This paper argues the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) (1921-present) use of imagery from the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1977) to create a false reality to support their political goals. It focuses on how socialist realist propaganda posters produced under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976) changed with the ever-evolving political state of Communist China until Mao’s death in 1976. To support this argument, I will analyze the print The People’s Commune is Good, Happiness Will Last for Ten Thousand Years which depicts China’s society as bountiful and prosperous to reinforce Chairman Mao’s long-term goal to rectify the Chinese Communist Party and build an industrialized, self-reliant country. I examine the progression of the Chinese Communist Party from the initial Sino-Soviet alliance to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution to contextualize the political and societal changes reflected in these propaganda posters. I argue that these posters, with their images and texts, reflect the political state of Communist China characterized by false realities, subtle violence, and ideological messaging. From the utopian themes of the Great Leap Forward to the more aggressive, violent themes of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong used propaganda posters to secure his image as a national hero who liberated China and led the country to a greater, more progressive future.

This paper examines the intersection of language, identity, and cultural representation in the work of Xu Bing, with a focus on his pieces Book from the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy Classroom. Using Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan’s essay “Racist Love” as a theoretical lens, it explores how Xu Bing’s art reflects and critiques the “dual personality” experienced by Chinese Americans due to historical discrimination and assimilation. Chin and Chan argue that Chinese Americans are confined by stereotypes, either as perpetual foreigners reliant on white acceptance or as “handicapped natives” alienated from their heritage. Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky embodies this duality, featuring illegible Chinese-like script that renders it disconnected from both Chinese and American audiences, much like the fragmented identity of Chinese Americans described in “Racist Love.” Conversely, Square Word Calligraphy Classroom synthesizes Chinese and English elements, offering a way to reconcile these cultural divides by crafting a unique hybrid visual language. By engaging with the dynamics of language as a tool for shaping identity and power, Xu Bing’s work extends Chin and Chan’s critique, addressing the alienation and erasure faced by Chinese Americans. This paper argues that Xu Bing’s art not only reflects the disorienting experience of diaspora but also proposes a new framework for cultural identity.

My presentation examines contemporary Chinese portraiture through the works of Li Jin (b. 1958), Yu Hong (b. 1966), and Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963), exploring how their art navigates the interplay between individual expression and collective experience during China’s rapid transformation in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries, shaped by the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the Reform and Opening-Up policies (1978). Drawing on autotheory and Jacob Burckhardt’s theory of individualism, I interpret their figurative works as more than realistic depictions—positioning them as reflections of personal insights, social identities, and lived realities, while presenting the artists as witnesses and chroniclers of societal change.

The analysis highlights how these artists blend traditional Chinese techniques, such as Xieyi and ink, with Western influences like Renaissance altarpieces, framing their practices as forms of cultural exchange. Themes of alienation, materialism, and self-realization reveal how their works reflect the evolving relationship between personal agency and cultural dynamics. Through self-portraits, group portraits, and intergenerational depictions, the artists expose the intricate connections between individuals, communities, and societal contexts.

Their works transcend historical documentation, addressing contemporary issues such as disconnection and the challenges of capitalism in a globalized world. By balancing heritage with innovation, these portraits foster a deeper understanding of Chinese society and its intersection with global narratives, serving as powerful reflections of culture, memory, and transformation. Future research could examine whether portraiture transcends sociocultural constraints, facilitates global cultural exchange, or challenges traditional subject-object dynamics. Investigating new frameworks for portraiture may deepen our understanding of how it connects personal and collective identities, offering fresh perspectives on art, identity, and cultural reconstruction in an interconnected world.

