University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The trouble with Radical Women: anti-Blackness, Latinidad, and contemporary curating

(USC Thesis Other)

The trouble with Radical Women: anti-Blackness, Latinidad, and contemporary curating

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

The Trouble with Radical Women:
Anti-Blackness, Latinidad, and Contemporary Curating

by

Bianca M. Morán

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROKSI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
CURATORIAL PRACTICE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 2020

ii
Acknowledgements

To Paloma: Thank you for being my guiding light and for pushing me to be the best version of
myself. I love you endlessly and I am beyond proud to be your mother. This is for you.

I would like to thank the faculty at USC in the MA program in the Roski School of Art and
Design. Karen Moss was and is a gracious, patient and thoughtful advisor and mentor. I
unequivocally could not have completed this program and thesis without her, and I am thankful
to have had her support. Amelia G. Jones continually pushes me to broaden my thinking and
criticality in ways I hadn’t anticipated and am grateful beyond measure for her support, insight
and critique. My time at USC was both formative and fruitful because of the time spent with
these tremendous women. Finally, I would like to thank Andy Campbell, whose class I had the
pleasure and honor of serving as teaching assistant. Thank you Andy, for the words of
encouragement, your generous teaching and for being the type of educator we so desperately
need in these times. In addition to the faculty in Roski, I would like to offer my profound
gratitude to Taj Frazier and Natalie Belisle who both served as members of my thesis committee.
Thank you both for your invaluable guidance, brilliant critique and generosity with your time.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my friends and family who both supported and
guided me through both graduate school and life. To Brandon, Joseph, Te, Ethan, Rafi, Essence,
Eve, Victoria, Allison, and Clara, thank you for your advice, conversation, help, energy, time,
support, laughs and love. You all kept me sane and happy. I could not have gone through and
completed graduate school without you. I love you all deeply.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………….............................ii

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………iv

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….1
Section 1: Historical Framework …………………………………………………………………7
Section 2: Curatorial Context and Content of Radical Women………………………………….18

Section 3: Case Study of Victoria Santa Cruz .…………………………………….....................34
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................41
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................44

Appendix of Figures …………………………………………………………………………….47

iv

List of Figures

1.1 Source: CEPAL.org, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/qa-with-
director-of-harvards-afro-latin-american-research -
institute/.............................................................................................................8

2.2 Martha Araújo, Brazilian, Photographic documentation of the performance "Para
Um Corpo Nas Suas Impossibilidades", 1985, Documentation of performance:
three black-and-white photographs, 22 x 17 1/2 in., Collection of the artist,
courtesy of Galeria Jaqueline Martins…………………………………………...30

3.2 Maria Luisa Bemberg, El mundo de la mujer,1972, 16mm film transferred to
DVD, color, sound, 15 minutes, 52 seconds, Maria Luisa Bemberg
family…………………………………………………………………………….30

4.2 Lea Lublin, Argentine, Interrogations sur la Femme (Interrogations about
Woman),1978, Synthetic polymer paint on fabric, wood, and string, 109 1/16 x 69
11/16 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Acquired through the
generosity of The Modern Women's Fund, the Latin American and
Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka………………………31

5.3 Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz, Me gritaron negra,1978,Video documentation of
performance, excerpted from the documentary Victoria—Black and Woman
(1978) Sound,3 minutes, 58 seconds (excerpt), Directed by Torgeir Wethal and
produced by Odin Teatret Film/OTA-Odin, Teatret Archives…………………..35

6.3 Wanda Pimentel, Sem título, Série Envolvimento (Untitled, Series Entanglement),
1968, Vinyl paint on canvas, 45 3/8 x 34 15/16 in., Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM
RJ Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro………………………39

7.3 Wanda Pimentel, Transposição I (Transposition I),1968, Vinyl paint on canvas
Dimensions: Sheet: 51 3/16 x 38 1/4 in., Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM RJ
Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro………………………….39

v
8.3 Wanda Pimentel, Sem título, Série Envolvimento (Untitled, Series Entanglement),
1968, Vinyl paint on canvas, 46 7/16 x 35 13/16 in., Gilberto Chateaubriand
MAM RJ Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro………………39

9.3 Yolanda Lopez, Tableaux Vivant Series, 1978, Twelve color photographs,
(Each): 14 x 9 1/4 in., Yolanda M. Lopez, Photography: Susan Moguo………..39

.

Introduction

This thesis explores, disputes and reconstitutes contemporary notions of Latinidad
through the lens of the recent exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985 (2018)
at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles which was part of the Pacific Standard Time Los
Angeles/Latin America (PST LA/LA) initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation, curated by
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta.1 While prior to Radical Women there had been notable
exhibitions of only women artists,2 none had focused specifically on Latin America and Latina
artists. This is something to be appreciated and applauded without question and it is well worth
noting that this exhibition was also an extraordinary accomplishment for the women artists
included. However, this thesis is not particularly invested in a deep art historical dive, nor does
it function as a review of individual works of art or the of the women artists who were included
in the exhibition, it is primarily concerned with who was excluded and why.
Radical Women raised fundamental questions about contemporary curatorial practices
and the responsibility museums have in revealing the tensions and fissures of colliding histories.
This thesis is particularly concerned with how “Latin America” is conceptualized in this
exhibition and whether that term is sufficient or insufficient in relation to the historical
connotations of that nomenclature. What was the curators’ understanding of Latinidad and Latin
America and who it includes? What does the word “radical” really signal in this exhibition? And

1 The exhibition is guest curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Andrea Giunta with Marcela Guerrero former curatorial
fellow, in collaboration with Connie Butler, chief curator, Hammer Museum. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea
Giunta are cited as the two co-curators of the exhibition on the Hammer Museum website and the accompanying
publication.
2 See Cornelia H. Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution Los Angeles: Museum
of Contemporary Art, 2007. Almost a decade prior to Radical Women, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles presented WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2008). This exhibition was groundbreaking in both
scope and content. There were works from 120 artists from around the globe, including some from Latin
America/Latina artists. There were a few artists who were included in both exhibitions; Cecilia Vicuña, Lygia Clark,
Iole de Freitas and Judith F. Baca. And while there was some overlap in the artists shown in both exhibitions there
we no other Afro-Latinas included in either exhibition aside from Victoria Santa Cruz.

2
which artists and artistic practices are included and which were excluded? What does the
inclusion of just one Afro-Latina in the entire exhibition of more than 250 works of art say about
the canon of what is considered “Latin American,” or “art”? What role do museums play in
shaping larger epistemologies? How might the inclusion of a single Afro-Latina ignore the
massive cultural contributions of the African Diaspora on Latin American identity, art and
culture? Finally, how might we reimagine Radical Women when we shift to a decolonial lens and
focus not solely on the content, but on the curatorial logic of the exhibition?
In this thesis I am interested in interrogating the absence of a critical framework and
historiography of the region that would have undoubtedly altered the curators’ selection of
artists, artworks, dialogue, and narrative of radical women and art from Latin America from
1960-1985. I will examine the colonial constructions of race and the canon of art history that
shapes the exhibition and argue that the curators put forth a flat interpretation of radical women
artists in Latin America––one that was more closely linked to Euro-American avant-garde art
traditions and notions of radicality as opposed to a more critical assessment of radicality and
cultural production in relation to power, identity and politics in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
The time frame of this particular exhibition coincides with a particularly turbulent era in
the overall history of the Americas and the Caribbean and simultaneously overlooks the
contributions of Afro-Latina artists as subjects and producers whose agency and existence are
inherently radical. I want to also put forth a framework for understanding the ways in which
Black women’s bodies––particularly in the context of Latin America––are generative for
discussions of womanhood, feminism and as art makers. This thesis also aims to pressurize
notions of art practices to redirect discourse around “Art in Latin America” to the kinds of

3
cultural productions that are rooted in the African diaspora that actually shape what it means to
be Latin American. It may seem obvious, yet it is nonetheless imperative to state, that an
exhibition of work by predominately European descended artists and avant-garde art practices
suggest that, in the framing of this show, Latin America and notions of radicality are solely
understood as by-products of the European influence in the region. To be clear, the temporal,
social and cultural landscape of Latin America is kaleidoscopic and comes to fruition through the
coalescence of African, Indigenous, European and even Asian influences. The art practices
included in any exhibition of Latin American art should reflect this complex genealogy. Given
the historiographies the curators employed in the conception and execution of the exhibition,
what emerges from the Radical Women is a misrepresentation of social, political and cultural
histories that continue to fuel a false narrative about art and art makers and problematic notions
about Latinidad that are inherently anti-Black. Additionally, I will argue that more generally,
some contemporary arts institutions are reiterating similar hegemonic, ahistorical and
Eurocentric notions of Latinidad which ultimately inscribe anti-Blackness through the structural
mechanisms of the museum.
These gaps in the curatorial conception of the Radical Women exhibition and the writing
in the accompanying publication has illuminated the fact that work that still needs to be done
with regard to representations of Black women and the historical accuracy of the impact of trans-
Atlantic slave trade on the Americas. My objective here is to recuperate the missed opportunities
for a dynamic and fruitful dialogue around the African Diaspora and the radical women who
emerged from it despite the most brutal and horrific of circumstances and whose contributions
are often maligned, ignored and erased. By analyzing the work of the single Afro-Latina artist
included in Radical Women, Victoria Santa Cruz, I hope to offer an alternative framework for

