E.5 Confronting the "Origin": The Appropriation and Resilience of Indigenous and Afro Forms in the Americas
Fri Oct 16 / 14:00 – 15:30
voice_chat expiredchairs /
- Carla Hermann, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
- Jacqueline Witkowski, University of British Columbia
Modernism has held a complicated position towards Indigenous and African forms. In Canada and the United States, cultural products were copied for their aesthetically "primitive" inspirations or stood in for "disappearing" populations. Throughout Latin America, artists turned to such forms to establish the legitimacy of ‘genuine’ identities or to forge ideals in newly industrializing nations.
What lies at the center of these tactics is the employment of marginalized bodies, propped up by the integration of cultural forms and techniques of Indigenous, First Nations and/or African nations. This panel aims to recuperate histories that went ignored or were erased under the twentieth-century modernist and vanguard movements. We invite contributions that consider how Afro and Indigenous artists re-appropriated or altered "modern" forms to counter colonial narratives, as well as papers analyzing artists and/or movements in the Americas that were overlooked within a hegemonic legacy of modernism.
Carla Hermann is a sessional instructor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), presently teaching Art History undergraduate courses (Art History, Art theory and Art and Institutions). In her PhD dissertation (2016), she studied the only panorama of Rio de Janeiro exhibited in London during the first half of the nineteenth century, and its emergence within the panorama phenomenon more broadly. She holds an MA in Art history and BA in Geography, and her wider research interests include the long 19th century, modern art, Brazilian and Latin America art and landscape.
Jacqueline Witkowski is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory Department at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on integrations of textile and fiber-based practices in works by North and South American artists in the postwar period. Witkowski has presented her work in institutions throughout Europe and the Americas, and has published on the history of craft within digital and tactile warfare, labour and craft, and textile explorations in postwar Brazil. Her research has been supported by the Mitacs Globalink Scholarship and a project grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design.
E.5.1 Gender, Race, and Style in the work of Cecilia Marcovich (1894-1976)
Georgina G. Gluzman, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Painter, sculptor, and educator, Cecilia Marcovich was born in Romania and moved with her family to Argentina as a child. After her initial training in the city of Rosario, she went to Paris to complete her education with Antoine Bourdelle, André Lothe, Charles Despiau and Paul Baudoüin. In 1931, Cecilia Marcovich returned from Paris and settled in Buenos Aires. A few years later, she founded an art school, the Asociación Plástica Argentina, which provided art education to several generations of artists. She made several trips through Argentina and Brazil. There she began a series of paintings and sculptures that deal with Afro-Brazilian population. This series offers a deep exploration of a marginalized group, which was often employed in the development of modern languages as the mere object of representation. I argue that Marcovich’s point of view, informed by her political beliefs, presented these subjects in their complexity. Her critical fortune is inextricably linked to the criticism the style she devoted herself to, a modern figurative language, and to her focus on theses topics, largely ignored by traditional narratives.
Georgina G. Gluzman (1984) is an Assistant Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, having received doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the same institution in 2010 and 2015. She is also an Assistant Professor of Art History and Gender Studies at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. She received her PhD in Art History and Theory from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2015, having previously received an undergraduate degree in art history and a teaching certification at the same university. Her work focuses on the art of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentine women artists. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. She has published Trazos invisibles: Mujeres artistas en Buenos Aires (1890–1923) (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2016).
E.5.2 Challenging White Cultural Hegemony from Within: Afro-Cuban Figurative Art Between 1940-58
Cary Aileen García Yero, Harvard University
This paper explains the ways in which Afro-Cuban artists such as Ramon Loy, Ramos Blanco, and Uver Solís mobilized modernist figurative art techniques to navigate Cuba’s race relations during the Second Republic (1940-58). The ambiguous historical context in which these artists worked persistently silenced racial inequality and took for granted the hegemony of Western culture while problematically embracing lo negro as Cuban. These black artists did not reject European art; instead, they embraced the capaciousness of European art for their professional development. The paper explains the ways in which they challenged white cultural hegemony from within and asserted ideals of black autonomy within the island hegemonic ideological context of racial harmony. In doing so, this work illuminates on their significant yet unrecognized artistic contributions, understanding them in their own terms as part of the larger map of black artistic production.
Cary Aileen García Yero is Raphael Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-21) in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Scholars Program at Harvard University. She received a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2020. Her research interests include Afro-Latin American art, race relations in the Americas, Cuban history, and cultural theory. Her book project, Conflicting Sounds, Dissenting Sights, studies the power and limitations of the arts to oppose racism in Latin American societies shaped by ideologies of racial harmony. She has been Managing Editor of the journal Cuban Studies, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has taught history courses at Simon Fraser University and the University of the Fraser Valley. Her work has been published in Studies in Latin America Popular Culture and Cuban Studies.
