Books by Tatiana Flores
"Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago," curated by Tatiana Flo... more "Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago," curated by Tatiana Flores for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, is a major survey exhibition of twenty-first century art of the Caribbean that employs the archipelago as an analytical framework. Working against traditional understandings of the Caribbean as discontinuous, isolated, and beyond comprehension as a result of its heterogeneous populations, multiple linguistic traditions, and diverse colonial histories, "Relational Undercurrents" locates thematic continuities in the art of the Caribbean islands. This lavishly illustrated catalogue, co-edited by Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, includes commissioned essays by scholars and curators.
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
September 16, 2017 - January 28, 2018
Catalogue forthcoming from Museum of Latin American Art /Duke University Press:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/relational-undercurrents?viewby=subject&categoryid=8&sort=newest
Book Chapters by Tatiana Flores
Humor in Global Contemporary Art, 2024
"Reír por no llorar," which translates as ‘laugh to keep from crying’, is an expression pertinent... more "Reír por no llorar," which translates as ‘laugh to keep from crying’, is an expression pertinent to contemporary Venezuela, a country subsumed in prolonged crises that are much economic as existential, dating to the election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1998. Against this backdrop, contemporary Venezuelan artists have activated humor in various ways: as a strategy of resistance against the government, as a manner of making sense of the (absurd) world around them, and as a critique of Venezuela’s heroic tradition of geometric abstraction, with its false promises of utopia. This essay focuses on the work of two performance artists, Deborah Castillo and Érika Ordosgoitti, whose humorous and distinctly feminist forms of social protest activate the body in daring ways, challenging not only the current political regime, but also heteronormative patriarchal culture, canonical Venezuelan aesthetics, and sexist hierarchies in Venezuelan arts and letters.
The Barnes Then and Now: Dialogues on Education, Installation, and Social Justice, edited by Martha Lucy, 2023
Published in a volume celebrating the centennial of the establishment of the Barnes Foundation, t... more Published in a volume celebrating the centennial of the establishment of the Barnes Foundation, the essay ponders the role of the global and folk art collected by Albert C. Barnes in dialogue with European modernism, which formed the thrust of his collection.
A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, edited byJane Chin Davidson & Amelia Jones, 2023
As a critical term in contemporary art, “revolution” is vexed with Eurocentric bias. Moreover, af... more As a critical term in contemporary art, “revolution” is vexed with Eurocentric bias. Moreover, after a century's worth of revolutionary movements that have been thwarted, undermined, or institutionalized, the word may generate more disillusionment, skepticism, or outright hostility than dreams of a future utopia. Although the perceived failure of twentieth-century revolutions to deliver on their promises propels a loss of confidence in their potential, decolonial interventions in the present insist on the possibility of social transformation and new beginnings. This chapter addresses the paradox and promise of revolution by probing the relation between race, modernity, and revolution through the work of major European thinkers and critical race scholars. The essay concludes by proposing to embrace the aspect of temporal recurrence from the word's original meaning, thereby thinking of “revolution” not as a line but as a circle.
The Routledge Companion to African-American Art History, edited by Eddie Chambers, 2019
This essay interrogates the exclusion of Afro-descendant peoples from the construct of "Latin Ame... more This essay interrogates the exclusion of Afro-descendant peoples from the construct of "Latin America," reflecting on my experiences curating the 2017 exhibition "Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago."
A Portrait: It’s simple and concrete. Selections from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection. Edited by Anelys Alvarez, Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hanna, and Natalia Zuluaga. Miami: [NAME] Publications, 2017
Original English version of an essay about the Jorge M. Pérez collection of contemporary art for ... more Original English version of an essay about the Jorge M. Pérez collection of contemporary art for a catalogue of the collection.
An essay on Anita Brenner's art criticism, published in the exhibition catalogue "Another Promise... more An essay on Anita Brenner's art criticism, published in the exhibition catalogue "Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico," edited by Karen Cordero Reiman. Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2017.
The Routledge History of Latin American Culture, edited by Carlos Manuel Salomon, 2018
The Modernist World, edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross, Jun 2015
Positing that modernism in Latin American art was motivated by a different set of concerns than i... more Positing that modernism in Latin American art was motivated by a different set of concerns than its European counterpart, this essay lays out a set of ‘other criteria’, to borrow a phrase from Leo Steinberg, for its understanding. Concerned with self-definition and social justice and less interested in the autonomous art object, Latin America modernism challenges conventional periodization based on modern art as a series of formal innovations. Drawing on recent scholarship on contemporary art under globalization, I consider new frameworks through which to read it. The essay examines artistic production from the 1910s through the 1960s, focusing particular attention on the rise of the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, followed by social realism, surrealism, and geometric abstraction.