4
thinking through this exhibition as both a corrective measure and as a gesture towards
reclamation and recuperation. Ultimately, I will make conclusions that demonstrate why it was
negligent and irresponsible of both a curatorial team and an institution to either actively or
passively engage with practices, both curatorial and epistemological, that perpetuate a colonial,
Eurocentric and anti-Black notion of identity and art practices.
This thesis is organized into three sections. The first section is a deep dive into the
historical framework to offer a more nuanced contextualization of the flawed concept of what
has been articulated as “Latinidad” and the integral role of the African diaspora in cultural
productions in Latin America. The point here is to clearly articulate that Latin America, much
like North America, owes so much of its post-colonial history to the labor extracted from terror
imposed on Black bodies.3 However, prior to the infliction of chattel slavery, descendants of
Africa and the subsequent diaspora had rich cultural, sonic, culinary, visual, kinetic and artistic
histories that then become extrapolated and transferred across the Americas as means of survival,
resilience and radicality. The fabric of Latin America as it has been understood is inextricably
linked to these transmissions while the constructions of national and cultural identities embedded
in “Latinidad” have purposefully excluded Blackness and the African diaspora in order to
perpetuate an imagined genealogy linked only to Europe. As a corollary, I briefly examine the
fundamental ways the African diaspora contributes to the essence of Latin American culture and
art, as an alternative to Eurocentric orientation of the exhibition. I outline this history in order to

3 While this thesis is concerned specifically with the omission of Afro-Latina artists, it should also be noted that the
absence of Indigenous artists is equally problematic and disturbing, especially given that indigenous women have
been cultural producers for centuries and have been both radical and resilient. There are many examples of art
practices of indigenous women that are integral to the landscape of cultural productions in both Los Angeles and
Latin America. An example of this is the Quechua women in Peru who weave and pass down the stories and
traditions of their ancestors. This and the many other indigenous women deserve their own treatment and critique in
relation to this exhibition.

5
provide a framework to foreground the critique around articulation of “art” and the idea of Latin
America in this exhibition and the Getty initiative as a whole. The intention here is to broaden
the margins of what is considered art to include the practices that are closely linked to the
African Diaspora as opposed to a European lineage and conceptualization.
The second section is an overview of the curatorial content and context for Radical
Women. In this section, I offer a lens to clarify and understand the overarching mission of the
Getty/Pacific Standard Time initiative and the curators’ stated intentions along with conceptual
organization for the exhibition. Through a more extensive engagement with the exhibition
structure, language and curatorial gestures, I hope to articulate its limitations and rather bold
exclusions. I offer a more comprehensive understanding of both the implications of this
exhibition and the ways anti-Blackness operated on an institutional as well as an epistemological
level.
In the third section I narrow the lens of this inquiry to review the case of Victoria Santa
Cruz, the single Afro-Latina artist in the exhibition. This is a close reading of the video
installation of her performance, Me gritaron negra (They shouted Black at me) (1978) included
at the entrance to the exhibition. This section is meant to analyze the work as a point of
departure to delve deeply into the ways in which radicality is inherent to Black bodies in the
Americas. Furthermore, in thinking through performance and the performativity of Blackness in
relation to Latinidad and the Latin American context, I want to suggest that not only was the
erasure of the African diaspora and Blackness from this narrative a disservice to this exhibition,
but there is a fundamental misunderstanding of Black women’s experiences as they relate to their
art practice and the multitude of ways Black cultural production is central to the amalgamation
that is Latin American.

6
Finally, the conclusion of this thesis serves as a meditation on future curatorial practices,
as well as reimaging of Radical Women that includes a vigorous exploration of the beauty,
dynamism and radicality of the African diaspora in Latin America. It also serves as a call to
curators in the Americas and beyond to employ a decolonial pedagogy in their practice, one that
necessitates a deep examination of the ways anti-Blackness permeates logic and reproduction of
knowledge.

7
Historical Framework

Latin America is a complex, fraught and highly questionable construct based on
geography, language and identity. To better understand this, it is beneficial to begin with a
cursory examination of the idea of race to illuminate the ways in which it shapes, in the post-
contact epoch, what it means to be Latin American. To state plainly, “the idea of race, in its
modern meaning, does not have a known history before the colonization of America,” it is an
invention.4 On writing about race and the Americas, Aníbal Quijano notes that:
As time went by the colonizers codified the phenotypic trait of the colonized as color, and
they assumed it as a the emblematic characteristic of racial category…the so called
Blacks were not only the most important exploited group, since the principal part of the
economy rested on their labor; they were, above all the most important colonized race,
since Indians were not part of that colonial society.5

If we then draw the line from “Blackness” to labor, and then to the class structure around which
European identity is constituted upon, we can better understand the role of anti-Blackness of any
and all institutions predicated upon said structure of colonial society and relations of domination.
Moreover, we can use this as a starting point to see the way “race became the fundamental
criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places and roles in society’s
structure of power.”6 The ways in which colorism emerges can be directly linked to mechanism
of domination and how Blackness becomes synonymous with “inferiority” in the colonial
context. It is a testament to the virulent nature of the mechanisms of the colonial enterprise that
Latinx and Latin American identity can be seen as mutually exclusive of the African diaspora
and Blackness.

4 Anibal Quijano, and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” in Nepantla: Views
from South, 1, no. 3 (2000), 534.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.

8
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is estimated twelve to fifteen million
Africans were forcefully brought to the Americas and the Caribbean (fig. 1). Specifically,
between 1502 and 1850, when Brazil formally outlawed the transatlantic slave trade, “almost
thirteen million Africans were abducted, from their ancestral homelands, sold and transported to
the Americas in chains” and “of these estimated eleven million survivors of the Middle Passage,
about 450,000 arrived in the United States, while the remaining ten and half million Africans
were enslaved in the anglophone, francophone, hispanophone and Dutch Antilles as well as in
Central and South America, most importantly Brazil.”7 This fact alone, is compelling enough to
suggest that an exhibition of “Latin American” art should unequivocally include work by artists
from the diaspora if not for the fact alone that “Latin America” does not exist without the
African diaspora. The vestiges of this diaspora are both visible through cultural artifacts and
archived through the bodies of their descendants. Yet, as Ben Vinson III notes, “when looking at
the broad trajectory of historical writings on Latin America, outside of the Caribbean and Brazil,
it has long been possible to do Latin American history without referencing Blackness or the
African Diaspora… the tradition of the field has simply prioritized other questions ahead of
reconciling the region’s African heritage.”8 It is this reconciliation that I endeavor towards.
The flawed concept of Latinidad has been articulated as the “essence” of being Latin
American or Latinx but it is permissible when it is embodied through a particular physical
manifestation, which excludes blackness. Often, Black bodies are seen as exiting outside of the
construct of “Latinidad” because Blackness marks them as other, and not legible with the

7 Marion Rohrleitner and Ryan, Sarah E Ryan, “African? Chicana? Latina? No, Afro Latina” in Dialogues Across
Diasporas : Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation (Lanham, Md:
Lexington Books, 2013), 1.
8 Ben Vinson III, “Introduction: African (Black) Diaspora History, Latin American History,” The Americas 63, no. 1
(2006), 3.

9
language of this construct. Consequently, this conjecture is reinforced and reiterated through the
pervasiveness of anti-blackness that is reinforced in institutions, language, industries and
national identities. Museums as Euro-American institutions mimic this behavior and regurgitate
anti-Blackness through the structural violence of a narrow and contested reading of art history
and the historical exclusion of Black art and artists from the art historical record. As Charles
Gaines writes, “museums exist in a global world, but that this world is still evolving from a
colonial history and is therefore bifurcated along the racial and ethnic lines engineered by this
history.”9
Earlier in this thesis, the engineering of these racial and ethnic lines was addressed to
illuminate the inextricably linked notions of Latinidad to the colonial project whereby the value
of art objects and their makers is tethered to European values, beliefs and knowledge. To be
clear, “museums and universities were and continue to be two crucial institutions for the
accumulation of meaning and the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge and beings,”
Walter Mignolo argues, continuing, “museums in the modern/colonial world (that is, the way of
life, economic principles, political structures, and models of subjectivities that originated in the
sixteenth century with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuits) had and still have and
still have a particular role to play in the colonization of knowledge and of beings.”10 If one
considers the historical and cultural role of the African diaspora in shaping Latin America, one
might be compelled to consider in what ways this exhibition facilitated or framed the
conversation through that considerable contribution.

9 Gaines, Charles C. A Tale of Conflict: the contemporary museum in the age of liberalism
http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2016/03/charles -gaines/. Accessed Jan 17, 2020.

10 Mignolo, Walter. Museums in the colonial horizon of modernity: Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” in Fred
Wilson: A Critical Reader, edited by Doro Globus (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 374.

10
Since the inception of the colonial enterprise, Black bodies have not been embraced as
part of the projects of forming national identities so their art practices are not embraced as part of
an articulated art history. Certainly, the onus should be place on curators, scholars and
institutions to address the violent erasures enabled by anti-Blackness. In order for an exhibition
to be constructed through the lens of “Latin American Art,” there must be some general
consensus and ideation around what constitutes Latin America and consequently, which artists
qualify as “Latin American” and importantly, whose art and objects qualify as having meaning
and purpose with in the global art world. It is worth examining the ways in which Blacks and
African slave laborers, become secondary in relation to the construction of identity and excluded
from the narratives of Latinidad. In his book Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America
and the Caribbean, Robert Lee Adams Jr. writes:
Where do Blacks fit into the imagined past of Latin American and the Caribbean? Afro-
Latinos play crucial roles in constructing the colonial enterprise in the Americas. Afro-
Latinos populated the Spanish and Portuguese colonies from the most Southern parts of
Chile into the swamps of Florida. They left a visible imprint on the imperial project.
Afro-Latin arts, foods, dances, religion, like Rumba in Cuba or Candomble in Brazil,
have become central symbols of national identification. Despite their significant
historical contributions, Afro-Latino history across the Americas remains obscured and
buried. Where do Blacks fit into the contemporary imagined communities of Latina
America? In most countries, Afro-Latinos are absent or sorely underrepresented in
national politics, government bureaucracies, universities and professions. In other words,
Afro-Latinos are not fully acknowledged when judged by their demographics or their
historical service to the nation. Afro-Latinos continue to exist as the invisible in the
national narrative while remaining hyper-visible in the nightly news reports.11

This is the crux of the argument around anti-Blackness and the museum. The imagined
historiography is one that is centered around the European invasion of the Americas, and the

11 Robert L. Adams Jr, “Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Beyond Disciplinary
and National Boundaries” in Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: Beyond
Disciplinary and National Boundaries, Edited by Robert Lee Adams, Jr. (London; Routledge, 2013), 2.

