Dr. Anagnost's new book reviewed in Art Journal

"Anagnost has done a superb job of reuniting the discussions of art and architecture, reminding us of the intense exchanges between people working on different media and at different scales."

Professor Adrian Anagnost’s new book Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil (Yale University Press, 2022) is reviewed by Fernando Luiz Lara in the current issue of Art Journal.

Dr. Adrian Anagnost is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane. Her new book explores the intersections among art, architecture, and urbanism in Brazil from the 1920s through the 1960s. It shows how modernity was manifested in locally specific spatial forms linked to Brazil’s colonial and imperial past. Discussing the ways artists and architects understood urban planning as a tool to reorganize the world, control human action, and remedy social problems, Anagnost offers a nuanced account of the seeming conflict between modernist aesthetics and a predominately poor and historically disenfranchised urban public, with particular attention to regionalist forms of urban development.

Dr. Fernando Lara is the Potter Rose Professor in Urban Planning at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Citation: Fernando Luiz Lara, review of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires and Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil in Art Journal 81, no. 3 (2022): 116-118, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2022.2110425

Barbara E. Mundy joins the faculty as Roberston Chair in Latin American Art

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Barbara E. Mundy to the faculty as Professor of Art History and the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art.

Barbara E. Mundy’s scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She has been particularly interested in the social construction of space and its imaginary, which was the subject of her first book, The Mapping of New Spain. Her most recent book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century.

Mundy's current book project, "The Embodiment of the Word: European Book Culture and New World Manuscripts." Rather than considering Indigenous manuscripts as phenomena separate from European books, it situates native bookmakers in the midst of the new technological revolution brought about by the printing press. While Martin Luther’s innovations (and conflagrations) take up most of the oxygen in the history of print in the early sixteenth century, attracting less attention, but equally radical, was the Spanish crown’s use of the new technology to control, via standardization, governance, language, and history. The testing ground of this imperial project was the “Indies,” as their American territories were called, and it is within this context that her protagonists--Indigenous writers, painters and bookmakers--operated.

With Dana Leibsohn, Mundy is the co-creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. Digital projects are a fundamental part of her teaching practice. Mundy was the 2021-22 Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress; she has had fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and at the John Carter Brown Library. She serves on the editorial board of Estudios de cultura náhuatl and is the current president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a Professor of Art History at Fordham University in New York.

 

Alumni News: Adriana Obiols-Roca

2019 Art History M.A. graduate Adriana Obiols-Roca was recently awarded the Stone Center for Latin American Studies' Donald Robertson Prize for best paper in the Humanities by a Latin American Studies Graduate Student. This award honors Donald Robertson, a professor of Art History at Tulane for more than 25 years and a pioneer in the field of Latin American art history. He authored the groundbreaking Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools, and motivated a generation of budding Art Historians and Ethnohistorians.

Adriana's award-winning paper, "The Battle of the Whale: Bataillean Aesthetics in El Techo de la Ballena," analyzed the 1960s Venezuelan artistic and literary group El Techo de la Ballena, in relation to the dissident surrealism of French writer Georges Bataille. While El Techo has been the focus of sustained analysis on the part of literary critics, the group’s artistic production has received comparatively less attention. Their artistic production has previously been understood as part of a continuation of postwar gestural abstraction, and as a rejection of the geometric abstract art and modernist architecture that characterized the developmentalist state in 1950s-70s Venezuela. However, Adriana’s paper convincingly argues that El Techo’s practice should not be understood as a belated modernist project, but as quintessentially of its time, as a particularly Venezuelan take on the 1960s neo-avant-garde strategies of entropy, base materiality, and assemblage.

Ph.D. candidate Patricia Lagarde named a Fulbright-Hays fellow

As a 2019 Fulbright-Hays fellow, Patricia Alexander Lagarde, a doctoral candidate in art history and Latin American studies, will conduct research in Peru for seven months at Chavín de Huántar, a ceremonial center in the Andes mountains that dates to 1200-500 BCE. She will focus on a group of anthropomorphic stone sculptures known as the tenon heads that were installed on the exterior walls of the temple architecture. Her project will explore the variety in style, the assortment in material, and the overall viewer experience of the sculptures. Lagarde will be an affiliate with the Chavín International Research Center (Centro Internacional de Investigación de Chavín) where she will work with archeologists to examine what the sculptures’ roles were in the ceremonial and religious traditions at the time. While only one sculpture is still installed at the site, more than 100 existed, varying in shape and size. This fellowship will support Lagarde’s goal to create a comprehensive catalog of the tenon heads at Chavín de Huántar.  Studying their materiality, Lagarde hopes to gain a greater understanding of the Ancient Andean peoples’ perspective of the natural landscape as animate—she’s interested in how specific stones were chosen, potentially representing specific regions, communities, or ancestors.

