Research Interests
- 19th and 20th century histories of Latin American art and architecture (Brazil focus)
- Institutional and exhibition histories; histories of collecting and display
- Histories of race and the built environment
- Histories of popular art and architecture
- Political and intellectual history
- Regionalism and Nationalism
- Material cultural studies
- Politics of space
- Decolonial theory
Education
BA, Honours in History, University of British Columbia
MA, Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Museum Studies, New York University
Bio
Pilar Dirickson Garrett is a doctoral student in the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century art and architectural histories of Latin America. Pilar's research interests include institutional and exhibition histories, histories of architectural modernism and its pluralities, intellectual history, material cultural studies, and politics of race and the built environment.
Her dissertation project, titled “The Making of Race, Space, and Region in Collections and Exhibitions of Brazilian Popular Art, 1930-1965,” takes a material approach to consider the emergence of museums and exhibitions of Brazilian popular art from the 1930s through the 1960s for their involvement in co-constitutive understandings of spatial, racial, and national modernity in the interwar and immediate post-war periods. By observing the discursive overlaps of two dominant ideological movements concerned with the collection and exhibition of Brazilian material culture (specifically material culture that was understood to be agentive in their original contexts of use), her dissertation examines how folkloric understandings of a “national past” came into tension with regional modernist aspirations as advanced by local museums of popular art in the Brazilian Northeast. Central to her research is the recognition of buildings and material things as both products and producers of social meaning and as agents that have the capacity to inform asymmetrical relationships of power through their construction and politics of display.
Pilar holds an MA in Latin American Studies and Museum Studies from New York University and a BA in History with Honors from the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship has been supported by a Graduate School Continuing Fellowship (Summer 2024) as well as by a 2023 Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, awarded through the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art.