The Permanent Seminar in Latin American Art is a working group of faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who meet regularly to develop research projects in progress and discuss current issues of methodology and historiography. It has no beginning or end, but is rather a workshop committed to ongoing critical collegiality and experimentation outside of curricular and professional constraints.
The seminar was founded by Andrea Giunta and Roberto Tejada in 2008.
2024
Cherise Smith, Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies and Professor of Art History, UT Austin
Seminar: “Carrie Mae Weems’ Pictures”
Bananhattan, from the portfolio Manifestaciones, 2010
Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano, Project Director, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Seminar: “Banana Craze: a Digital Humanities Project on Extractivism in the Americas”
María Elena Ortiz, Curator, Museum of Modern Art of Forth Worth
Seminar: Viewing at the Blanton Museum of Art , in conjunction with Ortiz’s talk on “Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940”
Co-sponsored by the Archiving Black América initiative of LLILAS Benson.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, Social Practice Artist-in-Residence, UT Austin
Seminar: Artist Talk
Deborah Dorotinsky, Professor-Researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Seminar: “Popular Arts and Cultural and Diplomatic Mediations during the Global Cold War: Cultural Diplomacy and the Display of Folk-Art”
2023
Cherise Smith, Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies and Professor of Art History, UT Austin
Seminar: “Carrie Mae Weems’ From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995)”
Nicole Awai, New York-based Artist
Seminar: TBA
Paula Kupfer, PhD Candidate, University of Pittsburgh
Seminar: “‘The Exotic Dominates, Which Is Regrettable’: Negotiating Foreignness in the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden”
Aline Motta, São Paulo-based Artist
Seminar: screening and discussion of Filha Natural (Natural Daughter, 2018–19)
Diane Lima, Independent Curator based in São Paulo and Salvador
Seminar: “Negros na Piscina/Blacks in the Pool: Hypervisibility, Art, and Curatorship in Brazil”
Virginia Colwell, Mexico City-based Artist
Seminar: “To Have and to Hold”
Cherise Smith, Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies and Professor of Art History, UT Austin
Seminar: “Cauleen Smith’s Remote Viewing”
2022
Bruno Pinheiro, PhD Candidate, Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Seminar: “Brazilian Modernism and Anti-Racist Culture (1930–1946)”
Nicole Smythe-Johnson, PhD Candidate, UT Austin
Seminar: “John Dunkley’s Photographic Eye: A Close Look at Banana Plantation“
Rachel Weiss, Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Seminar: “Now What? Quandaries of Art and the Radical Past”
Thiago Ferreira, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Seminar: “A ‘New Brazilian Subject’: Brasília as Imagined by Mário Pedrosa”
2020
Andrea Giunta, Professor, Universidad de Buenos Aires & Co-Founder, Center for Latin American Visual Studies
Seminar: “Curatorial Projects During the Covid-19 Isolation: Mercosul Bienal 12, Porto Alegre and Rethink Everything, Buenos Aires”
Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Assistant Professor, San Francisco State University
Seminar: “Afro-Latinx Power and Religion: Nuyorican and Afro-Brazilian Artistic Intersections in the 1970s”
Jaime Lauriano, Porto and São Paulo-based Artist
Seminar: Lauriano discusses past works, including his 2017 video Justice and Barbarity, and his collaboration on the Enciclopédia Negra (Black Encyclopedia) with historians Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and Flávio Gomes, a major 500-entry publication forthcoming with Companhia das Letras.
Co-organized with Visual Arts Center, with generous support from Shannon and Mark Hart
Natalia Majluf, former Director and Head Curator, Museo de Arte de Lima
Seminar: Majluf discusses the development of the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte de Lima. Held in conjunction with the exhibition The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s co-organized by Beverly Adams and Natalia Majluf and on view at the Blanton from February 16-May 17, 2020.
2019
Mary Coffey, Associate Professor, Dartmouth College
Seminar: Coffey discusses her forthcoming book, Orozco’s American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race (Duke University Press, 2020).
Michael Schreffler, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame
Seminar: “Ephemerality and Permanence at the Cathedral of Mexico City, ca. 1696”
Julia Detchon, PhD Candidate, UT Austin
Seminar: “Con la participación del público”: Participation and Pedagogy in the Work of Mirtha Dermisache and Margarita Paksa”
Luiz Camillo Osorio, Professor, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Seminar: Osorio discusses his curation of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo’s 2017 Panorama, which was the target of far-right protests, and the politics of art in contemporary Brazil.
Gabriela Sircusano, Professor, CONICET (National Research Council, Argentina) & Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, and Universidad de Buenos Aires
Seminar: “Matter Matters: Images and Materiality in Discussion”
Leandro Katz, Buenos Aires-based Artist
Seminar: Screening of Katz’s El dia que me quieras (1997) and discussion.
Andrea Giunta, Professor, Universidad de Buenos Aires & UT Austin
Seminar: “Lucio Fontana in Buenos Aires. Abstraction, Science, and War”
2018
Aleca Le Blanc, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside
Seminar: At the H.E.B. Study Room at Blanton Museum of Art, Le Blanc led participants in study of works by postwar Brazilian abstract artists, particularly works by Hércules Barsotti, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, and Willys de Castro, as well as Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel.
Milan Hughston, Former Chief of the Library and Museum Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Seminar: “Documenting the Visual: Building a Latin American Collection at the MoMA Library”
Roberto Conduru, Professor, Southern Methodist University
Seminar: Review of Conduru’s various writings on Afro-Brazilian art and culture.
Ana Maria Reyes, Assistant Professor, Boston University
Seminar: “Symbolic Reparations, Institution-Building, and the Art of Mutual Recognition”
Dorota Biczel, PhD Candidate, UT Austin
Seminar: “Between Social Art Work and Social Engineering: Teresa Burga͛s ‘Non-object art’ in Service of Peruvian Women and New Democracy, 1980–1981”
2017
Cristóbal Bianchi, Fellow, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, New York University
Seminar: “Intangible Materials: The Sky and Gravity in Artistic Creation”
Cary Cordova, Associate Professor, UT Austin
Seminar: “The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco”
Patricia Ortega Miranda, MA candidate, UT Austin
Seminar: “Embodied Geographies: Poetic Bodies and Revolutionary Performance in Nicolas Guillen Landrian͛s Coffea Arabiga”
2015
Renato González Mello, Professor and Director, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Seminar: “Workshops and Outlets in Mexican Printmaking, 20th Century”
Andrea Noble, Professor, University of Durham
Seminar: “Cold War Camera: Transnational Visual Networks”
2014
James Oles, Professor, Wellesley College
Seminar: “Diego Rivera’s Trophy”
Edward Sullivan, Professor, New York University
Seminar: “From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism”
Kathryn O’Rourke, Assistant Professor, Trinity University
Seminar: “Luis Barragán͛s Rooms”
Victoria Sánchez Holguín, PhD Candidate, Architecture, UT Austin
Seminar: “Ciudad Kennedy: Modernization and Social Reality in Colombia in the 1960s”
Fredo Rivera, PhD Candidate, Art History, Duke University
Seminar: “Building Utopia: Architecture and Ideology in 1960s Havana,
Cuba”
2013
Dorota Biczel, PhD Candidate, Art History, UT Austin
Seminar: “‘Nothing political’: Limeña Cultural Underground and the Remaking of Politics in the 1980s”
Cynthia Francica, PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, UT Austin
Seminar: “Belleza y Felicidad: Queerness and Visual Practices”
Sebastian Vidal, PhD Candidate, Art History, UT Austin
Seminar: “En el principio: Arte, archivos y tecnologías durante la dictadura en Chile”
