Abstract

Drawn from the research for my recently published book, Radical Form: Modernist Abstraction in South America, this lecture turns to a small set of abstract artists working in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century whose work was directed by universal questions, ones concerned with subjectivity, emancipation, and belonging at their most general. My focus will be on methodological questions that arise in tackling such universalist ambitions from the so-called “periphery” and how the recovery of such projects might square with efforts to write more expansive, non-linear, and contextually grounded histories of modernism as a global phenomenon.

Megan A. Sullivan received her PhD in the History of Art from Harvard University and is presently assistant professor of modern Latin American art at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Radical Form: Modernist Abstraction in South America (Yale University Press, 2022) and co-editor of A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2022). She is currently at work on a monograph provisionally titled Twentieth-Century Peruvian Art: Episodes in a History of Modernism and its Others, which will chart the relationship between modernism, pre-Columbian artifacts, and indigenous material culture in Peru between 1920 and the 1970s.