Thinking Ibero-America: Modernity and Indigenism

juandowney‘Thinking Ibero-America: Modernity and Indigenism,’ Birkbeck, University of London,

Malet St, Bloomsbury, WC1E 7HX, 23/11/2017, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Ticio Escobar in conversation with John Kraniauskas

Under the dominance of European and then Creole elites, the people of Latin America have historically looked to Europe and North America as referents for cultural modernity. Until recently, everything related to indigenous people and culture was associated with the idea of underdevelopment. However, with globalisation, contemporary cultural discourses have begun incorporating notions of diversity, difference, inclusion and cultural rights; this allows for the articulation of new critical visions such as that of Paraguayan Ticio Escobar.

A lawyer, curator, teacher, art critic and cultural promoter, Ticio Escobar was Minister of Culture of Paraguay (2008-2012). Prior to that, he was Director of Culture of the Municipality of Asuncion (1991-1996) and founder of the Museum of Indigenous Art. He is the author of the National Law of Culture of Paraguay and President of the Paraguayan Section of the International Association of Art Critics. He has published numerous books on Paraguayan and Latin American art. He currently directs the Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro in Asunción.

John Kraniauskas is Professor of Latin American Studies at Birkbeck (UL). Expert in literature and cultural studies, he is the author of numerous essays and translations. His latest book is Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin American Culture (University of Wales Press, 2017). He met Ticio Escobar on a trip to Paraguay during the days of Stroessner, as a member of the Parliamentary Group on Human Rights.

The Thinking Ibero-America cycle is a cooperation between the Instituto Cervantes and Canning House, with the collaboration of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), Birkbeck, University of London, and Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities (BIH).

The event will be held in the Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck, University of London (access through Torrington Square).

In Spanish and English.

The Maius Workshop’s first meeting: report

MaiusfirstmeetingThe first meeting of the Maius Workshop took place last Monday, 16 October, at the Warburg Institute. It was a well-attended event where we presented the aims of the research group, discussed our shared interests and needs and shared ideas about the most useful format for future sessions.

The Maius Workshop aims to bring together young researchers (MAs, PhDs and early career academics) working on Iberian and Latin American topics. It aims to create a collaborative network of researchers where shared problems and research obstacles can be discussed informally, and where personal encounters can foster interdisciplinary collaboration.

During our first meeting we decided that the network will:

  1. Share training resources and specific knowledge on e.g. archives, museum collections, languages, paleography…both in person during our meetings and online through our website.
  2. Offer an online platform for members to present themselves and their work on the web.
  3. Favour the creation of spin-off subject specific events to better cater to members’ very wid
    e interests.
  4. Run general meetings where members will have an opportunity to present problematic documents and objects from their current research in a friendly, collaborative and creative environment.

The first of these meetings, loosely titles ‘Sacred Encounters,’ will take place on 11 December (place TBC). Further information on this event will soon be published on our website. If you are interested in discussing your research at this event, please contact maiusworkshop@gmail.com.

 

Symposium: El Greco to Goya: Spanish Masterpieces from The Bowes Museum

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Please click here to book a ticket

ARTES Event: Curator’s tour of ‘El Greco to Goya’ at the Wallace Collection, 21 November 2017, 10 am

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Isabelle Kent, Enriqueta Harris Frankfort curatorial assistant at the Wallace Collection,  will give ARTES members a tour of the exhibition on 21st November at 10:00.
Please RSVP to artesiberia@gmail.com by 15 November.
This event is open to ARTES members only.

Featured Exhibition: Sacred art in the age of contact: Chumash and Latin American traditions in Santa Barbara

smaller20abalone20virgin20mary_1Sacred art in the age of contact: Chumash and Latin American traditions in Santa Barbara, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, until 8 December, 2017.

Sacred Art in the Age of Contact  focuses on the relationship between art and religion in both historic Chumash and Spanish traditions in the early Mission period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, highlighting themes of devotion, sacred space, language and materiality. The exhibition investigates the mutually transformative interaction among these traditions. Twentieth-century and contemporary Chumash visual production will be on view alongside sacred objects. This exhibition brings together, for the first time, a diverse array of approximately 100 objects, from local collections that include the Mission Santa Inés, Mission La Purísima Concepcíon, the Santa Barbara Mission Museum and Archive-Library, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and the Repository for Archaeological and Ethnographic Collections at UC Santa Barbara.

Featured exhibition: Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969, Palm Springs Art Museum, until 15 January 2018

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Martha Boto, Déplacements optico-hydrauliques, 1970, Collection of Gérard and Maria Rose Guilbert, Paris. Courtesy of Sicardi Gallery, Houston, © 2017 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, Photograph by Logan Sebastian Beck

Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969, Palm Springs Art Museum, 26 August 2017 – 15 January, 2018.

