Just before the academic year began in earnest, a cohort of graduate students met on Zoom for a three-day seminar focused on developing and practicing art historical methodologies centered in anti-racism, decoloniality and the close study of Afro-Latin American art and visual culture.
The seminars were supported by the UT Provost Office’s Seed Grants for Actions that promote Community Transformation, an initiative to enable members of the UT Austin campus community to lead projects that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Seminar funding was also provided by the Office of the Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Art History Lecture Series.
Organized by UT Art History faculty members Eddie Chambers, George Flaherty and Adele Nelson, the CLAVIS Critical Intervention: Afro-Brazilian & Afro-Caribbean Art and Visual Culture seminar invited a host of speakers, including Carla Acevedo Yates (curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Chasitie Brown (Art History PhD candidate, UT Austin), Christopher Cozier (Trinidad-based artist), Rosana Paulino (São Paulo-based artist), Phillip Townsend (Art History PhD candidate, UT Austin), and Rachel E. Winston (Black Diaspora Librarian, Benson Collection, UT Austin).
We asked a few of the participating students to respond to the seminar, how its content and focus impacted them and their work. The following responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Phillip Townsend
PhD candidate in Art History focused on Modern and Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora
The CLAVIS Critical Intervention: Afro-Brazilian & Afro-Caribbean Art and Visual Culture seminar allowed me to present my dissertation chapter on contemporary artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. I received valuable feedback from organizers and fellow attendees. Moreover, I gained valuable insight from guest speakers Winston, Yates, Paulino, and Cozier. Each offered new and expansive considerations about the “boundaries” between the Caribbean and Latin America—areas prominent in my scholarly and curatorial practice.
For example, Winston curated ephemera and materials from the Caribbean and Latin America to address the pervasive patterns of naming. Through the archivist's presentation, I learned how some institutions reinforce artificial borders around specific physical and ideological structures to control representation. In other words, how public-facing materials are used to foster myths about the racial demographics of particular countries and regions. Winston's assertations were supported by the presentation by Yates, who conceptualizes the Caribbean as extending beyond geographical borders to include shared and divergent histories and experiences. Many of these ideas she presented are the foundation for an exhibition focused on the art of the Caribbean.
In a similar manner, Paulino presented how she has blurred the boundaries between her art-making and pedagogical practices. As I work primarily on the politics of identity, it was generative to speak with her about race in Brazil and the ways it affects access, research and exposure. Cozier used many of his projects to address conventional readings of the Caribbean. The artist presented documentation of a performance that demonstrated a communal interest in art within an expansive urban landscape. The most compelling aspect of his presentation was his address of the Caribbean's sense of burden and belonging.
These considerations inspired new approaches to my current and future dissertation chapters and as well as my curatorial practice.
Maria Emilia Fernandez Nadurille
MA candidate in Art History focused on Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
As a second year Masters student and CLAVIS member, working in contemporary art from Latin America, taking this seminar was deeply influential for my own research. I am originally from Mexico, a country where, under the narrative of miscegenation, racism is not really examined or acknowledged, making it harder to dismantle. In that sense, this seminar helped me put into words what I already knew: that in many countries in Latin America we are very late in developing a critical framework for dealing with and talking about race, and that as an academic field we are very invested in whiteness. Over the course of three days, professors, guests and colleagues gifted me incisive reflections that I will carry forward in my own research. Who has the privilege of not asking these questions, of not being concerned with racism, discrimination, erasure, dispossession? Moreover, the critical discussions in the seminar have directly informed my thesis project as I look to learn more about the works of black and afro-indigenous artists working in Brazil today and their forms of resistance, their shared experiences in and against colonialism.
Aja Mujinga Sherrard
PhD candidate in Art History focused on Contemporary Art from the Black Atlantic
The three-day seminar on Afro-Brazilian and Afro Caribbean Art this past August is exactly the kind of immersive research experience I dreamed of when I applied to the graduate program at UT Austin. Like many of us in the seminar, I began my doctoral program in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the seminar also conducted a large portion of its programming virtually, the time we spent in-person exploring the Black Diasporic Archive collection at the Benson Latin American Collection was the first time I was able to meet a number of my professors and peers in person. In many ways, our first session felt like a welcome to campus: it set a strong, energizing, and optimistic tone for the coming academic year. A number of the peers with whom I attended the seminar have since become friends, and two of the professors who organized the seminar have accepted my invitation to serve on my dissertation committee. In terms of shaping my professional network here at UT, the seminar has been transformative.
More so than its social impact, it is the content of the seminar is what makes it stand out as a meaningful opportunity. The chance to meet Paulino and Cozier was particularly thrilling, especially as I have researched and written about Paulino’s work beforehand, and may include analysis of her work in my dissertation. As a Blanton Fellow this year, I learned from Yates’ curatorial work in preparation for what will no doubt become a landmark exhibition of Caribbean and Latin American artwork. Among the artists Yates discussed is the artist, Firelei Baez, around whom my dissertation will focus. Yates’ comments regarding Baez’s work—and some of the gaps in the scholarship surrounding Baez to date, are especially relevant to my work moving forwards.
As my work engages systems of race in the Americas, addressing the construction of blackness across the American diaspora in contrast with the construction of Indigeneity and whiteness in these spaces, the writing of Tatiana Flores and James Clifford, whose texts were assigned for the seminar, have proved particularly instructive.
In my experience, any work with which we have deeply engaged becomes part of our intellectual reserves, and emerges in connection to future work in sometimes surprising ways. Although some of the connections between the rest of this seminar content and my current and future scholarship are not clear to me yet, I am certain that this meaningful and compelling experience will continue to percolate through my work moving forwards.