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

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.

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.

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]