Panelists

Clara Apostolatos

Institutional Affiliation: Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Clara Maria Apostolatos is an M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art of Latin America, Institutional Critique, diasporic memory, and memorial art. She is particularly interested in art that provides testimony for incomplete or inverted accounts of authoritarian pasts in Latin America. She co-curated the exhibition “Kenneth Kemble and Silvia Torras: Formative Years, 1956-63” and held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sapar Contemporary Art Gallery, and the Center for Italian Modern Art.

Paper Title: Art on the Threshold: Teresa Margolles and Performances of Liminality at the Colombia-Venezuela Border

Abstract: Teresa Margolles (b. 1965, Culiacán, Mexico) is a conceptual artist who researches, documents, and demands attention to social ruptures produced by violence, particularly deaths caused by drug-related crime, poverty, alienation, and political crises in national borders. Her photographs and installations, which often involve materials taken from murder sites or residues from autopsies, claim silenced and often forgotten stories of drug-related deaths and affix them to the gallery where people can reflect on the marginalized trauma. Margolles calls attention to the traces of violence and loss in the physical environment and social fabric: from bullet holes on walls and spilled blood in sites of murder, to recorded accounts of assassinated loved ones. Her work then serves as a multimodal archive of histories of border violence and diaspora. Margolles has staged performances and interventions directly on national borders fraught with mass migration, such as the Mexico-US and Venezuela-Colombia boundaries. These actions cast borders as sites of projection for complex interplays of biopolitics, where otherness is developed and thus identity begins. Focusing on her artworks on the Venezuelan exodus through the Simon Bolivar International Bridge to Colombia, I read Margolles’s site-specific interventions as direct confrontations with the physical sites of diaspora and displacement. In these artworks, Venezuelans pass the border repeatedly while performing different actions like carrying large stones across the river. They are caught in an indefinite liminality, an ongoing state of non-arrival that reverberates the spatial vocabulary of the bridge and the threshold it represents. Staging strenuously physical and material performances on the bridge, Margolles calls attention to the embodied experience of migration in a geopolitically and physically liminal architecture: bridging two countries and overtly different socio-political situations, the Simon Bolivar Bridge is at once a barrier and a threshold for Venezuelans. For other pieces, Margolles asked the border-crossers to narrate and knit onto soil- and sweat-stained fabrics their stories of diaspora. The spaces and subjects of forced migration come together in these happenings to perform and enact the migrant’s unstable being of displacement. The produced archive (sweat, photography, and geological makeup of the environment) allows for material evidence to exist against the absence or loss of testimony on the Venezuelan diaspora.


Matthew Bowman

Institutional Affiliation: University of Iowa

Matt Bowman is a third-year art history Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth-century American and Native American art. His academic interests lie in public artworks and their receptions, landscape paintings, representations of Natives by Anglo-American artists, intersections between Indigenous and American art histories, and art histories of the American West and Southwest. Before attending Iowa, Matt received a B.A. in art history from Augustana College (IL), an M.A. in art history from the University of Connecticut, and an M.A. in Indigenous Studies from the University of Kansas.

Paper Title: Before Glacier National Park: Native Displacement in J. H. Sharp’s Blackfeet Landscapes