11
hierarchy and value system of European knowledge production as being superior whereby
othered bodies, in particular indigenous and Black bodies, are excluded from the genealogy of
Latinidad. We then see how this concept of Latinidad and the identities shaped through it
become centered around proximity to whiteness or the European bloodline where the further you
are away from the labor class, the more “Latin” you are and the more privilege, access and
recognition you enjoy. This has significant ramifications for the discussion around Latinidad and
for answering the question of who is entitled to claim this heritage and who is then also
intentionally left out of the construct around this identity or invited to participate in the structures
and institutions it supports.
Who gets to participate in Latinidad and specifically, in relation to the exhibition Radical
Women, whose bodies are designated as being radical and/or producing radical art in Latin
America? As a thought experiment, if one were to construct an exhibition called Radical
Women: Art in North America from 1960-1985, would it be possible or responsible to exclude
Black and brown women artists from the logic and design of the exhibition? The point here is to
steer the discussion of how chattel slavery and the African diaspora shape the Americas away
from the myopic vision of this being isolated to the US and to push scholars and curators alike to
expand the framework to include what is coined Latin American where the majority of the
descendants of the African diaspora reside, outside of Africa.
In Brazil or Cuba for example, where there are large portions of the population that are
Afro-descended and legible as such, this hybridity is more obvious and undeniable and are
geographically connected to what is perceived as Latin America. For example, to be Afro-
Brazilian or Afro-Cuban is a legible identity within those countries whereas to be Afro-Mexican
is just now being recognized by the government and included as a legitimate identity to be

12
claimed on the 2020 census for the first time since the 19th century.12 There is however,
“suspicion” as Coco Fusco notes, in Latin America about identity and who claims it:
…what has actually happened is that the state has created ideologies that propose
solutions to the problem of identity, but those solutions always occlude the existence of
marginalized groups who are not part of the ‘national project’…Things get even more
complicated when we take into account that the official notion of mestizaje is connected
to concepts of nationality and territoriality.13

To expand on this, it is worthwhile to note that the national project is inextricably bound to
capitalism, exploitation and the global market whereby ties to Eurocentrism and Western notions
of value are projected onto indigenous and “Black” bodies.
While this thesis is not focused solely on the construction of Latinidad, the purpose of
exploring the notion here is to illuminate the ways in which Blackness becomes mutually
exclusive from the concept because of the connections to slave labor, colonial subjectivity and
the construction of race whereby institutions, such as museums, further enable that narrative to
persist because if their investment in these imagined histories whereby Latin America is an
extension of Europe. Undoubtedly, the homogeneity implied and reiterated by ethnicity is
problematic to say the least. Alicia Arrizón clarifies that “Latinos’ tendency to marginalize their
African and indigenous roots while celebrating their Hispanic (i.e. European) heritage is both an
outgrowth of a colonial subjectivity and a mechanism for perpetuating the domain of the
subjected. The colonized subject continuously abolishes her/his own identity by invalidating the

12 According to NPR, in an article published on February 6, 2016 and aired on the “All Things Considered,” radio
show, “The last time people of African descent were counted was in the 19th century. The Mexican federal
government is arriving late to the party.” https://www.npr.org/2016/02/06/465710473/now-counted-by-their-
country-afro-mexicans-grab-unprecedented-spotlight Accessed 3/16/2020.

13 Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the America (New York City: New Press,
1995), 163.

13
multiple determinants that may intersect within the broader categories of race or nation.”14 This
exhibition embodies this tension.
The ways in which anti-Blackness manifests within the broader Latinx community are in
many ways the same ways in which it functions outside of this construct to uphold more linear
and direct connections to a European lineage. For instance, within Latin American and Latinx
families and culture, hiding “blackness” by diminishing features that might mark your body as
legibly Black is applauded; by keeping your skin as fair as possible, and framing the language
around your ancestry as linked to Europe. This particular articulation of anti-Blackness closely
parallels the behaviors of institutions and the professionals working within them. This exhibition,
which originated in the United States elucidates this quite precisely. There was no discussion or
scholarship for this exhibition around the role the African diaspora plays in what is designated as
“Latin America.” This erasure serves to further anti-Black sentiment that is quite rampant in both
the United States and Latin America by suggesting that Black cultural production is either non-
existent and or not valuable.
While a more robust conversation around the construction of race and representation is
warranted, it is clear that we must call out when anti-Blackness further perpetuates the myth of
Latinidad. Gladys Jimenez Munoz reminds us that, “any attempt to construct a Latina-ness that
denies our African-ness is ultimately just a defense of a European-ness that- particularly in
United States–– nobody acknowledges; it is another attempt at ‘passing’.”15 The idea of passing
is closely linked to the cultural and financial capital that accompanies ties to a shared European
ancestry and a link to a lineage of a broader “whiteness.” It is important to articulate that the

14 Alicia Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 16.
15 Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “The Elusive Signs of African-Ness: Race and Representation Among Latinas in the
United States.” Border/Lines Issue 29/30. (January 1, 1993): 15. http://search.proquest.com/docview/197262270/

14
discourse around passing and colorism is not about ancestry or private ideation around identity,
but rather of the experience of being perceived as Black and the treatment, access and resources
that accompany that. There are many people who have African ancestry but retain the privilege
of proximity to whiteness whereby privileges are afforded to them precisely because they are not
read as Black. Over centuries, this privileging of whiteness has resulted in a diminishing and
dismissal of the Black body that has mutated in form and conformed to the economic, political
and social condition of the times. The anti-Blackness of the colonial era as manifested through
slavery may be de jure illegal but has infiltrated institutions structurally through the exclusion
and erasure of Black bodies. Moreover, anti-Blackness is performed in both explicit and implicit
ways through acts of erasure, violence upon Black bodies, structural violence and discrimination,
othering and a distancing from Black bodies and their experience
When thinking thorough the rich cultural traditions that are directly linked to the African
diaspora, it should always be thoroughly noted that so much of both US and Latin American
cultural, economic production is bound to the labor of Black bodies. There are diligent studies of
the cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans prior to, during, and of course after the
trans-Atlantic slave trade which illuminate the ways in which “cultural contacts” have been both
complex and extensive for centuries.16 In Latin America especially, the African diaspora shapes
culinary histories, dance and movement, music and religious practices adopted by massive
portions of populations in what would be considered Latin America. For example, culinary
historian Diane Spivey notes, “the last stage of this culinary diaspora was the forced migration of
Africans to the Americas through the slave trade, beginning in the 15th century, which brought
numerous culinary artists and expert agriculturalists to the Atlantic coast stretching from

16 Henry Louis Gates, Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4.

15
Argentina to Nova Scotia. The continual influx and steady increase of Africans into the
Caribbean and South America at the height of the human bondage trade ironically constantly
rejuvenated the African cultural input, and fostered a culinary revolution under the influence of
Africans that would permeate every aspect of cooking and cuisine in rural and urban areas of
every country in the Americas.”17 Drawing on these studies showing the extensive influence of
the African diaspora on the culture of the Americas, I want to push the boundaries of thinking
and talking about art into the realm of non-Western constructs. This is necessary in order to
really challenge the ways that institutions and curators’ function in an effort to destabilize
canonical and Eurocentric epistemologies. As a corollary, this rich culinary history is one of the
foundations of “Latin American” culture, as we know that food is often times what binds and
mobilizes communities. This is also true of music and dance in that survival, resilience and joy
are often times transmitted through sound and movement.
Weaving together the ways in which sonic and kinetic traditions are linked to the African
diaspora in Latin America is another avenue for reimagining both radicality and the how the idea
of Latin America was articulated in this exhibition. There is, of course, also the transmission of
musical traditions throughout Latin America that are equally rooted in the African diaspora. One
scholar of the African diaspora and Colombian music clarifies in regard to national popular
music, that “in many ways, these were musical styles that developed in the working class barrios
of Latin American cities, often by adapting European styles and combining them with African
derived (and to a much lesser extent Amerindian) aesthetics and rhythms, and that were then
fastened upon by middle classes, “cleaned up,” “modernized,” and made into acceptable

17 Diane Spivey, “Trans-Atlantic Food Migration: The African Culinary Influence on the Cuisine of the Americas”
(December 23, 2018) Retrieved from https://www.Blackpast.org/global-african-history/perspectives-global-african-
history/trans-atlantic-food-migration-the-african-culinary-influence-on-the-cuisine-of-the-americas/ (Accessed
12/19/2019).

