ISLAA Forum The ISLAA Forum: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop (2022-2024) was an annual gathering to build community and professional networks for graduate students who convene at the University of Texas, Austin’s Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) to develop their dissertation projects. Students presented their work-in-progress to peers, CLAVIS faculty and an invited scholars. The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), which expands scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America, was the lead sponsor of the ISLAA Forum. This 3-day program invited up to 6 doctoral students to workshop their dissertation chapter manuscripts with a group of scholars with a variety of geographic, thematic, and methodological interests. Discussions emphasized the strengthening of conceptual and narrative frameworks and the potential for interdisciplinary approaches, as well as identifying additional primary sources, relevant literatures, and potential interlocutors. The workshops also included 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 overarching goal for the organizers was to support highly original and fully historicized dissertations that directly contribute to a more rigorous, international, and collaborative field. ISLAA Forum 2024: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop April 4-6, 2024 For the full program of public events, including short academic bios of the participants, click here. ORGANIZED BYGeorge Flaherty and Adele Nelson, Center for Latin American Visual Studies IN PARTNERSHIP WITHInstitute for Studies on Latin American Art WITH THE GENEROUS ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OFArt History Division Lecture SeriesOffice of the Dean of the College of Fine Arts WITH THE GENEROUS COLLABORATION OFArt Galleries at Black StudiesBenson Latin American CollectionBlanton Museum of ArtHarry Ransom Center ISLAA Forum 2023: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop April 20-22, 2023 For the full program of public events, including short academic bios of the participants, click here. ORGANIZED BYGeorge Flaherty and Adele Nelson, Center for Latin American Visual Studies IN PARTNERSHIP WITHInstitute for Studies on Latin American Art WITH THE GENEROUS ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OFDivision of Art History Lecture SeriesLLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections WITH THE GENEROUS COLLABORATION OFArt Galleries at Black StudiesBenson Latin American CollectionBlanton Museum of ArtHarry Ransom Center ISLAA Forum 2022: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop April 22-23, 2022 For the full program of public events, including short academic bios of the participants, click here. Invited Scholars 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. 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. 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. 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. ORGANIZED BYGeorge Flaherty and Adele Nelson, Center for Latin American Visual Studies IN PARTNERSHIP WITHInstitute for Studies on Latin American Art WITH THE GENEROUS ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OFLLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections WITH THE GENEROUS COLLABORATION OFBlanton Museum of Art 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.