Abstract: For thousands of years, the Blackfeet peoples of present-day North America inhabited territory extending from the Saskatchewan to Missouri Rivers. The 1855 Lame Bull Treaty first delineated their reservation in present-day Montana, and by 1883 undelivered federal rations and the virtual extermination of the bison led to starvation deaths of over a quarter of their population. Desperate and coerced, the tribe sold 800,000 mountainous acres in 1895 to the U.S. government. Dubbed the “ceded strip,” this landscape yielded no mineral wealth for private interests, leading to inclusion as the eastern half of Glacier National Park upon its founding in 1910. This border remains contentious for the Blackfeet people who claim access rights to their ancestral territory. Various scholars have analyzed this Blackfeet removal, but art historical perspectives on this controversial landscape and its fraught identity remain unexamined. Richly evocative of these issues are the images of American artist Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953), famed founder of The Taos Society of Artists. One group of his canvases depict Blackfeet encampments with the relinquished territory and the future Glacier National Park in the distant background. Painted after the 1895 relinquishment but before the establishment of the park in 1910, Sharp’s pictures testify visually to a history of displacement and dispossession that continues today. Pairing formal analysis of Sharp’s paintings with Blackfeet stories and oral history, my paper will explore how Sharp evoked Blackfeet dislocation from sacred mountains so essential to their origins, identity, sovereignty, knowledge, sustenance, shelter, ceremony, and cosmology, and thus demonstrate that national park boundaries are productive spaces for decolonizing analyses of the ideological collisions that exist between Euro-American and Indigenous, U.S. governmental and tribal, land philosophies.


Kale Serrato Doyen

Institutional Affiliation: University of Pittsburgh

Kale Serrato Doyen (she/her) is a first-year Ph.D. student of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Kale studies modern and contemporary art history of the United States, focusing on representations of the landscape by Black and Latinx artists. She also leverages Digital Humanities in both her research and landscape photographic practice to analyze the infrastructural phenomena that racialize space. While an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Kale completed curatorial internships at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and Art Institute of Chicago as a 2018–2020 Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow.

Paper Title: Visualizing Chicanx Presence in the Rural Midwest

Abstract: People of color living in the rural United States are subject to political under-/misrepresentation and historically inconsistent access to social services and community investment. Consequently, they fall victim to segregation and erasure. This rings true for my home region of Mid-Michigan, whose dwindling economy was analyzed in a 2020 New York Times article that made no mention of the area’s Latinx population. Nonetheless, Mexican Americans have populated the area since the 1910s when they were recruited for agricultural and industrial work.

Three generations of my family have lived in Saginaw, MI since migrating from Mexico in the 1930s. This geography and its labor history have shaped my understanding of Chicanidad and, moreover, the racialization of space. Through my analog landscape photography practice, I visualize sites of the region’s Chicanx history and my own family’s labor history. Influencing my artistic, yet critical, documentation of space is my familial connection to artists of color from Saginaw. My tíos were members of ? and the Mysterians, the first Chicanx band with a #1 Billboard hit, and Stevie Wonder grew up down the street from my grandpa in Saginaw’s First Ward.

This presentation combines my photographs with digital maps to reveal the infrastructural phenomena that make invisible the state’s residents of color. In Mid-Michigan, this is exemplified by the intentional isolation of Mexican migrant camps. As agricultural employers recruited Mexican migrants with the promise of housing, they built camps that were scattered throughout the region’s expansive farmland. Meanwhile, the social landscape of the city of Saginaw remains crystalized by twentieth-century redlining practices. Although more than half of Saginaw’s population is Black or Latinx, many of these residents live east of the Saginaw River. My documentary photographs will be presented alongside digital maps to analyze racial inequality implicated through space.


Colleen Foran

Institutional Affiliation: Boston University

Colleen Foran is a Ph.D. student studying African art at Boston University. Her research focuses on contemporary West African art, particularly on participatory art in Ghana’s capital of Accra. During the 2020–21 school year, Colleen was a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow studying Akan Twi. She completed her M.A. at BU in spring 2020, as well as a Graduate Certificate in African Studies from BU’s African Studies Center. Prior to coming to BU, Colleen worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She received her B.A. from DePaul University in the history of art and architecture.

Paper Title: Back Talk: Locating Subaltern Resistance in an Ivorian Colonial-Era Wè Mask

Abstract: Starting from a close examination of a mid-twentieth-century Wè mask in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s collection, this paper argues that the object actively resisted French colonial oppression. The materials used (recycled gun casings that would have jangled when danced), their intentional arrangement (mirroring European cannons used to terrorize West Africa’s coastline), and the mask’s facial characteristics (including a distinctly European-style handlebar mustache), were intended to talk back to violent white invaders in a language they would understand.