16
national symbols.”18 There is little debate now about the influence of the African diaspora on
Latin American music, but for centuries Black cultural contributions like music were outright
denied and refused. This refusal is an outgrowth of the rampant anti-Blackness whereby white
and mestizo Latin Americans tend to distance themselves from Blackness and African heritage
so as to maintain a sense of colonial order and supremacy.
One form of music in particular, cumbia, embodies the significance of the African
diaspora in shaping regional and national legacies. In a recent interview on the National Public
Radio podcast “alt.Latino”, Eduardo Diaz, director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, explains
cumbia originated because “when the music itself was born, slaves had their legs shackled and
very minimal movement was possible.”19 As opposed to salsa, this dance was more
straightforward and the movement more accessible which is perhaps the reason it is widely
regarded as “the musical backbone of Latin America.”20 For both the purpose of this thesis and
the broader theoretical frameworks around Latin American art, this example elucidates the ways
artistic and cultural productions are demarcated, separated and valued differently based on their
perceived lineage. The result, as can be evidenced by this exhibition the perpetuation of an idea
of art that excludes practices outside of the visual arts linked to Euro-American traditions.
A closer examination of Radical Women reveals that this exhibition essentially functions
in the same ways as having an exhibition of “American” or “European” artists whereby these
artists either identify as a white Latin American, non-Black Latina or whose proximity to
whiteness aligns them with the same privileges, access and power as European descended

18 Peter Wade, “African Diaspora and Colombian Popular Music in the Twentieth Century,” Black Music Research
Journal 28, no. 2 (October 1, 2008): 43.
19 Jasmine Gard, “Cumbia: The musical backbone of Latin America” on National Public Radio podcast alt.Latino,
(February 18,2015)
20 Ibid.

17
bodies. Historically, the museum as a Euro-American institution has been uncomfortable with
and uniformed about Black women’s bodies. These lapses in regard to this exhibition are rooted
in a lack of engagement with the African diaspora and a cultural deficit around the Black body
and Black artistic practices and around how those art practices are radical in their own right. As
Uri McMillan reminds us, a member of the New York-based Heresies feminist collective once
told Lorraine O’Grady, “[t]he avant-garde has nothing to do with Black people.”21 My
contention here is that this exhibition reiterates this sentiment and fails to recognize the inherent
radicality of Black women in Latin America and fails at recuperating the monumental failures of
both the avant-garde and the art historical canons in recognizing how “the Eurocentric
narrativization of performance art elides the presence of Black artists as historical
coconspirators.”22 The omissions in this narrativization are reproduced in this exhibtion for
example through the selection of works in the categories of performance, dance and theater
which are linked again to Euro-American tradition and not one that is rooted in the African
diaspora. The curators here chose to assign value to one form and not the other which I would
suggest is rooted in a form of anti-Blackness that omits Black contributions to culture. I would
also argue here that McMillan’s statement could be extended beyond just performance art to art
works and histories generally. One must at least then question, if so few Black women artists
could be taken to qualify, what parameters were used by the curators to mark artists as radical
women?

21 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York
University Press, 2015), 7.
22 Ibid, 3.

18
Curatorial Context and Content of Radical Women
Pacific Standard Time (PST) is an initiative sponsored by The J. Paul Getty Foundation
to support research, exhibitions, and publications by arts organizations throughout Southern
California. The inaugural series of exhibitions was entitled Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA
1945-1980 and took place in 2011-2012; this was followed by a smaller initiative, Pacific
Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA which occurred in 2013.23 The third
iteration, Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles /Latin America, known as PST LA/LA, was
described on the Getty website as a “far reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American
and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles” with more than 70 institutions from Santa Barbara
to San Diego participating. 24From its inception, there seem to lack a critical engagement with
both notions of “Latin American” and “Latino” art in regard to who these include and what
precisely they mean. These concepts are, among certain communities, debated and contested
precisely because they fail to adequately encapsulate the myriad of cultures, identities, histories
and diasporas they claim to. For the most part, the exhibitions that came out of the initiative were
aligned with the logic of Latin America and Latino as being non-Black, non-Asian and non-
Indigenous. Among the cultural institutions that participated, the only two projects to focus on
the African diaspora were Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis, curated
by Patrick A. Polk, Roberto Conduru, Sabrina Gledhill and Randal Johnson at the UCLA Fowler
Museum, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago
curated by Tatiana Flores at the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) in Long Beach.
Relational Undercurrents was in fact the only show invested in thinking deeply and critically
about the ways Caribbean fit into and challenged the narrative of Latin American and Latino

23 The J. Paul Getty Foundation website, at: http://www.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/ (Accessed 1/23/2020).
24 Ibid.

19
art.25 Interestingly, neither of these institutions are mainstream, large scale contemporary art
museums. In fact, MoLAA is dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino
art while the Fowler Museum “explores art and material culture primarily from Africa, Asia, the
Pacific, and the Americas, past and present.”26 So, in essence, the majority of the engagement
with the African Diaspora came from much smaller institutions where there is an intentional
focus on Latin America and the Americas.
While the regions explored in these two exhibitions; the Caribbean and Brazil, have well-
documented Afro-descended populations, it is telling that Black artists were, for the remaining
68 or so exhibitions, marginalized and excluded from notions of Latinx and Latin American art.
As curator and scholar Tatiana Flores notes, “in the context of PST:LA/LA, ‘Latin American’
came to be associated with a white, Euro-descendant identity and ‘Latinx’ with people of color,
predominantly mixed-race mestizos with indigenous ancestry.”27 While it had the potential to be
a paradigm-shifting and epistemological query into the formations and complications of both the
“Latin American” and “Latinx” constructs, for the most part, the museums and cultural
institutions in PST:LA/LA did not seek to challenge the colonial and anti-Black underpinnings of
these racial and geographic categories. Instead, the curatorial and institutional inclination was to
perpetuate Eurocentric notions of identity, history and culture. Even though Los Angeles has a
long history of Afro-descended persons, including those whose families migrated from Mexico,
the Caribbean and other parts of what is recognized as Latin America, what emerged from PST

25 Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis was on view at the Fowler Museum from September
24, 2017- April 15, 2018. Relational Undercurrents was on view from Sept.16, 2017-Februrary 25, 2018.
26 https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/ (Accessed 1/27/2020)

27 Tatiana Flores, “Disturbing Categories, Remapping Knowledge” in The Routledge Companion to African
American Art History, edited by Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2020), 134.

20
LA/LA was a misleading narrative absent of dynamic and robust explorations of the ways in
which LA and Latin America are in dialogue with one another and have been for centuries.
Kellie Jones’ seminal work, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in
the 1960s and 1970s, acknowledges the ways in which art and cultural production in L.A. was
shaped by the voluntary migration of Blacks.28 She begins observing that : “…between the
sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, scores of people migrated from Central Mexico to the
northern border” and that in fact, “some of the first people of African descent in the land that
eventually would become the western United States spoke Spanish” and even that “Mexico’s
Sinaloa province had a substantial population of people of African descent; twenty-six of the
forty-six people who completed the five-hundred-mile journey overland and by sea from Sinaloa
to Alta California were Black.”29 This reference to the convergence of Black and Latin American
narratives in a book about Black art in Los Angeles is particularly illuminating in contrast to an
entire cultural initiative whose aim was to engage in a dialogue around the relationship between
Los Angeles and Latin America. Jones also notes how the history of Los Angeles is situated
among the legacies of people like Pío Pico, a businessman, politician, and last Mexican governor
of California who was a person of African descent and whose life spanned L.A.’s existence as
both a Mexican and a U.S. city.30
While this may not seem to have a direct correlation to a PST LA/LA exhibition, what a
person like Pío Pico represents is a non-linear genealogy that calls into question what it is we
might consider “Latino,” “Latinx” or “Latin American.” It requires a reexamination of how the
terms in the Getty initiative seem to obfuscate the complex histories of the city and region and

28 Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2017), 15.
29 Ibid, 3.
30 Ibid. In Los Angeles, an entire stretch of land, Pico Boulevard, is named after Pio Pico.

21
the people who inhabit these sites. The voluntary migration of Black peoples from the South,
Mexico and various Latin American countries gave rise to a multitude of cultural, social,
economic and artistic productions. This particular exhibition, along with others in PST LA/LA
seemed to paint with a very broad stroke a picture of Latinidad as mutually exclusive of
Blackness in the racial imaginary of spectators and institutions alike.
Migrations, movements of people, and diasporas never exist in a vacuum, and the
trajectories of those movements are complicated by the violent histories of colonialism and
fluctuations in economies and violence. Along those paths of both forced and voluntary
migrations follow the bloodlines of complex ancestries which belie the often-simplistic
taxonomies of race and ethnicity that are employed in the discourse of identity as articulated in
the Americas. While the entire PST LA:LA initiative exemplifies precisely how broad
terminology can prove to be marginalizing, Radical Women specifically signals the ways in
which cultures and people are bound by more than geography, and specifically elucidates the
homogenizing effect of a singular term for a region that is multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-
racial and multi-cultural. Again, Latin America and more accurately, the Americas, is far more
than its direct lineage to Europe. This exhibition could have done much more to bridge the gap in
the production of knowledge around how the African diaspora unfolded and reverberates across
borders and geopolitical constructs. The trans-Atlantic slave trade should be seen as having been
bifurcated along hemispheric lines and as such, each hemisphere reflects the imbrication of the
many diasporas and indigenous people that shape it. Just as one could not possibly conceive of
the United States without Black labor and cultural production, Latin America too must be
understood to be inextricably bound to the wealth extracted from Black (and indigenous) bodies.

22
The two primary curators of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, Cecilia
Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, articulated the goal of the show to be an examination of “the
practices of women artists working in Latin America and the United States active between 1960
and 1985, a key period in Latin American and Latina History and in the development of
contemporary art.” In the exhibition catalogue, they further explained that their “efforts were
focused on making work by women artists visible and providing it with the complex theoretical
and critical framework that it deserves.” While the focus here is clearly articulated as work by
women artists, their desire to “provide it with a complex theoretical and critical framework”
would seem to suggest a necessary exploration of the experiences of all women, not just Latin
American women of white or European descent, but also Black women and women of color.
The curators state, that “in addressing an art historical vacuum, Radical Women will give
visibility to the artistic practices of women artists working in Latin America and US-born
Chicanas and Latinas between 1960 and 1985—a key period in Latin American history and in
the development of contemporary art.”31 The distinction made here in the press release of US
born Chicanas and Latinas is an interesting one for many reasons but specifically because it
excludes terminology that acknowledges and references Afro-Latina artists and their distinct
experience in the United States. There is a distinct experience that the nomenclature “Afro”
points to and it should be marked as part of the larger discourse around “Latin America.” The
term “Latin” in effect already signifies the connection to Europe and as distinct from indigenous
and African lineage. Moreover, the usage of the terms “Chicana” and “Latina” in the press
release and catalogue for this exhibition is deliberate here and marks clearly the choice of the

31 Hammer Museum press release for Radical Women: Art in Latin America 1960-1985, available at:
https://hammer.ucla.edu/fileadmin/media/Press_Releases/2016/Hammer_Radical_Women_English_FINAL.pdf
[Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].