The Superflat’s global debut in 2001 launched Takashi Murakami onto the international art scene, making the artist and his company, Kaikai Kiki, synonymous with the movement. Murakami translated the artistic and cultural cache of his 2001 exhibition, Superflat, into monetary success, thus cementing his legacy as one of the most famous contemporary Japanese artists in modern history. However, other Superflat artists and their work, namely Aya Takano, dispel the idea that the Superflat, or the broader corpus of contemporary Japanese art, is monolithic and uniform in its artistry. As an early member that was and continues to be strongly affiliated with the Superflat, Takano and her art illustrate how gender shapes the world-building inherent within Superflat art, despite being grounded in the same art and historical legacy of Japan. The core question examined by this paper addresses what nuances gender differences can create within the same movement, and what exactly these discrepancies elucidate not only about Superflat, but contemporary Japanese art and more broadly, the commercialization of creativity inherent to the international art world today. Drawing from a diverse body of material and visual culture from the movement, including prints, high fashion clothing collaborations, monumental sculptures, and paintings, this investigation of two Superflat artists explores a nexus of historical trauma, sexuality, representations and relationships to the body, and the commodification of one’s own identity.

This presentation focuses on four works by contemporary artist Cassils (they/them), considering how they use photography in those works and beyond. Cassils is well known for their performance pieces which regularly deal with topics regarding trans people. With trans-identity and trans-living taking center stage in their works, Cassils employs multiple themes and strategies, all of which highlight the importance of photography in their work. The first strategy used is Cassils’ use of homage to insert themselves within a feminist timeline. Cassils very frequently references works by feminist women artists such as Eleanor Antin and Lynda Benglis, seen specifically in Cassils’ own works: Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture and Advertisement: Homage to Benglis, respectively. Second, Cassils uses photography to document and display their live performances in creative ways which can be seen in Becoming an Image and in one of their more recent works, Movements. Scholars such as Peggy Phelan believe that live performance cannot be experienced through documentation only, but I argue that Cassils’ Becoming an Image and Movements prove otherwise. Lastly, many of Cassils’ works display the malleability of body and temporality, which can also be seen in Becoming an Image and Cuts. While Cuts focuses on the malleability of only the human body, Becoming an Image expands on that and shows how the malleability of a material such as clay can be representative of the body. Photography becomes a tool to document and provide static moments in time within the ever-changing malleability of body and material. My research on Cassils aims to tie these three themes together using the analysis of photography in queer performance.

This paper, drawing insights from art history and media studies, argues that the artist Evelin Stermitz uses the novel medium of avatar art to disrupt traditional ways of representing the female body. In my analysis I examine Stermitz’s exhibition, the World of Female Avatars (2005), as a case study which exemplifies this usage of avatar art. The exhibition is a unique confluence of early 2000s internet culture combined with the grassroots effort of women on the internet. The leading artist, Evelin Stermitz, utilizes assemblage as an art making process to create avatars out of raw images women sent to her over the internet, and the avatars that Stermitz crafts both modify and circumvent representations of the female body. Using Stermitz and her World of Female Avatars as a case study, I argue that the women employing avatars in these digital spaces disrupt traditional ways of viewing femininity.

I define an avatar as a digital representation of a human user, which may or may not be representative of the user, that facilitates interaction with other users, entities, or the environment, whether it be on an online forum space like Facebook or a virtual world such as Second Life. Avatar art raises questions about whether people can ever hope to escape representation through the internet, and if so, what this digital frontier may look like. My research also probes how audiences interact with avatar art, which is often solely found through videos on the internet, and how late twentieth century concepts such as Donna Haraway’s cyborg relate to the hyper-contemporary twenty-first-century avatar. In my analysis, I utilize mixed frameworks and methodologies such as feminist, queer, and disability theory, along with digital humanities techniques such as online archives to further elucidate how these artists leverage the avatar.

Technology has become a part of modern life, easing our way through everyday tasks, fomenting accessibility in the public sphere, and facilitating communications, to name a few of the positives of its existence. Regardless of the constraints often put into the machine’s usage, there have been, throughout history, artists have shown interested in the use of technology both as a tool, and as an inspiration. As society progresses, more challenges must be confronted with the use of technological advancements, as they have been used both for the good of the people, and for some inhumane reasons. The purpose of the research presented is to find connections between the historical context and art performances that were influenced by the coming of these advancements, utilizing the book 1984 by George Orwell as a reference to follow where the line between fiction and reality became a non-existent at the beginning of the twenty first century. The works of Andy Warhol, Stelarc, Eva and Franco Mattes, Marie Sester, and Nam June Paik will be discussed to show the different approaches New Media Art can have, and how they reflect on issues like surveillance and the role of the machine in the arts.