ELIZABETH HILL BOONE, 2019 CAA DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR

The College Art Association is honoring Elizabeth Hill Boone, Professor of History of Art and Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University, as the 2019 CAA Distinguished Scholar.

The Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Elizabeth Boone will take place Thursday, Febrary 14, 2019, from 4-5:30pm.

An expert in the Precolumbian and early colonial art of Latin America with an emphasis on Mexico, Professor Boone is the former Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and recipient of numerous honors and fellowships, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle, awarded by the Mexican government in 1990.

CAA media and content manager Joelle Te Paske corresponded with her recently to learn her thoughts on art history, scholarship, and challenges in the field. Read their interview here. 

Faculty news: Elizabeth Boone

Elizabeth Boone, professor of art history and Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art, lectured on "Spatial Grammars: The Union of Art and Writing in the Painted Books of Aztec Mexico" and led a workshop on "Reading the Past and the Future in the Painted Books of Aztec Mexico" as part of the Henry King Stanford Distinguished Professors lecture series, January 25-26, 2018. She was a discussant in the Dumbarton Oaks workshop "Future Directions in Pre-Columbian Studies" in Bogotá, March 22-23, 2018.

An expert in the Precolumbian and early colonial art of Latin America, with an emphasis on Mexico, Boone is the former Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Professor Boone has earned numerous honors and fellowships, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle, awarded by the Mexican government in 1990. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia.

Erin McCutcheon awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship

Erin McCutcheon, PhD candidate in Art History/Latin American Studies has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. The fellowship supports the final year of dissertation writing for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences whose work addresses women’s and gendered issues in interdisciplinary and original ways. 

Ms. McCutcheon talks about the points of personal passion that have sustained her research:

I began my academic career at the age of 18 with aspirations of becoming a painter. Fortunately, I quickly realized I wasn’t going to hack it in that profession, yet my love for art endured. I had always been interested in art made by women, and was struck that in all of my undergraduate courses, women, and especially those from outside a Euro-American center, were absent from our discussions. Where they were included, their work was treated one-dimensionally, usually in terms of biographical details, and not given the critical analysis afforded to their male contemporaries. During this same time, I was in the middle of my own discovery of feminist theory, which gave me the vocabulary I desperately needed to voice my frustrations. I resolved to devote myself to not simply unearthing the histories of forgotten or overlooked women artists, but to forging new strategies of representation that might disrupt the structures and processes that kept these marginal histories from view.

To my amazement, roughly 15 years after beginning my academic journey, I remain on the same path. Not enough seems to have changed; however, it is encouraging to see more projects under way that resist repeating the mistakes of art history. Most recently, I was a part of one such project: the first retrospective exhibition of an artist at the center of my dissertation research, Mónica Mayer. The exhibition’s format resisted traditional tropes and mechanisms that have historically worked to exclude women artists, and instead functions as a “retrocollective.” This simple shift more accurately reflects Mayer’s own commitment to the feminist movement and numerous collaborations over the course of her career. The exhibition, “Si tiene dudas… pregunte: Una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer” will run through July 2016 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City – a great reason to take a trip to Mexico this year!

Ms. McCutcheon’s dissertation title is Strategic Dispositions: Women, Art and Tradition in Mexico, 1975–1990.

http://woodrow.org/news/perspectives/meet-the-fellows-2016-womens-studies-fellow-erin-mccutcheon

Sonya Wohletz receives Fulbright-Hays award

Sonya Wohletz, a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American Studies and Art History at Tulane University, is a 2015-16 recipient of the Fulbright-Hays award to perform dissertation research in Quito, Ecuador.

Sonya received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon where she studied Spanish and art history. Having grown up in Northern New Mexico, Sonya was always fascinated by colonial art and architecture and was furthermore inspired to pursue research on the subject after living in Argentina and Chile during her undergraduate studies.

A student of Dr. Elizabeth Boone, Sonya's research centers on seventeenth-century devotional art from the city of Quito in modern-day Ecuador. Her dissertation, entitled "Lilies and Ash: Crisis and Artistic Production in Late Seventeenth-Century Quito," explores how miraculous images functioned during times of upheaval, drought, plague, and economic decline in the Andes. 

Her research in Quito will consist of extensive archival work in the city's various repositories. She will also analyze myriad paintings and sculptures housed within the city's historic convents, churches, and houses.

Emily Floyd awarded John Carter Brown Fellowship

Emily Floyd, PhD candidate in Art History/Latin American Studies, was awarded a four month John Carter Brown Library Associates Fellowship. 

Emily is currently at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University conducting research for her dissertation, “Matrices of Devotion: Lima's Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Devotional Prints and Local Religion in the Viceroyalty of Peru.”

New faculty: Delia Solomons, Visiting Assistant Professor

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Delia Solomons to the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor of  Modern and Contemporary Global Art.