23
curators to not engage critically with what it means to be “Latina” in that the entire idea of Afro-
Latinas in the United States were ignored. It is worth noting, that “just as in Latin America,
where the prefix Afro has been critical in challenging the homogenizing effects of national and
regional constructs, so in the United States the term Afro-Latin@ has surfaced as a way to signal
racial, cultural, and socioeconomic contradictions within the overly vague idea of Latin@. In
addition to reinforcing those ever-active transnational ties, the Afro-Latin@ concept calls
attention to the anti-Black racism within the Latina@ communities themselves.”32 Moreover, to
extend Latinidad to those artists who voluntarily migrated or were forced to migrate from Europe
to the South American continent, and not be compelled to include more Black/Afro-Latinas in
the exhibition is telling perhaps, both about curatorial practices and the extent to which
constructions of national/ethnic identities are bound to and entangled with coloniality and
privilege.
Anne Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles stated the following
about the Radical Women exhibition:

Radical Women brings overdue scholarly attention to the extraordinary contributions that
these Latin American women artists have made to the field of contemporary art,
reflecting the various political and social turmoil of their times, including the many
dictatorships that ruled Latin American countries in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.
The artworks in Radical Women can be viewed as heroic acts that gave a voice to
generations of women across Latin America and the United States.”33

32 Miriam Jimé nez Romá n and Juan Flores, Introduction to The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the
United States, edited by Miriam Jimé nez Romá n and Juan Flores (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,
2010), 2-17.

33 Anne Philbin, Press release for Radical Women: Art in Latin America 1960-1985
https://hammer.ucla.edu/fileadmin/media/Press_Releases/2016/Hammer_Radical_Women_English_FINAL.pdf
[Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].

24
The historical period of the exhibition undoubtedly is one of turmoil, however, it is critical to
articulate that this volatility, in particular the dictatorships aforementioned, disproportionately
affected Black and indigenous bodies as they were almost exclusively extensions of the
imperialist project. The crux of the argument here relies heavily upon an investigation into which
women, and what version of Latin America is privileged and included in this dialogue and how
the “political body” here is reserved for a specific “body.” The “political body” here is used in
direct correlation to an art practice that uses the body as a feminist gesture, sometimes without a
formal framework of feminism.
The curators note that during the time frame used for the exhibition, there were in some
cases no formal feminist collectives, movements or frameworks for an art practice and that “most
of the artists featured in the this exhibition did not set out to make feminist works, even though
we as curators and art historians can now identify feminist agendas in their production”34.
Through feminism or feminist agendas, which have historically excluded Black women, again it
seems that lens has failed here to acknowledge, differentiate and engage with critically the role
of cultural production of Afro-Latinas. It is curious when Fajardo-Hills writes that, “for the
artists included in this exhibition, the female body became a locus of exploration and rediscovery
in a radical new visual language that challenged the way of understanding the world,” because
the “new visual language” could be read as being rooted in a Euro-American hegemony. I am
suggesting in this thesis that in order to challenge the way of understanding in the world, one
must include the specific experience of the Black body and specifically Black women. Fajardo-
Hill continues:
Radical Women centers on the notion of the political body. These artists embarked on
radical and experimental artistic investigations beginning in the early 1960s, forging new

34 Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Andrea Giunta and Rodrigo Alonso. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Los
Angeles: Hammer Museum and DelMonico Books/Prestel 2017), 19.

25
paths in photography, performance, video, and conceptual art. They generated a line of
inquiry focused on the politicization of the female body and sought to break free from the
atmosphere of political and social repression overshadowed women in Latin America.35

There many questions pertaining to this claim. The main query of this thesis is whether the
curators and the exhibition succeed in that. The mediums of photography, performance, video,
and conceptual art are extensions of the paths before them and in this exhibition are utilized
within the scope of the Euro-American tradition. This also raises a key question about Black
performance, and the kinds of art practices that emerge from populations who were and still are
excluded from art schools, access to technologies and materials, or whose ingenuity belies
categorization. In its entirety, Radical Women omits this critical reading of the hierarchies of
artistic production.
Returning to the language of the exhibition, the catalog offers another glimpse into the
both the logic and discourse that gave shape to Radical Women. Before discussing the work of
Victoria Santa Cruz, it is important to understand where her work is situated within the
organization and installation of Radical Women. The exhibition is divided into nine thematic
sections and in each of those sections, there is absence of deeper critique of how these themes
operates in relation to being Black in Latin America. First, in The Self Portrait where “works that
present conceptual and psychological narratives that challenge canonical, reductive notions of
beauty and female identity, claiming a space for critical self-expression, identity is explored in
nonliteral ways to go beyond traditional forms of portraiture” it is incumbent upon the curators to
ask how does this differ for Black women whose conceptual and psychological narratives are

35 Press release for Radical Women: Art in Latin America 1960-1985
https://hammer.ucla.edu/fileadmin/media/Press_Releases/2016/Hammer_Radical_Women_English_FINAL.pdf
[Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].

26
shaped in response to and because of anti-blackness? Moreover, as I will discuss later in this
thesis, this was a curious choice for the work of Santa Cruz because this language suggests that
her work was self-reflective, and that she was reflecting on female beauty when in fact her work,
which was not an actual performance piece, but a recording of her with a chorus of people
reciting a spoken-word piece, was commenting on the experience of Black women which is
distinct from that of non-Black women. In the section entitled Body Landscape which “seeks to
elucidate ways in which the landscape becomes a locus for the body to engage with the natural
environment” and “artists explored intimate experiences of nature, created metamorphic relations
with landscape, constructed ephemeral situations that symbolize the disappearance of cultures,
expressed concerns about the effects of human activity on the earth” I wonder how slavery and
its shaping of the body and land isn’t explored, or even the how Black women artists might have
been included to comment on these concern. In Performing the Body where the works gathered
“coexist in the intersection between dance, performance and theater” whereby artist use a
“multidisciplinary approach to performance” and “use the body as a tool explore notions of
temporality, aesthetics, subjectivity and spectatorship” there is a profound lack of historicity and
engagement with how each of these disciplines is shaped by Afro-Latinas and fails to
acknowledge the work done by these women within their own communities. Victoria Santa Cruz
is one example but even within the scope of her work, there was a broad network of women
working in the same vein. In each of the other thematic sections–– Resistance and Fear; The
Power of Words, Social Places, Feminisms; and The Erotic36––there was also a missed
opportunity to explicitly address

36 The language of the thematics sections read: Resistance and Fear; With unapologetic force the artists in this
section approach in their artworks the extreme violence practiced by oppressive political regimes. As powerful
forms of resistance, these works stand against officially sanctioned methods of instilling fear and record traumatic
even that official archives have failed to document. The Power of Word; While dictatorships in Latin America

27
and incorporate a more vibrant reading of Latinidad by including the Afro-Latina experience
because in each section these themes affect and are informed differently by Afro-Latinas. This is
a particularly poignant moment for reflection because here:

…the category of race is simply colonized under the broader category of sex, and the
stark problems of systemic racial oppression are elided. To state some obvious examples:
there is no parallel in sexual oppression to the racial oppression that legitimized the
enslavement of Africans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; racial difference is
marked on the body with a visibility not apparent in a person’s different sexual
practices.37

The experience of being Black, the history of Black women’s bodies and the role of these
women is entirely absent.
In each section, there is troubling absence of engagement with how these themes as
articulated by the curators have specific ramifications for Black women in Latin America. A
fitting complex theoretical and critical framework to employ here would be that of critical race
theory and the theory of intersectionality as outlined by Black American feminist scholar and
lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw points to a particular violence inflicted upon women of
color, and particularly women who are read as non-white bodies. Importantly, Crenshaw notes
that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics

employed extreme measures of surveillance to control language- repressive tactics that targeted both written and
spoken words and the bodies that enunciated them- artists created harsh political realities that they were
experiencing. Here the political becomes poetic and the poetic turns political. Social Places; the artworks in this
section assert that the social is personal and therefore politically constituted. The works assembled under this
category expose stereotypes and seek to give agency to marginalized and disenfranchised groups such as transgender
people, prostitutes, indigenous people, the disabled and those who were targeted by repressive regimes. Feminisms;
This section focuses on artists who have explored ways of articulating women’s rights from the perspective of
feminist activism. Whether documenting feminist demonstrations or creating a radical iconography of feminism the
works here illustrate the coalescence of art and feminist ideas. The Erotic; The artists in this section approach erotic
subject matter with a sense of humor and a critical eye toward stereotypical views of female sexuality and its
psychological complexities.

37 Malini Johar-Schueller, “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg
Body.” Signs 31, no. 1 (September 2005): 71.