This mask would have been danced in the early to mid-twentieth century to maintain the balance between civilization and wilderness. Wè masks made for this purpose grew and changed over time with the continual addition of materials, wisdom, and power, becoming a physical record of its community. During this mask’s lifetime, French military forces invaded Wè territory to create and then “pacify” the colony of Côte d’Ivoire. Thousands of shotgun casings were left behind, as well as French settlers intent on claiming Wè land for agricultural use and threatening the Wè community’s way of life. Postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously declared that the subaltern could not speak. This idea was later tempered by Spivak and others to reflect that the subaltern has of course always been speaking—a more relevant question is, can it be heard? This Wè mask loudly communicated through the auditory sounds it made in motion and through its evocative materials and their intimations of violence. By employing repurposed Western technology and caricatured European facial features, this Wè mask confronted its colonizers literally and metaphorically; its anti-colonial message can still be heard today.


Artie Foster

Institutional Affiliation: University of Illinois, Chicago

Artie Foster is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, studying modern and contemporary art, with a focus on the arts of the Black Atlantic in the mid-20th century. He has previously presented his work at the George Washington University Art History Graduate Symposium and the UIC In/Between Conference, and has been supported by the UIC Art History Fellowship, Provost’s Graduate Research Award, and Art History Travel and Research Award. He also co-curated 6.13.89: The Canceling of the Mapplethorpe Exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Networks of Resistance at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago. 

Paper Title: In the Crosshairs of Empire: The role of diaspora and postcolonial “Empire” in Frank Bowling’s Africa to Australia

Abstract: Frank Bowling’s 1971 series, the Map Paintings, chaotically upend conventional representations of the world map, with stenciled continental landmasses distorted and rearranged across sumptuous color-fields, capturing the uncertainty surrounding postcolonial independence and spreading black diaspora. As such, it is hardly surprising that viewers often overlook Bowling’s formal innovations in favor of these paintings’ supposed commentary on the aftermath of colonialism. And while scholarly and institutional writing about the Maps tends to characterize the series as critical of Euro-American colonialism and subsequent black diaspora, Bowling’s own comments complicate this view without fully rejecting it: he recalls his own diasporic migration from his native Guyana to the U.K. as casually as “moving down the street” and regularly extols the importance of London in his work, rendering all the more elusive Bowling’s own views on his diasporic identity.

A painting like Bowling’s Africa to Australia captures both the ambivalence the artist feels towards diasporic identity, as well as a forewarning of further global reordering yet to come following diasporic spread and globalization. Through the painting’s imposition of an all-encompassing, color-blocked grid—reminiscent of high modernist formalism, the schema of national flags, as well as a kaleidoscopic crosshair—this paper argues that Bowling’s Maps are not only critical of colonialism but of a burgeoning postcolonial, neoliberal order which was only just emerging. Such an order, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would later describe it, functions as a new international “Empire” that ultimately expands colonial-era domination and the inequalities upon which it rests. Thus, in expanding the scope of scholarly discussion around Bowling’s work, this paper will also challenge categories like “diasporic abstraction” and “diasporic sublime,” in a manner that reflects Bowling’s own skepticism towards identity categories which precede formalist evaluation of his work, categories which often unwittingly service and support Empire.


Esesua Ikpefan

Institutional Affiliation: Harvard University Graduate School of Design

While currently an Irving Instructional Technology Fellow and Deans Diversity and Inclusion Fellow, Esesua Ikpefan’s doctoral research highlights spatial dimensions of inequality and marginalization in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work sees the built environment as both an informer of conflict and identity, as well as a reflection of these issues. Her research focuses on the intersection between heritage, identity, inequality, and colonial legacies in Nigeria’s urban centers. This work assesses how claims of ownership and authenticity are performed in contestation over limited urban space in Lagos. It confronts popular hierarchies of place and persons in Nigeria, questioning who a given society sees as valuable enough to have a right to urban space, and why.