There is a philosophical concern in our current social climate surrounding the rise of generative artificial intelligence and how that has affected, and largely implanted itself, into the patchwork of how art, especially digital art, is consumed and created. We seem to have a drive and want to create technologies that can replicate ourselves, just look at the resources pooled into the research of artificial general intelligence. However, in the process, we are not only losing the “cultivation of moral skills,” or moral deskilling, a term coined by philosopher Shannon Vallor, but also the criticality which allowed for these technologies to even be used by artists. I argue that these phenomena are not exclusive to AI, and not even caused by it, instead it is in the emergence of these technologies, the reason for their very existence, their nature, that fuels these concerns. It stems from the innate reproducibility of photography and film, which has made these mediums incredibly useful in a commercial setting, their ability to disseminate visual information accurately and quickly contributing to its success; however, its acknowledgement as an artistic medium was on shaky ground. It had to be reclaimed from its original purpose, as a means of scientific and historical documentation, and given its own voice, the ability to critically engage with social and political issues, among other subjects, through a medium that is meant to serve those very systems. The artistic value of photography and other such mediums is not so much dependent on the aesthetics then, rather defined by the consciousness of the artist, the moral awareness of humans, something that is impossible with AI generated art. This commercialization and mindless oversaturation of art, a term that is used very liberally here, has concerning implications for the very roots of artistic practice.

Reclamation is the power to self-define. Tactilism is a term I’m recoining to contextualize within the twenty first century context highlighting the “tactile” relationship between digital culture and human agency informed by surveillance capitalist theory. Our social, financial, educational, and political mobility are now directly linked to our digital presences more than ever. The intimacies of the internet are what I closely look at within my thesis while bridging the art historical relevance through works by artists such as Stephanie Dinkins, Trevor Paglen, and Hyphen Labs.

One corner of my research touches on liberating cultural data within the digital age, in an artwork I have chosen by Stephanie Denkins, Binary Calculations are Inadequate. This art project began as a website but further developed into an app that looks to dissect the exclusionary nature of artificial intelligence with elements of her own visual art practice embedded to represent the various parts of our social histories that are relevant to us based on questions fed into the platform. Other artists like Trevor Paglen create work about the intersection of human agency and digital culture, with a specific look at his artwork entitled Digital Autonomy. It prompts questions of privacy and democratic action to protect ourselves from the corruption of Big Tech and frames technology as a site of potential resistance and liberation. In looking at the ways in which we can create a framework of commitment fluidity within the digital realm, scholars such as Melanie Hoff provide a template called the Digital Love languages– communion, consent, refusal, and renewal, which serve as pillars for tactilism as a method for encountering digital literacy. In nurturing and protecting our physical and virtual spheres, we can create a new structure of being that is completely stratified to grow the world we want to live in.

My paper focuses on questions of female power and agency in representations of imperial women in the Qing Dynasty, during the seventeenth century, as compared to depictions of “Haipai” modern women of Shanghai during the early twentieth century. My visual sources include paintings of concubines located within the sumptuous interiors of the Forbidden City palace, which were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor for his personal enjoyment, as well as chromolithograph posters of modern Shanghai women, created for a mass audience of new modern urbanites. While using visual analysis and an assortment of scholarly sources, I consider how representations of women changed between the imperial and modern periods in China, how those representations served particular audiences and what they tell us about female power in these different times and places.

