HAA 0502 Special Topics Latin America - Art in Modern Latin America

This course considers major aesthetic developments in Latin America, from early twentieth-century avant-garde movements to recent contemporary projects. With the understanding that the modern construct of “Latin America” encompasses an area of tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity, we will survey a broad range of artistic practices throughout the region as well as major modern architectural projects in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. Particular attention will be paid to cases in which artists and architects worked in the service of governmental regimes—as in Mexican muralism in the 1920s and the construction of Brasília, a new national capital for Brazil, in the 1950s—as well as those cases in which artworks and artistic networks offered a means of challenging or subverting official repression. Beyond politics, this course will focus on the tensions—indigenous vs. cosmopolitan, urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor—and transnational dialogues that have informed the production and reception of art and architecture in the region.