Her past research in the Master in Design Studies in Critical Conservation program at the GSD examines colonial, religious, and cultural practices that together have formed contemporary governmental and societal biases towards Nigeria’s urban poor. This research focuses on how heritage and narratives of history and place, and its built environment, can become tools for urban inequality and exclusion.

Esesua has a B.F.A. in Environmental and Interior Design from Syracuse University. She held teaching fellowships at the GSD Urban Planning and Design Department, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the General Education Department at Harvard University. She was also a Research Assistant at the Just City Lab and served as the Logistics Committee Lead for the 2019 Harvard GSD Black in Design Conference.

Paper Title: Returnee Architecture: Placemaking and Elitism in Afro-Brazilian Lagos

Abstract: The 19th Century saw a marked settlement of formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians in Portuguese Town, in Lagos, Nigeria. Due to their Western education, occupation as merchants, trade networks, and most especially, architectural and artisanal skill, many of the early “returnees,” as they came to be called, were able to establish themselves socially within Yoruba elite circles, and spatially in the thriving neighborhood of Popo Aguda (the Brazilian Quarters). Resting in what used to be the commercial and judicial capital of colonial-era Nigeria, Popo Aguda borders the Marina region of Lagos Island. The settlement is visually characterized by the distinct architecture by which the Afro-Brazilians built their homes, religious buildings, and businesses. In particular, this building typology became associated with particular elite tastes, an architectural characterization of status, by which wealthy indigenous Lagosians sought to situate themselves. Thus, Afro-Brazilian architects quickly rose to fame and were commissioned to build schools, homes, and official buildings for both the British and Nigerian ruling classes. Afro-Brazilian architecture is distinct in its transculturation of Portuguese and Baroque architecture, visually communicating the history of transatlantic enslavement, as well as the marked evolution and repossession of West African heritage through this process.

This paper makes the case that this architecture, an expression of Afro-Brazilian identity, is not only a form of placemaking or repossession related to former oppression in Brazil, but also a purposeful statement of power and reclaimed identity through placemaking in Lagos. This study of Afro-Brazilian settlement in Lagos gives insight into who or what the returnees sought to align themselves with, in addition to critically analyzing Afro-Brazilian “return” to Lagos. The paper investigates the ways in which returnee identity is reflected in and influenced by architectural practice. Ultimately, the work utilizes the history of Afro-Brazilian return and its architectural evolution and influence in Lagos, to illustrate how Afro-Brazilians sought to create through this architecture that acted as a catalyst for the population’s economic and political success in Lagos’ society, a distinct expression of what it meant to be Afro-Brazilian in a new home.


Kangmin Kim

Institutional Affiliation: Seoul National University

Kangmin Kim received a B.A. in art history and minored in international relations at Seoul National University, South Korea. In 2021 she graduated with an M.A. in art history from the same university. Her M.A. thesis, “Revisiting the Art of Pen Varlen (1916–1990),” examines the multilayered identity of Pen Varlen, a Korean-Soviet academician in Leningrad. She is currently expanding her project by investigating migrant and ethnic minority artists in the Soviet Union and the United States. She is also interested in the relationship between marginalized subjects and the architectural spaces they inhabit or depict in artworks.

Paper Title: Revisiting the Art of Pen Varlen (1916–1990): The Migrant Identity of a Korean Soviet Artist

Abstract: Pen Varlen (1916–1990) was a Korean Soviet artist active during the 1940s to the 1980s at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts). A migrant and minority citizen, Pen took advantage of Soviet ideology, propaganda, and preconceptions about ethnic minorities to seek his place in Soviet mainstream culture. His tactics can be summed up in three points that are not mutually exclusive: first, faithful adherence to the conventions of Soviet academic painting and socialist realist principles; second, fashioning himself as a model minority citizen by assuming the role of cultural translator for the Soviet Union; third, advocating the Soviet propaganda of racial equality and inclusiveness.