On a global scale, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographers expressed concerns regarding how to elevate the medium to the status of fine art. Pictorialism provided one stylistic approach wherein photographers sought to achieve this exaltation through mimicking alternate media in both style and subject matter. In Japan and China, the Sino-Japanese literati tradition was fundamental to this objective as pictorialist photographers in both nations looked to this canon to rework revered scholarly paintings and the concurrent aesthetic discourse to rationalize their artistic processes and imbue their images with lofty meanings. Although the iterative and chronological processes of Pictorialism’s development in China and Japan materialized in varying and unique ways, the shared literati tradition arguably upheld the purported status of photography as a veritable art form in both nations. Instead of perpetuating the art historical myth of unilinear development, which often underscores the primacy of Western models, I aim to approach these photographs as complex amalgamations of past and present that asserted their autonomy precisely through their hybrid performances. In applying a comparative approach to the manifestations of literati ideals in Japanese and Chinese Pictorialism, I explore a series of questions regarding the mediations between domestic tradition and global modernity within this photographic movement. In doing so, I seek to demonstrate that the literati presence in both Chinese and Japanese pictorialist photography was not the result of merely drawing upon a static, distant past to reaffirm traditional character; rather, I argue, that it was part of a deliberate synthesis of broad temporal and geographical visualities that was deeply intertwined with the cultivation and display of cultural capital.

Kalighat paintings emerged in Calcutta’s artistic consciousness during the mid-nineteenth century. This style of painting was created in response to a political dichotomy emerging in colonized India that was then reflected in the art. Patuas who had previously created larger, idealistic scroll paintings of Hindu mythology and colonial Indian life adapted to shorter and abstracted paintings, made in large quantities for commercial buyers of both European and Indian heritage. The Kalighat style emerged at the genesis of Bengali modernism, when artists were starting to break away from colonial styles, such as the Company style, as well as romanticized and exotic scenes of Indian landscapes. Instead, Kalighat painters adopted a technique that practically eliminated the need for a background, honing in on the subjects relevant to the viewer. The production and style of the Kalighats, along with the widespread audience, made them a revolutionary form of artistic expression in nineteenth-century Kolkata. In my paper, I argue that the reduction of background and idealistic naturalism are not only a response to the fast-paced production of the paintings, but a response to the chasm between Indian traditionalist styles, idealistic colonial styles, and an emerging modernism of the new Indian identity. Kalighat painters represented both classical and contemporary subjects, ranging from depictions of deities to babus and other nineteenth-century individuals. I explore the nuanced creation of the Kalighat religious depictions through a series of paintings, though diving into one specific painting entitled Krishna and Radha, one of the holiest couples in Bengali Hindu tradition reinterpreted by a nineteenth-century Indian patua.

One of the lasting examples of performance in India is the art of dance, one that goes back thousands of years. Throughout the progression of the Mughal Dynasty, a rich manuscript culture developed, one that would produce limited representations of women performing kathak in the royal court of Akbar. Kathak is a variation of dance which is commonly associated with performative expression and storytelling most commonly in Northern India and parts of Pakistan. Manuscripts produced during the Mughal period provide a glance into the ways in which women contributed to artistic performative practices. With the development of photography, colonialism in the form of the British Raj directly impacted the ways in which performing women were represented and often decontextualized the art of dance in confounding ways. Photographers from far and wide traveled to India to photograph their own visions of culture and essentially limit its understanding to still and artificial frames. The film industry in Mumbai, commonly referred to as “Bollywood,” is known for its choreographic sequences, many of which contain kathak and countless other choreographic influences. Following independence from Great Britain and the Partition of India and Pakistan, many of the women who had become experts in the art of dance would work to develop the cinematic foundations for “Bollywood,” essentially reclaiming the art that they were discouraged from practicing during the British Raj. In this paper, I will discuss two Mughal manuscripts, two photographs, and two film performances, and relate them to the ways in which representations of women dancers have been manipulated and, according to several writers like Pallabi Chakravorty, Mekhala Sengupta, and Sarah Rahman Niazi, “transformed” to fit the standards of those in power. I have consulted sources on the history of dance in India, art history, feminism, political science, photography and visual media to formulate this paper.

