Tuesday, September 10

6:00 PM ET

Marisa Lerer, Director of Education at Creative Capital Foundation, will discuss disaster monuments in the Caribbean in her talk Commemorating Disasters Across Borders in Latine Public Memorials. The line “It has to be from here, right this instance, my cry into the world” by Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos appears in both English and Spanish on the memorial by artist Antonio Martorell and architect Segundo Cardona dedicated to the thousands of victims of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

Focusing on the bilingualism and diasporic nature of Latine commemorative visual culture through three case studies, this talk examines how contemporary memorials that are part of a surge of twenty-first-century disaster monuments respond to entwined Latin American and US tragedies. A close analysis of memorials by Martorell and Cardona, Freddy Rodríguez, and Scherezade Garcia illuminate innovations in material and aesthetic inquiries in commemorative works. The memorials under discussion embrace an aesthetics of post-disaster politics, which this study defines as an attempt to balance a representation of destructive forces such as societal and environmental instability while creating a nurturing, regenerative, and caring environment for visitors. 

The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and livestreamed via Zoom. For in-person attendance, please RSVP here. To register for the Zoom livestream, click here.

The ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art is a platform sustained in partnership with the Institute of Studies for Latin American Art (ISLAA). This event series brings artists, scholars, and critics of the arts of the Americas to the Institute of Fine Arts, providing a platform for discussions and debates about diverse issues pertaining to contemporary arts and visual cultures throughout the hemisphere. This series of public programs and events is coordinated by Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and organized by graduate students. Since partnering with ISLAA in 2011, the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU has hosted more than thirty events bringing artists, scholars, and critics of the arts of the Americas together to discuss and debate diverse issues pertaining to contemporary arts and visual cultures throughout the hemisphere.