Esther Gabara Duke University
Claire Fox University of Iowa
Graciela Speranza Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Irene Small Princeton University
Gabriela Rangel Americas Society
Karen Benezra Columbia University

The past twenty years have witnessed the rapid growth of art historical interest in the post-war period in Latin America, with a special emphasis on the 1960s and 70s. They have also seen the growing popularity of critics who once ventured to define the regional, historical and ontological specificity of art. Such developments represent an important attempt to question inherited canons, periodizations and critical frameworks of Latin American art, as well as the methodological presumptions that may motivate them. At the same time, they belie the extent to which artistic production in the 1960s and 70s, as well as its archival rediscovery in more recent decades, exceeded the capacities of existing critical and theoretical discourses. This one-day colloquium will examine the social, institutional and historical conditions of art criticism from and about Latin America beginning in the period following the Second World War. The aim of the event is to interrogate the potential contemporaneity of such critical approaches in terms of the genealogy and circulation of artistic movements it implies within and beyond dominant narratives and periodizations. The question of contemporaneity will also be considered as one that seeks to understand the self-reflexive conditions of critique from the specificity of the Latin American experience.

Admission is free to the public; advance registration is not required. The speakers will be introduced by Daniella Wurst and Nicholas Morgan and the event will be moderated by Alexander Alberro. 

This event is cosponsored by Columbia University and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

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