Juan Ledezma

Juan Ledezma is a scholar and curator.  He received his Ph.D. in the History of Western Art (20th and 21st centuries) from Columbia University in 2009. His research examines art’s import in the construction of collective perception in different time periods and regions, with an emphasis on early Soviet Russia and postwar Latin America. He has written catalog essays and book chapters on the design of exhibition spaces in the Soviet Union, the perceptual agency of modernism, and Latin American abstraction’s relation to populist discourse, among other topics dealing with the art object’s contribution to the formation of a critical public sphere through strategies of participation. He has presented his scholarship at numerous public fora, including the Museum of Modern art and different conventions of the College Art Association. Starting with “The Sites of Latin American Abstraction”—a 2006 exhibition that rewrote the studies of the region’s Concrete Art by integrating photography as yet another medium, or “site,” through which pictorial and sculptural questions were provided innovative answers—his curatorship at different museums and galleries has contributed to the understanding of the history of Latin American abstract art, which is the topic of a chapter included in the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art. Ledezma is working on the manuscript of Tropes of Participation: The Architectural Imagination of Latin American Modernist Art, a book that examines the relationship between the disposition of the region’s modernism toward the construction of a participatory public space and the architectural thought and practice advanced in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela.