Art & Crisis in Latin America & Latinx U.S., 1940-1990

Catalog description

This class focuses on artistic responses to crisis and instability in the art of the Americas in the post-World War II era and includes the work of Latinx artists in the United States. During this time of upheaval, artists mobilized heterogeneous and oppositional practices such as geometric abstraction, conceptual art, mail art, street interventions, murals, performance, video art, and earth art. Course discussions will focus on the aesthetic strategies artists cultivated to tackle the effects of colonialism, state violence, abrupt modernization, migration, exile, and violent dictatorships in various countries and regions. In discussing the relation of Latin American and Latinx art and artists to European and U.S. cultural centers; the emergence of multi-media art; the role of art criticism on the notion of the popular; and the rise of arts institutions (modern art museums, international biennials and fairs, galleries, cultural exchanges), we will also consider the ways in which postwar art in the Americas reflects and has been codified against a north-south geopolitical order and a Euro-centric and dominant art history. As the global struggle for racial and social justice continues, what can we learn from artists in the global south? What can we learn from a history of art that seeks out the voices of the underrepresented, the marginalized, and the oppressed? And how can artists, critics, educators, historians, and museum professionals engage the crises of the past to inform and transform our present?