Speaker Series

The Art Forum Speaker Series seeks to foster critical thinking and academic debate about the vast array of topics and issues relevant to the contemporary production and history of Latin American and Latino Art. Programmed by the Art Forum’s Curator the Art Forum speaker series are divided into three thematic sub-series: Art Lab, Artists on their Art and Art Forum Workshops

• Co-sponsored with the Cultural Agents Initiative, the Art Lab talks are opportunities for artists and academics to gather and explore together the relevance of the slippery but productive relationship between arts and society which has shaped decisively, much of the artistic practice in Latin America since its formation.
• The Artists on Their Art series is an opportunity for contemporary artists to present their work and engage in a critical analysis and discussion of its relevance in an academic forum.
• The Art Forum Workshop series constitute the Art forum’s latest and most significant effort to further academic scholarship in the field of Latin American art history. there are currently 3 workshops running at the Art Forum: Word and Image, Art and Politics and Conceptual Stumblings: The Recasting of Chilean Art since 1975.
  • Word and Image Word and Image are a series of two year seminars that explore the complex relation between writing and imaging and they do so within the artistic production of Latin America. These seminars are particularly interested in mapping out the area where both practices intersect to create a new area of study.
    Co-directed by Ernesto Livon-Grosman: Livon-Grosman teaches literature and film at Boston College. He has published extensivly on Latin American literature and made films on informal recycling and video poetry.
    
  • Art & Politics in Contemporary Latin America explores the shifting tectonics of the “political” in contemporary Latin American art. Prominent Latin American and U.S. scholars and artists address the decisive shifts that have taken place in artistic forms, practices and institutions as they have intersected with the period’s political upheavals, and assess the profound transformations in the concept of political subjectivity itself – changes in the nature of political agency that have been actively facilitated by and through artistic practice.
    Co-directed by Robin Greeley: Robin Greeley teaches art history at the University of Connecticut, where she focuses on art and politics in modern and contemporary Latin America.She has written extensively on art and state formation in Mexico, and on the relationship between modernity, modernism and modernization. Her current project concerns contemporary Mexican artist Abraham Cruz Villegas and the critique of commodity culture.
  • Conceptual Stumblings revises the last 35 years of visual arts in Chile establishing a dialog among the most prominent Chilean artists and a group of American scholars. The academic goal of this research project is to facilitate an awareness and new reading of an historical phenomenon of particular importance in the history of Chilean art—the Escena de Avanzada—and to situate it as a central point of inflection in the history of Latin American art.
    Co-directed by Marcela Ramos, Art Forum Program Coordinator: Bio
    Research assistant: Macarena López. Macarena López is a Chilean journalist based in New York. She specializes in visual arts and has worked for the Chilean Minister of Foreign Affairs producing and coordinating visual arts project around the world. She has also covered art shows in New York City  as a freelance journalist for Chilean newspapers and magazines.

All talks are recorded and later available on our website as podcasts.

All talks will be held at 1730 Cambridge street (2 floor), unless noted.

Please contact Marcela Ramos at mvramos@fas.harvard.edu if you need additional information.

Upcoming