Cecilia Fajardo-Hill - Post 1980s-art in Latinx America

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

This lesson examines artistic production in Latin America during the processes of democratic crisis and transition, focusing on artists that have responded to the legacies of dictatorship, social inequality, and colonial heritage through strategies of resistance, cultural and political reclamation, and collective engagement. Performance and body-based practices addressing violence, trauma, gender oppression, and collective memory are considered through the work of artists such as: Ana Mendieta, Maria Evelia Marmolejo, Teresa Margolles, Regina José Galindo, ASCO, Laura Aguilar, Tania Bruguera, and Martine Gutierrez. Political conceptualism is examined in the practices of artists such as: Cildo Meireles, Doris Salcedo, rafa esparza, and Óscar Muñoz, who use materials, language, and everyday objects to articulate critiques of power and historical erasure. The lesson also considers artists such as Adriana Varejão, Delilah Montoya, Guadalupe Maravilla, Sonia Gomes, Rosana Paulino, James Luna, who rework colonial, African and indigenous aesthetics and iconographies to confront cultural hybridity and reclaim suppressed visual and cultural traditions. The artists discussed will demonstrate how contemporary art can be a tool for agency, civic engagement and decolonization.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is an art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art. Her work focuses on Latin American and Latinx art, developing a decolonial art history project focused on gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, African heritage, and popular culture. She has held research fellowships at Princeton, the Clark Art Institute, Harvard, and UCLA, and is now Associate Professor of Museum Studies and Art History and Director of Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University.