El verbo es conjugar. Mexico City: Museo Mural Diego Rivera / INBA. , 2014
Juan Soriano • Vaquitas pastando, 1965 • Óleo sobre tela • 61 x 41.5 cm • Colección Pérez Simón, ... more Juan Soriano • Vaquitas pastando, 1965 • Óleo sobre tela • 61 x 41.5 cm • Colección Pérez Simón, México
Un retrato. Es simple y concreto. Selecciones de la Colección Jorge M. Pérez. Editado por Anelys Alvarez, Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hanna y Natalia Zuluaga. Miami: [NAME] Publications, 2017
Traducción al español de un texto sobre la colección de arte contemporáneo de Jorge M. Pérez orig... more Traducción al español de un texto sobre la colección de arte contemporáneo de Jorge M. Pérez originalmente escrito en inglés.
Encuentro de Investigaciones Emergentes IV, Instituto Distrital de las Artes, Bogota, Colombia, 2016
Codo a codo: Parejas de artistas en México, ed. Dina Comisarenco Mirkin. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana., 2013
Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Robin A. Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012
Articles by Tatiana Flores
H-ART, 2024
This essay discusses the construction of Mexico in the
writings of André Breton as “the surrealis... more This essay discusses the construction of Mexico in the
writings of André Breton as “the surrealist place par excellence.”
I focus on Breton’s claim that Mexico is “the
chosen land of black humor” through an analysis of his
literary sources and his engagement with the printmaker
José Guadalupe Posada. I then address Breton’s presentation
of Mexico in France through the 1939 exhibition
Mexique, which was Frida Kahlo’s Parisian debut, and the
article “Souvenir du Mexique,” published in the surrealist
journal Minotaure.
21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, 2024
As art history begins to take seriously the imperative to decolonize, one of the most vexing area... more As art history begins to take seriously the imperative to decolonize, one of the most vexing areas of resistance to change is the conventional periodization of art historical epochs. Even while acknowledging that spatial divisions like West and Non-West are deeply problematic, as are geographic divisions per se, we continue to honor the “history” in the discipline’s nomenclature by insisting on temporality as a primary organizing category. The period commonly designated as “modernist” (roughly 1860 to 1960) is particularly difficult to divorce from Western ideals of progress as defined both by technological “advances” and by the heroization of artistic “innovation”. When the modernist moment attempts to open itself up to global narratives, its structuring undercurrent is a particular vision of the art of the West. In this essay, I read the conventional narrative of modernism through a decolonial lens and revisit the reception of Impressionism in the 1910s and 1920s in Mexico to consider how an artistic idiom widely seen as retrograde at that moment became the basis for a radical rethinking around the democratization of art. My analysis exposes how, because of its championing of novelty and its inherent Eurocentrism, the category of modernism obscures and suppresses artists and narratives that fall outside of its limited purview.
LA ESCUELA_JOURNAL, 2024
The essay considers the representation of the ocean
in the work of Caribbean artists and writers,... more The essay considers the representation of the ocean
in the work of Caribbean artists and writers, including
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Dionne Brand, Édouard
Glissant, Juana Valdés, Nadia Huggins, and Suchitra
Mattai. It takes as a point of departure the critique of
Western humanism and its purported universal subject
in the art of Campos-Pons and examines how the artist
calls forth a specific “we”: the victims of colonialism and
the Transatlantic slave trade. Moving from the figural
to the abstract sea, the essay turns to representational
strategies for rendering the ocean’s vast immensity and
the silenced histories contained therein. The author
concludes that considering the sea as hydrocommons
requires acknowledging difference and particularity.
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2021
Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregr... more Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregrounding how it reproduces Black erasure. I argue that “Latin America,” rather than being a geographical designator, is an imagined community that is Eurocentric to the degree that its conceptual boundaries exclude African diaspora spaces. I then turn to understandings of whiteness across borders, contrasting perceptions of racial mixture in the United States and the Hispanophone Americas. Lastly, I examine works by (Afro-)Latinx artists whose nuanced views on race demonstrate the potential of visual representation to provide insight into this complex topic beyond the black-white binary.
