Esther Gabara is associate professor of romance studies and art, art history, and visual studies at Duke University. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin America, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that bring together research, theory, and practice, and introduce students to scholarly and artistic genealogies in the Global South. Gabara was the faculty guest curator of the exhibition Pop América, 1965–1975, which traveled from the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, Texas, 2018) to the Nasher Museum of Art (Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 2019) and the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 2019). Pop América was awarded the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize for curatorial innovation. Recent publications include essays for Un arte sin tutela: Salón Independiente en México, 1968–1971 (Art Without Guardianship: Salón Independiente in Mexico, 1968–1971, MUAC/UNAM, Mexico), La Raza (Autry Museum of the American West), and Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery/Getty Foundation). 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).
Join us for the launch of the ISLAA Forum: Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop, the first of three annual dissertation workshops for emerging scholars organized by the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) and ISLAA.
The program will include a public session on April 22 featuring brief presentations by the seven workshop participants on their dissertation projects and keynote lectures from Esther Gabara and Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Saturday, April 23 comprises a closed-door session for graduate-student participants.
The keynotes will be delivered over livestream and in-person at University of Texas at Austin. Please click here to view the livestream on April 22.
PUBLIC PROGRAM: FRIDAY, APRIL 22
- Julia Detchon (University of Texas at Austin), “Work-Around: Four Argentine Artists between Feminism and Conceptualism, 1968–1983”
- Sonja Elena Gandert (The Graduate Center, City University of New York), “La resolana: Chicano Artistic Imaginaries of Place, Race, and Activism in New Mexico, 1969-1985”
- Sophia Kitlinski (Yale University), “Departing the Sacred: The Circulation of Abakuá Visual and Material Worlds across the Spanish Empire, 1976-1898”
- Paula Victoria Kupfer (University of Pittsburgh), “Marc Ferrez’s Landscapes of Intervention: Photography, Ecology, and Enslavement in Late-Imperial Brazil”
- Emma J. Oslé (Rutgers University), “Locating Las Madres: Maternity and Latinx Art”
- Pau Nava (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), “The Artist as Community: A Chicago Case Study”
- Marisol Villela Balderrama (University of Pittsburgh), “Revolutionary Public Art: José Venturelli’s Murals and Prints in China, Cuba, and Chile (1947-1973)”
KEYNOTE: 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."
KEYNOTE: 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."
Learn more about the ISLAA Forum at CLAVIS's website.
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.