Prof. Solomons specializes in twentieth-century art of the Americas and Europe. Her research examines intersections of globalization, exhibition practices, visual culture, and politics. Her current project explores the sudden surge in exhibitions of Latin American art across the United States in the 1960s, the years directly following the Cuban Revolution; the project reveals how, as cold-war tensions escalated in the Americas, museums offered privileged spaces to stage both cultural diplomacy and dissent. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Humanities Initiative at New York University, the Institute of Fine Arts, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.

Solomons received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2015. Prior to coming to Tulane, she taught at New York University and the City University of New York. She also co-curated the exhibition Sari Dienes at The Drawing Center in 2014 and has worked on curatorial projects for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Grey Art Gallery.

Solomons offers new courses to Tulane undergraduate and graduate students including Global Catalysts: Artists Respond to Disaster, Revolution, and Liberation , Art and Issues in Latin America After 1945, and Medium Matters in Contemporary Art: Dirt, Paint, Mirrors, and Lights. 

Allison Caplan joins the Getty Graduate Internship Program

Allison Caplan, a Ph.D. student in Art History and Latin American Studies, will be joining the Getty Graduate Internship Program for 2015-2016. She will be conducting research for the upcoming Pre-Columbian art exhibition, “Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas,” and its accompanying catalogue. The exhibition is part of the Getty’s initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, and will show at the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. Allison’s research for the exhibition builds on her work for her Ph.D. dissertation on central Mexican indigenous aesthetics and materiality.

Erin McCutcheon awarded grants to research feminist art in Mexico City

Erin L. McCutcheon, PhD Candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies, has recently been awarded research grants from both the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund and the Organization for Research on Women in Communication in support of her dissertation project, “Strategic Dis-Positions: Feminist Art in Mexico City, 1975–90.”  

The Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund was established in 1991 in honor of the anthropologist Ruth Schlossberg Landes, and provides support for interdisciplinary research on subjects including gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, minority populations, culture and education. 

The Organization for Research on Women and Communication provides grants to assist feminist scholars in completing research projects that privilege and advance an understanding of the intersectionalities and complexities that define women’s lives.  

Erin is currently completing her fieldwork in Mexico City.  She is conducting an oral history project with feminist artists residing there, and has been assisting in planning the upcoming retrospective exhibition for the artist Mónica Mayer, to be held at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in 2016.

Jennifer Saracino named Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow

Jennifer Saracino, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies, has been appointed as a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies for the academic year of 2015-2016. 

As a fellow, she will be pursuing research for her Ph.D. dissertation project entitled, "Shifting Landscape: Depictions of Environmental & Cultural Disruption in the Mapa Uppsala." The Mapa Uppsala is one of the earliest maps of post-Conquest Mexico City painted by indigenous hands. By combining studies of Mesoamerican and European cartography with a formal analysis of the Mapa Uppsala, she plans to demonstrate how the Mapa Uppsala is a testament to the lived experience of early colonial artists living in Mexico-Tenochtitlan.​

Congratulations to Derek Burdette, PhD '12

Derek Burdette, a 2012 graduate of the joint PhD program in Art History and Latin American Studies, was awarded the Association for Latin American Art's biennial award for the best dissertation in Latin American art history 2012-2014, for "Miraculous Crucifixes and Colonial Mexican Society: The Artistic, Devotional, and Political Lives of Mexico City's Early-Colonial Cristos."  His dissertation committee was Elizabeth Boone (Art History, chair), Thomas Reese (Art History and Latin American Studies), Susan Schroeder (emeritus History).  Dr. Burdette is currently at Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College.

Elizabeth Boone honored with conference at Harvard

Elizabeth Boone, Professor and holder of the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art, will be attending a conference in her honor on Oct. 31-Nov. 1 at Harvard University, titled "Telling Stories: Discourse, Meaning, and Performance in Mesoamerican Things," and receiving the 2014 "H.B. Nicholson Award for Excellence in Mesoamerican Studies" by the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. 
Next month Dr .Boone will give a paper titled "Spatial Grammars: Meaning in the Two-dimensional Field at the Juncture of Art and Writing," at an international conference at the University of Chicago, "Signs of Writing: The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World's First Writing Systems" on Nov. 8-9.

Lucia Abramovich appointed Spanish Colonial Fellow at NOMA

Lucia Abramovich, PhD candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane, has joined the staff at the New Orleans Museum of Art as the new curatorial fellow of Spanish Colonial Art.

Abramovich is currently reviewing NOMA's extensive collection of Spanish Colonial art which will ultimately result in a new installation at the museum. She will also serve as institutional curator for Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish Colonial Home, 1492-1898, an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art that will open at NOMA on June 20, 2013.

[Arts Quarterly, New Orleans Museum of Art, Winter 2014, photo by Judy Cooper]