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2021
Curated by Yelaine Rodriguez and edited by Tatiana Flores, this Dialogues stages a series of conv... more Curated by Yelaine Rodriguez and edited by Tatiana Flores, this Dialogues stages a series of conversations around Afro-Latinx art through interventions by Afro-Latina cultural producers. Black Latinxs often feel excluded both from the framework of Latinidad as well as from the designation “African-American.” The essays address Blackness in a U.S. Latinx context, through discussion of curatorial approaches, biographical reflections, art historical inquiry, artistic projects, and museum-based activism. Recent conversations around Latinxs and Black Lives Matter reveal that in the popular imaginary, Latinx presupposes a Brown identity. In their contributions to “Afro-Latinx Art and Activism,” the authors argue for a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of Latinx that does not reproduce the racial attitudes of the Lusophone and Hispanophone countries of Latin America or the black-white binary of the United States. They look forward to a time when the terms “Afro” or “Black” might cease to be necessary qualifiers of “Latinx.”
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Books by Tatiana Flores
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
September 16, 2017 - January 28, 2018
Catalogue forthcoming from Museum of Latin American Art /Duke University Press:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/relational-undercurrents?viewby=subject&categoryid=8&sort=newest
Book Chapters by Tatiana Flores
Articles by Tatiana Flores
writings of André Breton as “the surrealist place par excellence.”
I focus on Breton’s claim that Mexico is “the
chosen land of black humor” through an analysis of his
literary sources and his engagement with the printmaker
José Guadalupe Posada. I then address Breton’s presentation
of Mexico in France through the 1939 exhibition
Mexique, which was Frida Kahlo’s Parisian debut, and the
article “Souvenir du Mexique,” published in the surrealist
journal Minotaure.
in the work of Caribbean artists and writers, including
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Dionne Brand, Édouard
Glissant, Juana Valdés, Nadia Huggins, and Suchitra
Mattai. It takes as a point of departure the critique of
Western humanism and its purported universal subject
in the art of Campos-Pons and examines how the artist
calls forth a specific “we”: the victims of colonialism and
the Transatlantic slave trade. Moving from the figural
to the abstract sea, the essay turns to representational
strategies for rendering the ocean’s vast immensity and
the silenced histories contained therein. The author
concludes that considering the sea as hydrocommons
requires acknowledging difference and particularity.
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
September 16, 2017 - January 28, 2018
Catalogue forthcoming from Museum of Latin American Art /Duke University Press:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/relational-undercurrents?viewby=subject&categoryid=8&sort=newest
writings of André Breton as “the surrealist place par excellence.”
I focus on Breton’s claim that Mexico is “the
chosen land of black humor” through an analysis of his
literary sources and his engagement with the printmaker
José Guadalupe Posada. I then address Breton’s presentation
of Mexico in France through the 1939 exhibition
Mexique, which was Frida Kahlo’s Parisian debut, and the
article “Souvenir du Mexique,” published in the surrealist
journal Minotaure.
in the work of Caribbean artists and writers, including
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Dionne Brand, Édouard
Glissant, Juana Valdés, Nadia Huggins, and Suchitra
Mattai. It takes as a point of departure the critique of
Western humanism and its purported universal subject
in the art of Campos-Pons and examines how the artist
calls forth a specific “we”: the victims of colonialism and
the Transatlantic slave trade. Moving from the figural
to the abstract sea, the essay turns to representational
strategies for rendering the ocean’s vast immensity and
the silenced histories contained therein. The author
concludes that considering the sea as hydrocommons
requires acknowledging difference and particularity.
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/where-others-see-fragmentation-tatiana-flores-sees_us_59cd64eae4b034ae778d4907
Si bien el tema de la institucionalización de las prácticas artísticas ha sido recurrente en los espacios con los que cuenta el sector de las artes en Colombia, este no ha sido abordado desde la pregunta acerca de cuál ha sido el impacto que ha tenido en los artistas y en el sector en general. Por ello, para profesores y estudiantes del Programa de Artes
Plásticas de la Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, resulta pertinente el trazado del Encuentro de Investigaciones Emergentes: “La institucionalización de las prácticas artísticas”, pues recoge algunos de los interrogantes que se plantean en las discusiones de clase o en los
encuentros en las cafeterías, en relación a la incidencia que tiene este tema en la formación de artistas y en el posicionamiento de las artes plásticas en el país.