This exhibition is the first in-depth examination of the pioneering role played by South American artists in the international Kinetic Art movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Grounded by scholarly research into experimental art movements of the late 1940s and early 1950s in Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Rio de Janeiro.  Kinesthesia  begins its survey with the layered “vibrational” works created by Jesús Rafael Soto for the historic Le Mouvement exhibition at Galerie Denise René in Paris (1955) and goes on to explore more than fifty examples by nine artists, including the works of internationally well-known figures, such as Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gyula Kosice, and Julio Le Parc, alongside the less well known Martha Boto, Horacio García-Rossi, Alejandro Otero, Abraham Palatnik, and Gregorio Vardánega. The exhibition like that at Santa Barbara is part of the Getty Foundation supported Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

 

ARTES Travel Scholarship Report: Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin

artesThanks to the generosity of ARTES and Coll y Cortés, I was awarded a Travel Scholarships which gave me the opportunity to carry out field research in Spain during the Spring and Summer Terms of the academic year 2016-2017. Even if I was based in Madrid, my research was often conducted outside the capital and I had the chance to visit several medieval monuments linked to the PhD thesis I am writing at the Warburg Institute (London).

The goal of my PhD research is to demonstrate that the first two Marquises of Villena, Juan Pacheco (1419-1474) and Diego López Pacheco (c.1445-1529), dedicated enormous efforts and energies in organising a complex cultural programme aimed at counteracting the negative image of their family that the Catholic Monarchs had created through a powerful political propaganda. My research includes the analysis of material and written sources, as their combined reading in historical terms is one of the best tools to understand how historical memory could be manipulated through acts of patronage at the dawn of the Early Modern Period.

During my stay in Spain, I visited many cities and villages that belonged to the Marquises of Villena during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Some of the most impressive castles I visited were those of Villena, Almansa, Escalona, Garcimuñoz, Chinchilla and Belmonte. Among the religious buildings, the most relevant for my research were the monasteries of Santa María del Parral, Saint Cataline of Siena and St Francis in Belmonte. These trips helped me to answer three fundamental questions of my PhD research: How did the Pachecos insert these buildings in the pre-existent urban landscape? In which way were they used by the Pachecos? And finally, what was their meaning and how were they perceived according to the standards of the visual culture of their time?

Being in Spain not only allowed me to visit and study in situ many buildings and artworks promoted by the Marquises of Villena, it also gave me the opportunity to carry out documentary research in various archives. The majority of the documents linked to the Pacheco family are preserved in the Archive of the Nobility, today in the Tavera’s Hospital in Toledo, a perfect place for all those who are interested in studying the great noble families of the medieval and early modern periods. Nonetheless, I also found interesting documents in the National Archive, the National Library, the Biblioteca Francisco de Zabálburu and the Biblioteca of the Museo Lázaro Galdiano.

While I was in Spain, I also dedicated part of my time in Spain to the drafting of a paper I presented at the Kings and Queens Conference: In the Shadow of the Throne, organised by the Royal Studies Network, which analysed the links between Diego López Pacheco and the inheritors to the Crowns of the Iberian Kingdoms. At the same time, I also had the chance to assist to several lectures and seminars, activities that were a useful platform to interact with scholars who are developing their research in Spanish institutions such as the CSIC, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the Museo del Prado, etc.

Lecture: ” The Palace of Pedro I in Seville, ‘very much like the residence of the Muslim kings’?”, SOAS, 7pm, 11 October 2017

ISLAMIC ART CIRCLE at SOAS
Monthly Lecture

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The Palace of Pedro I in Seville, ‘very much like the residence of the Muslim kings’?
Dr Tom Nickson
Wednesday, 11 October 2017
7.00 p.m., Khalili Lecture Theatre, Main Building, SOAS
Chaired by Professor Hugh Kennedy
Enquiries: rosalindhaddon@gmail.com

Introducing the Maius Workshop

Morgan Beatus Angel Sun Rev 19The Maius Workshop is an interdisciplinary group that brings together graduate students and early career scholars dealing with Hispanic art (broadly considered to include literature, theatre, music, etc.) and history from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. The aim of the Maius Workshop is to encourage dialogue among specialists in different stages of their academic life and to provide a forum for discussing methods of information gathering and research news. The group is kindly supported by ARTES.

The workshop is named after the tenth-century painter of the Morgan Beatus manuscript as it wishes to create an interdisciplinary space where scholars of art and history can interact. Through a series of reading group meetings, the Workshop aims to bring together young researchers tackling the study of Hispanic culture and history and to create a strong network of specialists of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and Latin America.

Thanks to the new connections that the group will create, the meetings will develop current research rather than present finished projects. The group’s activities are directed to the diffusion of the interest in Iberian and Latin American cultural creations, with the long-term aim of establishing a permanent community open to all students of Hispanic art and history.

The Maius Workshop’s first meeting will take place on Monday 16 October at 6 pm at the Warburg Institute. This will be an informal meeting and an opportunity to meet postgraduate researchers with similar interests, to discuss how these interests can be drawn together in a reading group setting. The meeting is open to MA, PhD and early career researchers. Refreshments will be provided.

If you are interested in the activities of this research group or would like to attend the meeting, please fill in this form