28
charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.”
She goes on to suggest, “in the context of the violence against women, this elision of difference
in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that women experience is
often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class.”38
The omission, or rather the lack of critical engagement, even on a cursory level, with the
monumental impact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade had on the conditions of Black women in
Latin America is in line with the long tradition of Western denial of culpability for both the
terror inflicted upon them and their reliance upon Black bodies for cultural, social and economic
production. This is the crux of how anti-Blackness persists and penetrates contemporary sites of
cultural production. While the curators of this exhibition were adamant about using a critical
framework and a feminist approach, it is evident that, through lack of analysis and robust
exploration of Black cultural production, they reproduced what “white feminists” are often
accused of, in that there is no engagement with the ways that race and class differentiate
experiences of women. Malini Johar Schueller suggests, “feminist and gender theorists might
simply repeat the universalizing knowledge claims of colonialism by celebrating an ahistorical
and acontextual blurring of boundaries”. 39 She concludes this sentiment with a pertinent
question that asks, “might the blurring of racial boundaries be an obfuscation of the systemic
racial oppression and racial hierarchies that continue to affect women’s lives?”40 I am suggesting
here that this obfuscation and the notion that women’s experiences are analogous regardless of

38 Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against
Women of Color: Women of Color at the Center: Selections from the Third National Conference on Women of
Color and the Law.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1, 1991): 1242.
39 Malini Johar-Schueller, “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg
Body.” Signs 31, no. 1 (September 2005): 77.

40 Ibid.

29
“race” essentially helps whiteness, and Eurocentrism retain and even exacerbate their power and
privilege when uninterrogated.
There were multiple opportunities in the exhibition to explore the complexity of different
women’s experiences and art practices in a dynamic way. Not one Afro-Latina or indigenous
woman was included any section other than in “The Self-Portrait.” I would posit that, for
example, in “Body Landscapes,” the work of Deborah Jack, a multi-media artist from St.
Marteen could have offered a poignant reflection on the relationship between the land, traumatic
historical events and counter-narratives. Within “Performing the Body,” which focused on the
intersection between dance, performance and theater, there was an opening to really dig deeply
into the ways the African diaspora directly mediates this, particularly in the Caribbean, and Latin
America. In addition to the notable talent of Celia Cruz and her radical transformation of the
representation of Afro-Latinas there are a multitude of theater and film actresses, dance and
performance artists who could have been included. For example, the work of Eusebia Cosme, a
renowned performer of “Afro-Antillean” poetry and an actress in Mexican films in the 1960s
would have undoubtedly been a rich contribution to this exhibition. Through her performances
she “fundamentally helped transform how gendered and sexualized representations of Blackness
circulated throughout the Americas, “and, by “focusing on her Afro-Cuban heritage, Cosme
embodied and performed racialized and sexualized representations of Blackness.”41 In lieu of
this, the curators elected to include a work by Martha Araújo, non-Black Brazilian artist. In the
work, we see the documentation of a performance displayed as three black and white
photographs. The piece is entitled, Para um corpo nas suas impossibilidades (For a body in its
impossibilities,1985) and the viewer sees a triptych each with a visibly non-black figure

41 Takkara Brunson, “Eusebia Cosme and Black Womanhood on the Transatlantic Stage.” Meridians 15, no. 2
(January 1, 2017): 389–411. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1950026399/.

30
capturing the body in different positions against a wall (fig. 2). There were 23 artists from Brazil
included in the exhibition, none of them Afro-Brazilian. Somehow, in Brazil, a country that has
the largest population of African descended people outside of Africa, the curators could not or
chose not to include a legibly Black woman and instead included a white passing Brazilian
woman to explore themes of the body and radicality.
The choice by the curators to include artists from predominately visual art backgrounds
there are multiple missed opportunities in the exhibition to include work by Afro-Latinas within
that limiting frame. Particularly in relation to dance, film, performance and theater, the absence
here of any contributions of Afro-Latina artists other than Cruz is telling precisely because of the
integral ways in which the African diaspora culture shapes these mediums. There are multiple
missed opportunities in the exhibition: from documentary filmmaker Gloria Rolando, actress and
performer Julia Marichal, singer Ruth Fernandez, to Toto Bissainthe, the exiled Haitian
performer. However, there was the room to include Maria Luisa Bemberg, an Argentinian
filmwriter, director and actress in the exhibition. Bemberg, born in 1922 to a very prominent
family in Argentina focused much of her work on famous Argentinian women and the upper
class. The curators selected a film of this artist entitled El mundo de la mujer (Woman’s world,
1972) (fig.3) in which the subjects of the film are non-black women. The issue here is that the
curators found room to include moving images and films from non-Black artists yet missed
opportunities to include Afro-Latinas working in this medium where there are substantial
contributions from in the field by them. The absence of work by Black women calls into question

31
the inclusion of other white or white passing artists throughout every thematic section of the
exhibition.42
While I am not invested in making claims about ancestry, I am compelled to interrogate
the ways in which the reliance on color and phenotypical traits to allocate resources and assign
privilege operates. The discourse around colorism is concerned less with ancestry and more with
the experience of being legibly Black and what its signification means in terms of social,
political and economic access, as well as bodily autonomy. There is also the psychological
component to being marked as either white or white passing versus that of being read as Black
which is what Santa Cruz’s work speaks to. It is necessary to understand that had she been a
light-skinned or white passing person with African descent, her experience would have been
different and consequently, the way she viewed her work would have undoubtedly been changed.
If there is one segment of the exhibition that encapsulates the larger issue with the logic
and execution of Radical Women it is the section entitled “Feminisms.” There are 12 women
artists who are all light skinned and white passing. While there no Black women here, the work
of Lea Lublin, a Polish born émigré to Argentina, is included. One of her works Interrogations
sur la femme (Interrogations About Women,1978) , is a wall-bound piece whereby questions of
womanhood are offered, painted in alternating colors on a rectangular fabric, in French (fig.4).
While this work is from a series combining images from the Renaissance with modernist work,
using feminist and psychoanalytical methodology to deconstruct these two canons of art history,
it is nonetheless rooted in a radicality that pertains to a praxis evolving from the Euro-American

42 On the Hammer Museum website there is an extensive archive of materials related to the exhibition. Included in
this archive are images and biographies of each of the artists included in the exhibition. The images of all of the
artists included can be found at https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/artists .

32
tradition.43 As a point of reflection, I offer this particular example as a meditation on the ways in
which whiteness is not only privileged here, but also the way that the term radical is employed
through Eurocentrism. While artists from the Caribbean and the French Antilles were almost
entirely absent in the exhibition, the inclusion of Lublin’s work signals both a clear refusal to
consider the simultaneity of Blackness and radicality and the tendency of the curators to include
work by European diasporic artists whose work they deemed as fitting for the concept of
contemporary radical art while also ignoring and Afro-Latina artists. It is curious that a
European born woman, whose family emigrated when she was young, and whose work we
encounter in French is part of the fabric of “Latin American Art” but a Black Haitian, a St.
Maartenian or Martinican cannot. What does this say of these Feminisms and more what does
this exclusion contribute to the discourse around the idea of “Latin America”? The evasion of the
critical ways in which race and specifically being legibly Black intersect with the experience of
being gendered or identifying as a woman is palpable. And while the focus of Radical Women is
not explicitly about violence against women, its inception is predicated upon the sort of soft
violence of the historic erasure of women in art history and museums.
Moreover, because this exhibition purports to be in dialogue with Latina and Latin
American women artists, both identities that arise from colonization, it mandates a thoughtful
and comprehensive treatment of the ways that violence gives life to those two concepts and
importantly, that the color of a woman’s skin was a determinant for specific types of violence. If
we extend this logic, there is necessary inquiry into what the term “radical” means and
specifically how Black women embody radicality in ways that are not necessarily linked to

43 This reading of the work is based on a conversation with my thesis chair, Karen Moss on 2/3/2020.

33
avant-garde art practice but to radical existence through joy, pleasure, survival and cultural
expression.
Radical Women fails to capture the essence of precisely what Latin America is; that its
existence is contingent upon both colonization and the endurance of the slavery that both
facilitates and sustains the extraction of wealth that allows for cultural production of Western art
and its canon. Conversely, Paul Gilroy suggests for descendants of slaves that “artistic
expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered by the masters as token
substitute for freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-
fashioning and communal liberation.”44 It is this self-fashioning and communal liberation in
spite of and in response to bondage that constitutes a type of radicality that isn’t considered in
this exhibition and one that certainly would and should have changed the landscape of artworks
chosen. This was a missed opportunity to explore notions of radical joy and healing,
acknowledging that “even though history has been terribly unkind to the African body, the body
was and still is capable of being something quite beautiful, quite sensuous, quite joyous.”45 It is
in this joy, beauty and sensuality that radicality resides along with survival and produces an
entirely different radicality one that exists outside of Euro-American avant-garde concept of the
radical. Without this recognition, the term radical becomes almost oxymoronic in this exhibition.
It is imperative, for this thesis and for the broader conversation around this historical narrative to
note every mode of existing as “Black” in the Americas and the Caribbean is in and of itself
radical.

44 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 40.
45 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, “The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror,” in Gender and
Catastrophe, edited by Ronit Lenṭin (London: Zed Books, 1997), 322.

34
Case Study – Victoria Santa Cruz
In the context of Latin America, a vastly heterogenous geographic region, colonialism
operated through violence on specific bodies. What Santa Cruz’ life’s work was oriented around
was precisely the difference of existing in a Black body in which both physical and structural
violence has been and continues to be inflicted on Black bodies. Victoria Santa Cruz was an
Afro-Peruvian choreographer, composer, activist and poet who was born into a family steeped in
the tradition of Black intellectuals, artists and musicians deeply rooted in Lima, Peru. Along with
her brother, Nicomedes, she cofounded the first Black theater company in Peru and spent most of
her life invested in the work of recuperating the lost histories of Black cultural contributions in
her country. In her writing about Santa Cruz, Heidi Feldman describes the “mobilization of
Peru’s Black population” through both Victoria and her brothers’ “reconstruction of lost cultural
traditions, music and dance in the 1960s and 1970s.”46 Her work included writing plays,
performing African dances, and reconstructing religious practices that had not survived.
Importantly, Santa Cruz was working both through ancestral memory and as part of a larger
community of Black Peruvians, and crucially, her practice was situated around community, not
the individual. Feldman suggests, “for Victoria, the process of creating works…fueled her role as
mentor for awakening Black consciousness, self-awareness and pride…She and her brother
devoted themselves to researching and remembering the music, dance, and cultural traditions of
their ancestors, and their young company members, bred in a society that hardly recognized the
presence of a Black population.”47 It is the erasure of her larger body of work and her

46 Heidi Carolyn Feldman, "Black Rhythms of Peru: Staging Cultural Memory through Music and Dance, 1956–
2000." UMI No. 3035664, University of California, Los Angeles (2001): 114.
47 Ibid.

