling the Body: Sculpture in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, 1960-1996 5:00 RECEPTION, Dean’s Patio in DFA ORGANIZERS George Flaherty University of Texas at Austin Adele Nelson University of Texas at Austin SPONSORS Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) With support from the Art History Division Lecture Series and the Office of the Dean of the College of Fine Arts ABOUT THE ISLAA FORUM This 3-day program invites up to 6 doctoral students to develop their dissertation chapter manuscripts with a group of scholars with a variety of geographic, thematic, and methodological interests. In the workshop, students will give brief overviews of their dissertation projects and engage in extended discussion of their manuscript with organizing and invited faculty, offering and receiving constructive commentary toward improving their argumentation and writing. Discussions will emphasize strengthening conceptual and narrative frameworks and potential for interdisciplinary approaches, as well as identifying additional primary sources, relevant literatures, and possible interlocutors. The workshop also includes visits to campus collections—among these are the Blanton Museum of Art, Benson Latin American Library, and Harry Ransom Center—and opportunities to meet with colleagues there. The goal is to support highly original and fully historicized dissertations that directly contribute to a more rigorous, international, and collaborative field. ABOUT ISLAA The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art. ISLAA recognizes Latin American artists and cultural movements as integral to the trajectory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. We seek to expand these narratives by creating opportunities for researchers, curators, and the public through grants, exhibitions, publications, and our art and archival collections. The ISLAA Forum aims to expand collaborative relationships through long-term partnerships with universities throughout the United States. The ISLAA Forum fosters connection and solidarity among graduate students studying Latin American Art by developing targeted programs for professional and intellectual enrichment and addressing potential disparities in resource accessibility and distribution for specialists in the field.