Pen’s persistent adherence to academic conventions, even during the demise of socialist realism, can be understood in relation to his self-consciousness as a model minority citizen who abides by the rules, both in the society and the art world. What little divergence he made from the typical socialist realist painting appears in the subject matter—for instance, the depiction of North Koreans or Black students—and the insertion of seemingly exotic elements such as Korean inscriptions and chrysanthemums. Stylistically his oil paintings are rather conservative compared to the works of his contemporaries, and despite their technical excellence, have not received much attention in Soviet art history. His prints and drawings are slightly more revealing of his character. Previous scholarship on Pen has mostly focused on his Korean identity, thereby neglecting the assimilative efforts made by the artist. While this essay acknowledges that Pen retained his Korean identity to a certain degree, it attempts to depart from the conventional interpretations of his works, which associate the artist’s entire oeuvre solely with his Korean heritage and nostalgia.


Claudia Grego March

Institutional Affiliation: University of California, Santa Barbara

Claudia Grego March is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she specializes in twentieth-century Latin American and European art. Her dissertation examines the political and artistic networks established between Spain and Latin America during the Francoist dictatorship. Claudia has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships while at UCSB including the Albert & Elaine Borchard European Studies Fellowship for Dissertation Research and UCSB’s Humanities & Social Sciences Research Grant. She was selected as a member of the International Selection Program at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, where she obtained a master’s degree in Theory of Literature. She also received a master’s degree in Art History from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Paper Title: Painting The Revolution Beyond Borders: Antonio Saura, The Spanish Exile, and Cuba during The Francoist Dictatorship

Abstract: In 1940s Spain, the end of the Civil War (1936–1939) and the beginning of Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) triggered a massive exodus that impoverished significantly the Spanish cultural scene. Due to the regime’s brutal censorship and authoritarian repression, exile was one of the few avenues that Spanish avant-garde artists found to produce politically dissident art. In this paper, I bring to light the intellectual circuit that connected Cuba, France, and Spain during the 1960s, arguing that this transnational route became a decisive space for the configuration of an openly anti-Francoist Spanish avant-garde. Joining the support that French leftist intellectuals showed towards Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the early 60s, a nucleus of Spanish artists and writers who were exiled in Paris—including Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Arroyo, and José Martínez—started collaborating with Cuban cultural institutions, primarily Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas) in Havana. Among these personalities, the informalist painter Antonio Saura stood out due to his multiple and long trips to the island. In this paper, I argue that Saura’s sympathetic cooperation with Casa de las Américas allowed him to stage his anti-Francoist dissidence as a constitutive part of the anti-imperialist and Socialist campaign encouraged by Castro’s government. Saura’s participation in the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1968 was a decisive moment for the painter’s acquaintance with the Cuban revolutionary ideas, which he assimilated as the ideological foundation of his anti-Francoist art. By examining the paintings, murals, and lithographs that Saura produced and exhibited in Havana, as well as the numerous illustrations he published in Cuban magazines such as El Caimán Barbudo, Unión, or Signos, I explore how Saura created visual imagery that conflated the Spanish and Cuban realities into the same political fight and posed Cuban Socialism as an aspirational political model for the post-totalitarian Spanish future.


Jeannette Martinez

Institutional Affiliation: University of New Mexico

Jeannette is a first-generation Ph.D. student in the art history program at The University of New Mexico. Being of the Central American diaspora greatly influenced her interests in contemporary U.S. Latinx art. While this is Jeannette’s area of discipline, her research interests are on migrations, transnationalisms, landscape, memory, feminisms, processes of identity, and decolonial art histories. She researches, writes, and curates on the Central American diaspora by engaging with contemporary artists that navigate it. Jeannette’s main goal through academia and curatorial practices is to make known the stories of communities that have been marginalized and erased.