35
community, and the lack of recognition of the Black population, that problematizes the way she
was included in this exhibition.
When one enters the exhibition, the very first work of art in the “The Self Portrait”
gallery is a projection of Victoria Santa Cruz’s performance Me gritaron negra (They shouted
Black at me, 1978) (fig. 5), strategically placed at the entrance. She is a vision to be sure. This
image is projected on a floating gallery wall that is noticeably larger than the two screens
floating behind her. As one watches her perform with her collaborators, her presence dominates
the room, injecting the exhibition with a powerful message for audiences to ruminate on. Her
performance is foregrounded in the show, but somehow also isolated as no other work
contextualizes or relates to her video or its content. It is ironic that the one visible Black body we
encounter not only in this gallery, but in the entirety of the exhibition, is that of Santa Cruz,
whose voice is literally exclaiming out to the audience about the experience of being
marginalized, ignored and erased and of the burden Black bodies carry in Latin America.
What Santa Cruz is exclaiming in her video is not an individual experience or reflection
of the self. In fact, she is articulating the damage done to a community. and there is an ensemble
of people literally echoing her sentiment, which marks this work as deliberately not about the
self as individual or a portrait of one person (fig.6). Performing with the collective of other
Afro-Latinx collaborators she exclaims:
I was only seven years,
only seven years
Not even seven years
I wasn't even five!

Suddenly, some voices in the street
Shouted at me: "Black!"
Black, black, black, black, black, black!

Am I black? I said to myself
Yes!

36
What does it mean being black?
Black!
I didn't knew the sad truth that it hid
Black!
And I felt black
Black!
Like they said
Black!
And I recoiled
Black!
As they wanted to
Black!
And I hated my hair and my thick lips
And I looked with sadness at my dark skin
and I recoiled
Black!
and I recoiled
Black, black, black,black, black black!
And the time passed by

Always bitter
I continued carrying in my back
My heavy burden

And it was so heavy!
I straightened my hair
I put powder on my face
And through my hair always resounded
The same word
Black, black, black, black, black, black!
Until one day that I recoiled
I recoiled and was just about to fall
Black, black, black,black, black, black!

So what?! Black!
Yes! Black!
I'm Black!
I'm black

Black! Yes!
Black!
I'm black
From now on I don't want to
straight my hair
I don't want to!
And I'm going to laugh at those
Who think, according to them, that
To avoid us some bad moment
Call black people "people of color"
And what color?!
Black!
And how good it sounds
Black!
And what a rhythm it has
Black, black, black,black,
Black, black, black,black,

37
Black, black, black,black,

Finally
Finally I understood!
Finally!
I don't recoil anymore
Finally!
Finally!
I'm sure on my way
Finally!
I go on and wait
Finally!
And I bless the skies
Because god wanted
that ebony is my color
And I understood
Finally!
I have the key
Black, black, black,black!
Black, black, black,black,
Black, black, black,black,
Black, black,
I'm a black woman!

While Santa Cruz is a central figure in this performance, she is not alone nor is her performance
a reflection or self-reflective. This work is a recording of a performance excerpted from a
documentary on the life of Santa Cruz and her folklore ensemble. The incantation is one that
isn’t necessarily derived from a practice of portraiture or the reflection of self and importantly is
not a performance by an individual and through closer examination amplifies the issue of a
flawed logic in the exhibition. There is both the misplacement of the work and the broader
misreading of it. The poem recited speaks of the discrimination and vitriol aimed at not just her
body, but all Black bodies. The performance is a collaboration, with a chorus of voices echoing
her sentiment and speaks to not just her experience but of the psychological violence endured by
Black people in Peru and Latin America, more generally . The oeuvre of Santa Cruz is incredibly
rich and suggests quite pointedly that she was not at all concerned with self, but instead with the
emancipation and liberation of the community of Black Peruvians and Latin Americans. The last
line she performs, “I am a Black woman” marks in many important ways why it is imperative to

38
demarcate the experience of Black women as distinct and to pay particular attention to conditions
that shape their experience. Moreover, this particular moment in her spoken word piece could
have been a moment of self-reflection for the curators to think more critically about Santa Cruz’s
work and to resituate their framework.
This inclusion of the performance video by Santa Cruz in the exhibition is simultaneously
troubling and illuminating. Through analysis of the historical framework that situates the
exhibition in conjunction with the curatorial logic it is evident that the inclusion of Cruz’s work
was insufficient, exploitative and instrumentalizing. Its scale and overt placement mark what
Robert Adams Lee Jr. articulates as the hyper-visible-invisible body.48 The performance is
displayed to make an Afro-Latina hyper-visible and centered, but there is no other connection to
the content of her work either surrounding her or in the rest of the exhibition. For the purpose of
publicizing the exhibtion, her image was notably used in the marketing, so as to signify a diligent
treatment of Afro-Latinidad and was a hypervisble presence to garner attention while
simultaneously invisible in discourse, publication and the rest of the exhibition. The way in
which this performance is situated in the gallery in relation to the other works of art suggests that
while Victoria Santa Cruz is hyper-visible in the gallery, the narrative of the exhibition
ultimately insists on the invisibility of the African Diaspora in Latin America. The prominent
placement of this work in this first gallery suggest that the curators are attempting to make-up for
the subsequent absence of any other Afro-Latina women in the rest of the exhibition. The
curators have stated that their aim was to create theoretical and critical frameworks to think
about works by Latin American women artists, but this moment exemplifies the boundaries of

48 Robert Lee Adams Jr., “Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean : Beyond
Disciplinary and National Boundaries” in Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean :
Beyond Disciplinary and National Boundaries, edited by Robert Lee Adams Jr. (London ;: Routledge, 2013), 2.

39
their thinking. The exhibition was a missed opportunity to delve deeply into the very
complicated nexus of Latinidad and to use the exhibition as a of point epistemological inquiry.
Another facet of this critique is noting and analyzing the other artists and works surrounding
Santa Cruz’s installation. Directly to the left are three paintings on vinyl by Brazilian artist
Wanda Pimentel (fig.6-8) The colors are vibrant, deep reds, crisp greens and bright yellows. The
sole figure that occupies each canvas are a stark white surrounded by colorful objects and
settings that offer a deep contrast. While these figures may not be meant to represent white or
European descended Latin Americans, there is an abundance of non-black figures that occupy
the galleries of the exhibition. For example, on the same gallery wall to the right and just around
the corner from Santa Cruz’s projection of work, is a series of a photographs by American artist
Yolanda Lopez from the series Tableaux Vivant (fig. 9). What is particularly striking is the
juxtaposition of these images, of a singular light-skinned American Latina, against a backdrop
reminiscent of the Virgin de Guadalupe, smiling and joyful. In just these two instances, the
disconnect from the historical narrative, cultural context and the significance of the work of
Santa Cruz is jarring. Moreover, it illuminates the particular subjectivity this exhibtion is
concerned with examining and showcasing while being passive at best about the experience of
dark-skinned and Afro-descended women.
In an exhibition of art by women, “it is not enough to show the body as a discursive
entity without addressing how different material practices are interwoven with the discursive to
affect and shape the materiality of the body.”49 The insertion of the work of Victoria Santa Cruz
in Radical Women and the strategic display of her body/being without also offering a critical

49 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, “The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror,” in Gender and
Catastrophe, edited by Ronit Lenṭin (London: Zed Books, 1997), 313.

40
framework for addressing precisely how material and discursive practices shaped this materiality
is exactly how anti-blackness operates. It is a refusal to engage with Blackness, with difference
and the textures that shape the materiality of the body.
In light of the legacy that Victoria Santa Cruz leaves behind, one that is filled with
tremendous accomplishments, and knowing how deeply she cared about celebrating and
preserving the African diaspora, specifically in Peru, I imagine that she would find her inclusion
in this exhibition, without any of her contemporaries, students or mentors, peculiar. It is for lack
of a better term, heartbreaking to think of what she observed, what she created and what she left
behind, and that decades later, her work would be utilized in Radical Women as an outlier and
not as part of the nucleus of what is radical women and art in Latin America.