In the canon of global art history, scholars of South Asia have largely neglected Bangladesh’s narrative within the field. Some of these missing pieces of history have to do with the effects of colonialism and ongoing sociopolitical conflict. However, the modern plight of the Bengali people is not a recent development. Their economic and social struggle did not start in 1952, when the Bengali Language Movement, a political movement geared towards the recognition of the Bangla language, appeared as a symbol of a separatist Bengali nationalism. Nor did it develop in 1971, when Bangladesh gained independence from West Pakistan, initially emerging as East Pakistan. Rather, Bangladesh’s plight was initiated by a historically overlooked event known as the Bengal Famine of 1943, a massive catastrophe that claimed three million lives. At the time, Zainul Abedin (1914-1976), a Bangladeshi art teacher, produced a series of historical “famine sketches” in response to the unspeakable atrocities he witnessed unfolding before his eyes. This paper focuses on selections from his sketches. Abedin’s sketches use rough, texturized linework, and a bare, almost unfinished, composition to depict the strife and visceral hunger of the Bengali people. Above all, Abedin’s famine sketches act as “exposé” pieces, revealing the negligence of Churchill’s policies toward the South Asian colonies and how South Asian history has been overshadowed by the broader legacy of colonialism.

Widely known for his sumptuous Indian wedding clothing, designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s New York West Village store opening in 2022 signals his recent expansion into the international luxury market. His 25th Anniversary Show in Mumbai this January encapsulates this trajectory. Sabyasachi achieves luxury status through a focus on Indian craftsmanship and curated aesthetics that evoke precolonial and colonial India. Through handwoven textiles, repeated Bengal tiger iconography, and opulent “living museum” retail spaces, Sabyasachi invites consumers to experience nostalgia for a bygone era. The Bengal tiger is Sabyasachi’s “house insignia,” his iconic brand motif, seen as golden emblems on handbags, clothing, and jewelry. The store decor also includes a menagerie-like display of animal sculptures, with taxidermy peacocks and greylag geese displayed above clothing racks. Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher’s Picturing the Indian Tiger: Imperial Iconography in the Nineteenth Century and Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age offer insights into how tigers and menageries during the British Raj were part of the colonial project. Although animal references may evoke their exotic, natural habitats, tigers, specifically, are endangered and rarely seen in natural settings because of hunting or ‘shikar’ expeditions related to the colonial period. Princely rulers in India widely practiced tiger hunting and placed themselves near them. The tradition resonated with the British, who practiced tiger hunting and wanted to “tame” the rulers remaining in India, as almost half of India was nominally ruled by the princely states during the British colonial rule. Sabyasachi is deeply connected to India’s past, with an aspiration of reclaiming it for contemporary audiences in South Asia, the diaspora, and the global luxury market. Sabyasachi’s use of the Bengal tiger icon resonates with this dual symbolism—exotic and endangered, tamed yet wild.

During his Haute Couture debut in January 2023, Robert Wun presented Fear, a collection that traverses the fearful/fearless binary: from challenging the fear of damaging high fashion garments to presenting the gore and horror associated with blood, surgeries, and bandages. Among these designs was a yellow ensemble called The Georgie Raincoat. Wun’s Instagram post revealed the reference to be Georgie Denbrough, one of the characters in Stephen King’s It (1986) and the two film adaptations by Andrés Muschietti (2017 and 2019). Many fashion magazines promoted the same reading, going so far as labelling Wun a horror couturier. His other label, the first Hong Kong couturier, is seemingly not represented in this collection, especially when one compares Wun’s designs to those of Chinese couturiers Guo Pei and Xiong Ying. However, through a visual analysis of The Georgie Raincoat, stills from the It films, and images of protest art from both the 2014 and 2019 protests in Hong Kong, I argue that Robert Wun not only references his cultural heritage, but directly engages in a local artistic practice of employing pop culture references to make political art that would be easily recognizable.

