Lucia Abramovich named Associate Curator of Latin American Art

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) announced this week that it has hired Lucia Abramovich as its new Associate Curator of Latin American Art. Over her career, Ms. Abramovich has spent time working in various institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she served as a curatorial fellow from 2013 to 2016. During this period, Ms. Abramovich worked with the institution’s collection of Spanish Colonial art and objects. She is expected to graduate in April of 2019 with a PhD from Tulane University, and will start her position at SAMA in June.

read more ... Glasstire {Texas visual art}  SAMA Hires Curator of Latin American Art

Spatial Grammars

Elizabeth Boone, Professor of Art History, gave the lecture “Spatial Grammars: The Union of Art and Writing in the Painted Books of Aztec Mexico” as the Distinguished Speaker in art history at the College of William & Mary, Oct. 13. She also presented a paper, “Layering Above and Below: What the Codex Ríos Says about the Aztec Cosmos at the Dawn of Creation,” at the symposium “As Above, So Below: Cosmic Roads to Mesoamerican Underworlds,” at Harvard University, Oct. 21-22.

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. 

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.