Francisco Matto, sculptures on the beach. Zig-zag Forms, c. 1985. Painted wood. Photo: Alfredo Testoni. ©Fundación Francisco Matto
E.5.3 Rereading Abstraction in Latin America: Wilfredo Lam, Fernando de Szyszio, Francisco Matto and the Afro-Amerindian Paradigm
Elena O’Neill, Universidad Católica del Uruguay
The hegemonic legacy of modernist art history and theory frequently inhibit other approaches to the art of the Americas; even if there is a certain recognition, the prefix pre as in Pre-Columbian or Pre-Hispanic often imply a perennial otherness, not to mention the bifurcation between North and Latin America, modernist and Amerindian abstraction, the modernist dilemma of abstraction/figuration and how historiography dealt with these issues.
A series of flat wooden sculptures set in a natural environment, which Francisco Matto called Totems, dialogue with the geometric abstraction of modern art while recovering the Amerindian heritage of the continent, where myth and ritual are closely intertwined. These figures reintroduce the notion of form in terms of psychic function, connecting man with a reality beyond reason. Trained under Academic guidelines, Wifredo Lam found in the art of Picasso a formal liberation from an academic tradition; but to analyse Lam’s works as from this bias is to affirm that his artistic identity was shaped by the same influences that constituted the European avant-garde. What if we analyse Lam’s work as from his return to Cuba in 1941, considering a transcultural Caribbean and its literary avant-garde? Fernando de Szyszlo’s works, and the titles of his works, endorse an indigenous cosmovision beyond the prevailing thematic indigenism of the time. Instead of contemplating and describing reality, Szyszlo entered an indigenous psychic matrix, establishing a creative dialogue between modernity and ancestrality that guides us into a mythic past which somehow we acknowledge us as ours. This paper aims to revisit the works of these artists as from an Afro-Amerindian paradigm, to think the term “abstraction” as constructed on America’s often forgotten roots and to acknowledge abstraction as a necessary step in the symbol-shaping process.
Born in Uruguay, Elena O’Neill received a B.A. in Architecture from the Universidad de la República (Uruguay), and a Ph.D by the Pontificia Universidade Católica de Rio de Janeiro (Puc-Rio, Brazil). Before returning to Uruguay, she completed her post-doctorate at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ, Brazil, 2013-2018). Co-editor together with Roberto Conduru of Arte Negro 50 + 50 (2019) and Carl Einstein: a arte da África (2015). Translator and author of several articles in books, academic journals and conference annals, she participated in national and international events. Her research addresses the connections between western art and other traditions, focusing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current research aims at an Afro Amerindian art history and theory, highlighting the interconnection between art and architecture, their physical and existential spaces, the cosmogonies condensed in these artistic productions. As from 2019 she teaches at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
E.5.4 Chasing the Invisiblized Heritage. Contemporary Artists and Photographers in Search of Afro-Argentinian Vestiges and Forms of Resistance in Argentinian Art and Culture
Katarzyna Cytlak, Independent Researcher
Not only the visibility but also the most basic recognition is nowadays the main issue for citizens of Afro-Argentinian descent. When in Brazil and in Uruguay the impact of Afro-American cultural heritage is still marginalized, but not questioned – the Afro-Brazilian Museum functions in São Paulo since 2004; the Casa de la Cultura Afrouruguaya (the Afro-Uruguayan Cultural House) in Montevideo organizes several exhibitions devoted to art and history of local communities – its condition in Argentina is much more precarious. The particularity of the political and socio-cultural situation in which Afro-Argentinians defend their cultural heritage is the lack of any official institutional support. The lack of museum structures results from a common belief that Afro-Argentinians once existed – they left their traces still perceptible in tango culture – but they had disappeared.
This paper will question the persistence in Latin American discourse on art and culture of patterns from the colonial past, as defined by the coloniality of power (colonialidad del poder), the key analytical category in the Latin American debate on the postcolonial condition, which was developed in the 1990s by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. It proposes to emphasize artistic activity by the Argentinian photographer Nicolás Parodi who, in collaboration with the Association Diafar (Diáspora Africana de la Argentina – Association of the African Diaspora in Argentina) and the Espacio Malcolm (the Afro-Argentinian Cultural Center) search to “fill an aesthetic and visual gap” in Argentinian cultural and artistic consciousness and to visibilize the traces of African and afro-Argentinian heritage in art, culture, and national history. We will tend to analyze the strategies of Parodi’s photographs as with the images designed for the review El Afroargentino edited by Espacio Malcolm.
Katarzyna Cytlak is a Polish art historian based in Buenos Aires, and Poznań, whose research focuses on artistic creation of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. In 2012, she received a PhD from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Between 2015 and 2017, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, and at the University of San Martín, Argentina. Her research project Utopia and Resistance: art during the sixties and seventies. Dialogues between Argentina and Eastern Europe highlighted cultural and artistic exchanges between world regions considered as “minor”, “peripheral” in the canonical narrations on art history. She is a grantee of the University Paris 4 Sorbonne (Paris), the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris). Selected publications include articles in Umění/Art, Eadem Utraque Europa, Third Text, the RIHA Journal, desbordes - review of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur.