Paper Title: Finding Terruño: Landscape Photographs of Muriel Hasbun

Abstract: How does art serve as a way to create memory? How is it a contributor to the processes of identity-making? Salvadoran artist Muriel Hasbun has been finding answers to these questions for the past thirty years through her art. Born in El Salvador to a Salvadoran-Palestinian-Christian father and French-Polish-Jewish mother, Hasbun grew up with a multifaceted cultural, ethnic, and religious background that greatly informs her processes of identification. As a Salvadoran of Palestinian and Jewish heritage, Hasbun has come to understand herself through diasporic, transnational, and intergenerational histories in which exile and refuge recur through three different countries, three different moments in history, and three different parts of the world. Through a predominantly Salvadoran lens, Hasbun continuously is in search of finding her place within this three-tiered diasporic sensibility; discovering who she is the most pertinent subject matter in her art. While Hasbun’s journey to discovering the parts that make her is complex, what is clear in her art is her use of landscape as a vehicle to capture the intertwining threads of her past and how they make her present. By engaging with scholarship on diasporas, transnationalism, and generational silence, I analyze how Hasbun uses landscape as a metaphor for memory and identity-making in two of her artworks: Volcán de Izalco, Amén (1996) from the Santos y sombras | Saints and Shadows series and Le Mont Dore (1996) from the Protegida: Auvergne: Toi et Moi series. By shedding light on the deeper meanings behind Hasbun’s landscapes, I argue that these artworks are like transitional objects of Hasbun’s in her search for terruño, a commonly used term in El Salvador that refers to feeling a sense of home and belonging.


Matthew Mullane

Institutional Affiliation: University of Tokyo

Matthew Mullane is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Tokyo’s Tokyo College. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2019, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and taught at the University of Oregon. His forthcoming book project is a history of how the first world architecture history written in Japan was born out of the Japanese empire’s colonial push into Asia. At The University of Tokyo, he is also working on a new project theorizing the transnational dimensions of cutting-edge scientific observatories being built between Japan and the world.

Paper Title: Concrete and Currents: Shitamichi Motoyuki’s Images of Postcolonial Myth

Abstract: Over the past two decades the photographer Shitamichi Motoyuki (b. 1978) has dedicated himself to documenting the recalcitrant remains of the Japanese colonial empire. Through intensive fieldwork in Japan’s former colonies and at home, he has uncovered striking architectural hybrids including military batteries secretly turned into homes, batteries transformed into zoo enclosures, and colonial shrines meshed into glass and steel facades. These remains were physically hidden by East Asia’s massive postcolonial growth, but also conceptually hidden by the myths of the Japanese empire’s disappearance. Simultaneous with his study of the mutability of concrete and imperial memory, Shitamichi has also investigated the ways in which the myths of colonial history have shaped the way we understand climate change. He has documented sacred landforms carried on oceanic currents throughout the Pacific to show how older modes of mythmaking have been lost, depriving us of a language to meaningfully describe and narrate climate change. In this paper, I analyze how Shitamichi has used photography and film to unite two disparate time scales: the quick but violent years of the Japanese colonial empire and the comparatively longer and slower temporality of planetary change. I argue that the crux of these conjoined timelines is the mythmaking potential of architecture, be it the symbolic architectures of former empires, or the architecturalization of nature as a monument. As we collectively struggle to conceptualize global climate change, Shitamichi’s work highlights how existing, but obscured, histories can help us better understand such large-scale transformation.


Gabrielle Tillenburg

Institutional Affiliation: University of Maryland, College Park

Gabrielle Tillenburg is a second-year M.A./Ph.D. student studying modern and contemporary Caribbean art history at the University of Maryland. Her master’s thesis compares lens-based artists responding to U.S. occupations in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and Okinawa, Japan. From 2015 to 2020, she was the Exhibitions Coordinator at Strathmore. Her curatorial projects have included Soft Serve at Willow Street Gallery and Past Process at Strathmore. In 2021, she worked as the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Catto Intern under the Time Based Media Arts and Latino Art & History curatorial departments, and as the curatorial intern for the 2022 Outwin-Boochever Portrait Competition. Her work has been published in Artlines and Sequitur.

