“Rebellion, Nonsense, and Despair: Latin American Artists at the end of the ’60s,” a Lecture by Inés Katzenstein

Thursday, October 17, 2024

5:00 PM EDT

No RSVP required

Curator and director of the Cisneros Institute at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) Inés Katzenstein will present “Rebellion, Nonsense, and Despair: Latin American Artists at the end of the ’60s” as part of the programming for the 2024 ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). This year's seminar, “When Radical Attitudes Become Form: Reinvention and Destruction of Art in 1960s Latin America,” is led by Mariano López Seoane.

All lectures at CCS Bard are free and open to the public. The lecture will take place at CCS Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson campus at 5:00 PM EDT in Classroom 102.

About the lecture:

By the end of the 1960s, Latin American art reached a threshold. In Argentina, the mainstream art historical narrative tells how, pushed by increasing politicization, many artists withdrew from the art world to engage in political activism. But amid that situation of liminality, there are other stories to be told. This presentation focuses on three artists who died young, but who were some of the most brilliant and original figures of the decade: Alberto Greco, Jorge Bonino, and Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos. It narrates how, like other politicized artists, they also refused the conventions of the art world and radicalized themselves. Although in their case they did it to the point of insanity, producing works and actions that were expressions of despair as well as symptoms of the limits of language. The presentation asks how to recuperate the value of rebelliousness and nonsense vis-à-vis the dominance of the discourse of rationality.

The ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative supports graduate seminars on key figures and periods of Latin American art with a focus on living artists who participate in conversations with students or on historical figures represented in the ISLAA collection. Students collaborate to produce a public-facing exhibition that aims to expand art historical narratives and provide a platform for emerging curators.