Mariana Yampolsky’s 1947 linocut print An Attack on a Train Directed by a Priest differs in subject matter from Yampolsky’s oeuvre by depicting a violent scene in the middle of a skirmish, as opposed to her typical rural and domestic scenes of farm and campesino life. An Attack on a Train Directed by a Priest shows the complexities of war and conflict, highlighting the fervor of revolution and the toll it has on civilians. Through a visual and social art history analysis, this essay seeks to assess how this print depicts the experiences of marginalized groups and common people. By examining Mariana Yampolsky’s career, her connection to the Taller de Gráfica Popular, and the Estampas de La Revolución Mexicana portfolio as a whole, this paper places An Attack on a Train Directed by a Priest in a broader cultural and art historical context.

The work contains a multilayered narrative, initially appearing celebratory due to its use of revolutionary symbols and unified compositional structure. However, a darker tale of religious manipulation and exploitation during the Cristero Rebellion, as well as the TGP’s tendency to simplify history to construct narratives that fit an idea of a monolithic rural class becomes evident. In her other works for the Estampas de La Revolución Mexicana collection, Yampolsky portrays scenes of hope and joy within the context of rebellion, but here, she illustrates a dark and brutal image that does not align with her other work. However, the context behind An Attack on a Train Directed by a Priest reveals that the print comments on the experiences of civilians during revolutions and criticizes the ways rural populations can be swept into ideological movements. Ultimately, the print connects to Yampolsky’s broader portfolio through her commitment to portraying the hardships and experiences of the underclasses.

Between 1946 and 1966, Colombia underwent a period of severe sociopolitical unrest and bipartisan violence known as “La Violencia.” During this period, artist Débora Arango (1907-2005) sought to bring awareness to the brutality of this time, documenting and interpreting injustices through her art. Her work criticized the social and political realities of her time through the lens of the common people and their daily lives. She was shunned by her peers and censored by the government due to the sociocultural context of her time and the values of Colombian society in the 1940s.

Arango’s challenges of social norms and activism addressed the violence of the period. Her willingness to depict gruesome scenes and her style have led some to equate her work with that of Frida Kahlo. Unlike Kahlo, however, Arango remains unknown and largely unstudied outside of Colombia and the Spanish language. Understanding and studying her work and its impact can further the understanding of the role of women artists during the twentieth  century in Latin America. My analysis of Gaitan and Masacre del 9 de Abril will emphasize Arango’s efforts to push back against the inaccessible systems and social contexts of the time.

In 1979, dictator Augusto Pinochet lorded over Chile with an iron grip. The socialist policies of his predecessor, Salvador Allende, came crashing down during his rule, leaving children and families impoverished and struggling with malnutrition. Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña and her allied artists at the Chilean Colectivo de Canciones de Arte (CADA), demonstrated international solidarity as they led artistic demonstrations in Chile, Colombia, and Canada. Vicuña in particular chose to demonstrate her solidarity with the struggling Colombian lower class by replicating the contaminated milk supply of a Colombian dairy who mixed their product with white paint in order to turn a larger profit. In turn, they were responsible for the deaths of at least 70 children, who were poisoned by the toxic material. Vicuña’s demonstration mobilized this image of a glass of ‘milk’ wrapped in a red string. Vicuña also surrounded herself in poetry that she had written in sidewalk chalk, which drew parallels between the milk of a cow and the spilled blood of the Colombian people. Then, she pulled on the red string and spilled the ‘milk’ of the cow on the sidewalk, capturing her entire performance on film.

While a sociopolitical reading of this piece regarding class is clearly aligned with Vicuña’s original intention, interpretation is problematized by considering the gendered symbols at play. Calling on Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of architectural excess, the gendered implications of Vicuña’s material choices may be understood in close consortium with the piece’s goals to communicate the dangers of egregious capitalist behaviors in Colombia. Vicuña’s representation of milk has inherently feminine implications. At its point of origin, breast milk is produced and owned by the same person: the mother. Its sole purpose is nourishment, putting it at odds with dominant capitalist political sentiment in Colombia.