Paper Title: Landscape as Post-Military Cinema: Picturing Dispossession and (Re)possession

Abstract: During WWII, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the establishment of a naval base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, later named after the president as “Roosevelt Roads.” Following one of the most successful public protests against U.S. military occupation, a 2003 decision to shut a bomb testing range in Vieques also legislated the closure of Roosevelt Roads. By this time, the base had long been established not only as a site for ongoing military operations but as a quintessential American suburb for military families. To this day, approximately 17 years after its closing, the remains of distinctly American base architecture—a baseball stadium, a golf course, an American high school—are being slowly swallowed by indigenous tropical plant life. This paper examines a reclamation of this previously occupied land, documented by artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. In her 2014 video, Post-Military Cinema, she turns her camera onto the now-closed El Coqui Theater. Where military-base residents once occupied cinema seats, daylight projects the shadows of a growing Puerto Rican forest—now, a cinema made by the island, for the island. I argue that through a hyper-real approach, Muñoz’s landscape in Post-Military Cinema is not a backdrop for the action, but the cinematographer, protagonist, and audience at once. Through such use of landscape, Muñoz pictures the dispossession of Puerto Rican land by U.S. forces and the repossession of neo-colonial architecture by the land itself. Thus, Muñoz positions a new landscape-cinema as a critical framework for decolonial resistance. This study challenges notions of “American Art” and reflects on how settler-colonialism, via the creation of binary oppositions such as occupier and occupied, create liminal spaces from which the colonized landscape can resist through new forms of cinema and (re)possession, as demonstrated by Muñoz.


Tom Young

Institutional Affiliation: University of Warwick

Tom Young is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, researching the global history of lithographic printing. Prior to that, he was the project curator of the British Museum’s exhibition Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He received his Ph.D., M.Phil., and undergraduate degrees from the University of Cambridge. His first book, an art history of the East India Company’s nationalisation by the British state, is currently under review.

Paper Title: Revolutionary Women, Global Lithography, and the Diasporic Construction of Polish Identity following the November Uprising of 1830–1

Abstract: Between 1832 and 1837, the publisher Józef Straszewicz, an important member of the Polish political émigré community in Paris, released a series of lithographs depicting revolutionaries who fought in the November Uprising (1830–1), a national insurrection against Poland’s occupation by Tsarist Russia. Released simultaneously in France, Germany, and Italy, Straszewicz’s series canonized Poland’s martyrs using a globally popular print format. Lithography’s capacity to produce facsimiles of handwriting enabled the publisher to transfer copies of his sitters’ autographs beneath each of their portraits—coupling visual likeness with a demonstration of their agentic capacity to “sign” themselves in contemporary public culture. Consequently, Straszewicz’s series not only portrayed Poland’s revolutionaries for an international public sphere but in accordance with a print format that presented identity as rooted in the relationship between an agentic, embodied self and the discursive media in which individual crafts their public image.

This paper explores the gender politics surrounding Straszewicz’s inclusion of seven women within this portrait series, three of whom donned male clothing and fought on the revolutionary frontline. Narratives of Poland’s “warrior-women” underpinned national exceptionalism that reinforced elite, diasporic Polish identity, yet the publisher’s portraits lauded these women according to an international print format that was predominantly involved in the construction of middle-class, male, and politically liberal forms of selfhood within the public spheres of Western Europe and North America. Equally, the format’s popularity was coterminous with an explosion of illustrated publications seeking to classify or taxonomize national societies and racial differences, which counterpoised the agency and individuality crafted through autographed portraits against conventionalized ideas about the phrenology, physiognomy, or costumes of national and racial “types.” My paper would position Straszewicz’s portraits of revolutionary Polish women within these global dynamics in European print culture. It would argue that scholarship on the historical construction of Polish identity requires greater focus on the technical affordances and cultural histories of the media through which diasporic Poles translated nationally specific ideas about self, nation, and revolutionary struggle into an international public culture with its own, hegemonic distinctions of class, gender, and race.

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