Framing Latin America: Brazilian Art and the Formation of the Regional Canon (1970-2020)

FAIN: HB-289004-23

Camila Maroja
California State University, Fullerton Foundation (Fullerton, CA 92831-3547)

Research and writing leading to a book about the Latin American art canon, and the important role played by Brazilian artists and critics in creating this canon, from the 1970s to the present.

This book-length project examines the construction of the current canon of Latin American art since the 1970s. It challenges the conventional view that the regional canon that came to be showcased when major US-European museums began to actively display Latin American art was part of a so-called “global art turn” in which mainstream institutions expanded western modernism to integrate peripherical areas. In contrast, based on extensive archival research, this analysis argues that today’s prevalent canon of Latin American art was largely a creation of Brazilian artists and critics that had been in the making since the 1970s. By closely tracing the genealogy of the recent Latin American art boom and the local intelligentsia’s contribution to that canon, it demonstrates that the impact of distinctively Latin American thought in prevailing discourses of art history has been largely unacknowledged and unjustly undervalued.