Addressing the historical issues of national identity and social history in Latin American countries is one of the themes expressed by its contemporary artists today. Two artists striving to confront these issues through their creative endeavors in Colombia are Beatriz González and Juan Manuel Echavarría. Both artists convey their country’s history through their own uniquely styled art forms. González highlights socio-political subjects featured in the news media using humor and irony, while Echavarría expresses his frustration mostly as metaphors for the breakdown of Colombia’s society by concealing a reaction or experience in a beautiful image. Both artists actively engage with Colombian politics, violence, and social history by addressing the question of what is Colombian and how can its past be remembered.

Colombia has had some of the highest numbers of desaparecidos (disappearances) primarily seen when the violent acts from the wars and cartels shifted from brutality to more discreet acts of disappearing the bodies. In this form of human absenting, the victims simply vanish. There is no recognition that a human life has been lost; this makes the deaths ungrieveable. Artists like González and Echavarría are now demanding justice, although they know there will never be any legal recourse. Recognizing that Colombia has no censorship, violent images are exploited causing desensitization. Substitute imagery in their works convey the message of absence, and both artists metaphorically achieve this messaging by recognizing the endless killings. They embody how to mourn the losses through their individual art allowing a cultural format to express tragic loss through social history. By visually telling these stories, they honor the victims whose souls are now and will forever be etched in the memory of their fellow countrymen as symbols of their national heritage, in hopes to never to be forgotten.

Wanda Pimentel was a young activist and artist when the Fifth Brazilian Republic was founded in 1964 after President João Goulart was deposed and exiled in a military coup d’état supported by the United States. The period of dictatorial rule would last until 1985 and was defined by state violence, censorship, mass arrests of political opposition, and the curtailing of civil rights. Institutional repression occurred throughout Brazilian society, but women like Pimentel struggled under the yoke of both dictatorial and patriarchal coercion. State oppression engendered a cultural reaction to subjective despair through the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Conservative aspects of psychoanalysis, rooted in Freud’s negative attitude towards Bolsheviks and women, facilitated the flourishing of his theories under the dictatorship. However, artists like Pimentel utilized the contemporary cultural discourse of psychoanalysis and its impact on radical artistic traditions to portray private scenes of domestic life imbued with the dreamlike quality of psychoanalysis. She creates scenes teeming with anxiety and sexual iconography recognizable in their domesticity: hair dryers, bathroom faucets, and bedsheets. This paper explores artistic abstraction as a site of phenomenological resistance to patriarchal and authoritarian oppression in the “Involvement” and “Entanglement” series produced by Wanda Pimentel in 1968. The radical abstraction of Pimentel’s interior scenes illuminates the violence and sexual coercion undergirding the exploitation of domestic labor and patriarchal social organization. Understanding the nexus of artistic production and experience as a contested site of social subversion will be imperative to developing a robust methodology of political resistance capable of creating meaningful change in the contemporary sociopolitical climate.

The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.) emerged during a period of political upheaval in Santiago, Chile in 1979 as a performance art group. The political environment was central to the founding of the group as the artists sought to create social change and generate imagined realities for Chile in the 1980s. C.A.D.A. explored memory, fear, hierarchy and elitism, false uniformity, and attempts by Chile’s totalitarian government to establish national culture and identity. In this work, I argue two performance actions, Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) and Ay Sudamérica (1981) were influenced by and directly respond to government attitudes enacted in the 1978 Amnesty Law and 1980 Constitutional project. I rely on the perspectives outlined in C.A.D.A.’s foundational document and illustrate how C.A.D.A.’s performance art deployed precise post-modern techniques which sought to generate collective remembrance experiences and expose histories concealed by the Amnesty Law and Constitutional project. 

Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) is interpreted as a parody of Chilean milk distribution policy with the goal of reminding people of the pre-coup anti-poverty aspirations. In Ay, Sudamérica, (1981), pamphlets were dropped like bombs to imitate the violent coup d’état. I examine how C.A.D.A. used covert and figurative language and publicly reproduced historical events to challenge popular amnesia in a period of censorship, repression, and political violence. Consistent across both pieces is the use of direct audience engagement which converted recipients of C.A.D.A’s art actions into active participants able to then engage in political action and creative thinking in service of Chilean democratization; their work operates using anti-authoritarian techniques to engage collective remembrance experiences that challenge an authoritarian attempt to dominate memory.

This paper explores the relationship between societal attitudes of hopelessness, ambivalence, and exile in post-Chávez Venezuela and the work of three contemporary Venezuelan artists—Ana Alenso, Juan José Olivarría, and Luis Molina-Pantín—through both aesthetic and geopolitical lenses. Backdropping formal analyses with the sociopolitical shifts induced by the Bolivarian Revolution, I seek to develop connections between the methodologies of the artworks and the ongoing mass emigration, hyperinflation, and humanitarian struggle. Since 1999, the year Hugo Chávez became president, the government has garnered support through the falsification of a collective identity, utilizing Simón Bolívar as their main figure, and effectively obscured their corruptive activities and overdependence on oil. This lack of transparency and consequential sense of disorientation informs many of the artworks analyzed. Alenso is a conceptual artist, working primarily in sculpture and sound, whose projects examined in the paper interrogate the “hiddenness” of the petrostate, or the oil economy. After analyzing her works, the paper moves to a painting by Olivarría that portrays a ceremonial surfacing of Simón Bolívar’s coffin held by Chávez. Lastly, the text traverses Molina-Pantín’s inscriptions of everyday realities otherwise excluded from history through investigating his use of found objects and images. Though executed in different forms, the artists have worked to explore the dialectic of hope and oblivion, centering themes of historical memory, resource death, and abandonment in their practices. The examination of such practices offers unique insight into both the contemporary Venezuelan question of leaving or staying and the universal question of whether or not “leaving” and “staying” truly exist.

This paper explores the synergy created by Venezuelan contemporary artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Physichromie series. Through careful evaluation and analysis of the artist’s artworks, interviews, and the ICAA database, I explore the various ways Cruz-Diez incorporates synergy through a cognitive interaction and participation between the viewer, artist, and material. Using basic geometric shapes and simple panes, he highlights color as the main facet. Playing with light and space, Cruz-Diez guides the viewer in a reclamation of approachable, nondiscriminatory, and digestible art. Physichromie showcases the process of dematerialization and redefinition of art inclusivity for all viewers, removing limitations placed upon by traditional artistic agendas. The plasticity that physically and metaphorically embodies Physichromie is a result from his dematerialization of conventional art traditions and primitive re-materialization into universal elements. The optical sensations created by color, light, and space transforms the viewer’s perception and experience with the piece. Physichromie is uniquely observed through the individual’s associations, memories, emotions, and experiences with color. The sustaining interaction of viewer participation, reignites and redefines art to each individual. The open compliance between the space and emotive properties created through color showcases synergy. This cultivated connectivity is timeless and accessible, promoting universal understanding and exploration of innate human emotions. The innovative principles of Physichromie cements its longevity, with its combination of previous elementary concepts and use of current technologies, to create a new modern future for contemporary art.

The issue my project addresses is understanding bordered relationships, specifically the U.S. and México border and the border between man and woman, masculinity and femininity. Its purpose is to investigate these trans relationships and be critical of bordered systems that exist within political, social, and geographical realms. If colonial borders are shaped without cuir people in mind, then those borders end up trapping cuir folks in an endless loop of finding home, support, and liberation – stuck in between. By reviewing the written and doodled theories of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Nepantla, which describes an in-between state of existence, I introduce a new parallel term of understanding which elicits simultaneity, Ambes. The approach used collages personal poems, stories, theories, reflections, within its frame, that suggest crossing academic borders to offer alternative methods of knowledge seeking. The outcome is not entirely conclusive, accepting multiple truths in the chaos of Ambes, which presents a cuir way of knowing and existing. It offers a new logic that directly opposes binary borders and seeks Truth through pursuing dismantlement, existence, and creation. The implications of The Border Problem exist beyond the U.S./México and Man/Woman borders. Every border which separates causes irreparable rifts within a multitude of scales. Ambes calls out to bordered people and opens their eyes to another way.