41

Conclusion
This critique of Radical Women really ought to compel curators, scholars and institutions,
to think critically about the ways in which a museum might function to inscribe fixed notions of
identity, ones that are easily consumable and do not necessitate a deep critique of the legacy of
colonialism. Arguably, this exhibition served as a vehicle to promote a marketable and normative
image of both radical women and art from “Latin America,” one that is undeniably tethered to
Euro-American notions of knowledge, art practice and radicality. The tension then becomes
evident by the tethering of art to art in Latin America, specifically because there is no “Latin
America” without brown and Black bodies that produce it through the colonial confrontation.
The idea of Latin America can hardly be represented without acknowledging the complex,
nuanced and diverse experiences of a shared colonial heritage. Furthermore, “any attempt to
address the issues posed by modern art in Latin America has to start by questioning the validity
of the term ‘Latin American art’ itself as there exists no one identity for the countries south of
the border.”50
Afro-Latinas have been routinely ignored by and distanced from “Latinidad” and Radical
Women did not do enough to dispel or condemn this. This exhibition in so many ways just
rearticulated not only the center-periphery relationship that exists both in the art world and
globally, but also reinforced the marginalization Black women face in Latin America and the
United States thereby inflicting a structural violence that serves to maintain colonial
relationships. For those who claim it, Latinidad is to embody a complex colonial hybridity

50 Mari Carmen Ramirez, "Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art." Art
Journal 51, no. 4. (1992): 61.

42
tethered to language, geography, land, customs, rituals and blood. To be Afro-Latina is then an
even more dynamic and complicated relationship to these things.
What both PST LA/LA and Radical Women revealed is the extent to which there is much
work to be done in field of curatorial practice to recuperate the loss of the African diaspora in
cultural histories as well as in the conversations around identity and racial politics. Going
forward, the field of curatorial practice ought to be equally concerned with political, social, and
cultural histories as they are with Euro-American art history. There is no room for curators to not
be well informed about the regions from which the art they are curating. I think to push that
sentiment even further, curators should be compelled to think deeply about their own
positionality and privilege. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill was educated in the UK and Andrea Giunta lives
and works in Argentina, a country that is the deeply steeped in European traditions with a very
small population of Indigenous and Afro-Latinxs. Mari Carmen Ramírez, a prominent curator
suggests that “we can ask how curators steeped in the values and symbols of a hegemonic culture
can attempt to speak for, or represent, the voices of the very different, heterogenous traditions
embodied in the Latin “other.”51 What Radical Women revealed is that this is still a valid
question, and unfortunately, one that our art world culture isn’t quite committed to. For the
duration of Radical Women, there was little to no critique and no other framework offered to
better understand the implications of an exhibition this broad in content. I think that is both quite
telling and indicative of the scope of the work that lies ahead and the ways in which the language
of feminism goes unchallenged.

51 Ramírez, Mari Carmen. "Beyond “the Fantastic”: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art."
Art Journal 51, no. 4 (1992): 61.

43
A curator should consider them self an educator of visual literacy, cultural phenomena
and of, importantly, the historical contexts within which works are produced. I want to suggest
that there must be a shift in curatorial practices to emphasize the ways in which art, visual
literacy and pedagogy is used and not used to engage in critical dialogues around anti-Blackness,
white supremacy and legacies of colonialism that are inherent to the institutions and the histories
they are tied to. If we understand curating as pedagogical and a method of teaching, then we
might engender a different sense of responsibility around the practices of the profession. It would
be unthinkable, unfathomable even, to curate an exhibition of Latin American art and not include
artists descended from Hispanic origin and the European colonial project. And yet, as
inextricably bound to that project African descended bodies are, they seem to not have found a
place in the story of Latin American Art.
We have to consider other models to sufficiently counteract hegemony as perpetrated by
eurocentrism, not for political reasons, but simply as a means to actively not reproduce the
systems of a colonial history. In a speculative future iteration of Radical Women, I would want to
see an exhibition that explores dance theater, performance, and even literature and film along
with culinary histories and food performance, and ethnomusicology I want visual arts to be
reconsidered and reconstituted through and centered around indigenous and Black cultural
production because these are integral components of what constitutes contemporary notions of
Latin America. An exhibition that purports to be in dialogue with Latin America and Los
Angeles, necessitates a deep examination of the role of the African diaspora in the shaping the
both the art historical record and larger histories. We ought to be heavily invested in using the
museum, in a “post-colonial” moment, to rewrite the historical narratives and correct the erasure
of the African diaspora from the colonial project that is Latin America.

44

Bibliography

Adams, Robert Lee, Jr. Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean:
Beyond Disciplinary and National Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2013.

Arrizón, Alicia. Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999.

Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable
Terror,” in Gender and Catastrophe, edited by Ronit Lenṭin, 311-322. London: Zed Books,
1997.

Brunson, Takkara. “Eusebia Cosme and Black Womanhood on the Transatlantic Stage.”
Meridians 15, no. 2 (January 1, 2017): 389–411.

Carter, Jacoby Adeshei, Carter, Jacoby Adeshei, and Harris, Leonard. African American
Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures: A Critical Edition of Lectures by Alain Locke.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016.

Cooks, Bridget R. Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color. (Women of Color at the Center: Selections from the
Third National Conference on Women of Color and the Law).” Stanford Law Review
43, no. 6 (July 1, 1991).

Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia, Andrea Giunta, and Rodrigo Alonso. Radical Women: Latin
American Art, 1960-1985. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum and DelMonico
Books/Prestel, 2017.

Feldman, Heidi Carolyn. "Black Rhythms of Peru: Staging Cultural Memory through Music and
Dance, 1956–2000." Order No. 3035664, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-c
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/304689720?accountid=14749.

Flores, Tatiana. “Disturbing Categories, Remapping Knowledge” in The Routledge
Companion to African American Art History, edited by Eddie Chambers, 134-145.
New York: Routledge, 2020.

45
Fusco, Coco. English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York
City: New Press, 1995.

Gaines, Charles C. A “Tale of Conflict: the contemporary museum in the age of liberalism” on
http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2016/03/charles -gaines/ (Accessed December 12, 2019)

Gaines, C. The Theater of refusal: Black art and mainstream criticism Irvine: Fine Arts
Gallery, University of California: Irvine, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis. Black in Latin America. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1993.

Jimé nez Romá n, Miriam, and Flores, Juan. The Afro-Latin@ Reader. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010.

Jimenez-Munoz, Gladys. “The Elusive Signs of African-Ness: Race and Representation Among
Latinas in the United States” in Border/Lines. January 1, 1993.
http://search.proquest.com/docview/197262270/

Johar Schueller, Malini. “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color
of the Cyborg Body.” Signs 31, no. 1, September 2005.

Jones, Kellie. South of Pico : African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

McMillan, Uri. Embodied Avatars : Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. New
York: New York University Press, 2015.

Mignolo, Walter. “Museums in the colonial horizon of modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the
Museum” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, edited. Doro Globus. London:
Ridinghouse, 2011. 374.

Preziosi, D., & Farago, C. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Aldershot, Hants,
England: Ashgate Pub, 2004.

Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America." International
Sociology 15, no. 2, 2000.

Quijano, Aníbal, and Ennis, Michael. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin
America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3, 2000.

Ramírez, Mari Carmen. "Beyond “the Fantastic””: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of
Latin American Art." Art Journal 51, no. 4, 1992.

46
Rohrleitner, M. and Ryan, Sarah E. Dialogues across Diasporas: Women Writers,
Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation. Critical
Africana Studies: African, African American, and Caribbean Interdisciplinary and
Intersectional Studies. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013.

Spivey, D. “Trans-Atlantic Food Migration: The African Culinary Influence on the Cuisine of
the Americas” (2018, December 23) Retrieved from https://www.Blackpast.org/global-
african-history/perspectives-global-african-history/trans-atlantic-food-migration-the-
african-culinary-influence-on-the-cuisine-of-the-americas/

Vinson, Ben, Iii. “Introduction: African (Black) Diaspora History, Latin American History.” The
Americas 63, no. 1 , 2006.https://muse.jhu.edu/article/201799.

Wade, Peter. “African Diaspora and Colombian Popular Music in the Twentieth Century.”
Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 2, October 1, 2008.

47

Figures

(fig. 1)Source: CEPAL.org
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/qa-with-director-of-harvards-afro-latin-american-
research-institute/

48

(fig.2) Martha Araújo, Brazilian, Photographic documentation of the performance "Para Um Corpo Nas
Suas Impossibilidades", 1985, Documentation of performance: three black-and-white photographs, (Each): 22 x 17
1/2 in., Collection of the artist, courtesy of Galeria Jaqueline Martins.

49

(Fig. 3) Maria Luisa Bemberg, El mundo de la mujer,1972, 16mm film transferred to DVD, color, sound, 15 minutes, 52
seconds, Maria Luisa Bemberg family

50

(fig.4) Lea Lublin, Argentine, Interrogations sur la Femme (Interrogations about Woman),1978, Synthetic polymer paint on
fabric, wood, and string, 109 1/16 x 69 11/16 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Acquired through the generosity of
The Modern Women's Fund, the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka

51

(fig.5) Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz, Me gritaron negra,1978,Video documentation of performance, excerpted from the
documentary Victoria—Black and Woman (1978) Sound, Running Time: 3 minutes, 58 seconds (excerpt)
Directed by Torgeir Wethal and produced by Odin Teatret Film/OTA-Odin, Teatret Archives.

52

(Fig. 6) Wanda Pimentel, Sem título, Série Envolvimento (Untitled, Series Entanglement), 1968, Vinyl paint on canvas, 45 3/8 x
34 15/16 in., Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM RJ Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro

53

(Fig. 7) Wanda Pimentel, Transposição I (Transposition I),1968, Vinyl paint on canvas
Dimensions: Sheet: 51 3/16 x 38 1/4 in., Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM RJ Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro

54

(fig. 8) Wanda Pimentel, Sem título, Série Envolvimento (Untitled, Series Entanglement), 1968, Vinyl paint on canvas, 46 7/16 x
35 13/16 in., Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM RJ Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro
.

55

(fig. 9) Yolanda Lopez, Tableaux Vivant Series, 1978, Twelve color photographs, (Each): 14 x 9 1/4 in., Yolanda M. Lopez,
Photography: Susan Moguo

56

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The globalization of contemporary Chinese art: biennales, large-scale exhibitions, and the transnational work of Cai Guo-Qiang

PDF

Poetry as a political tool: text and image in the narrative of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

PDF

Ableism in the U.S. art context: curators, art museums, and the non-normative body

PDF

Queer nightlife networks and the art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz

PDF

The Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe program and Essential Cinema at Anthology Film Archives: curating underground film

PDF

Contingent practice: contemporary methods in art process dependent on architecture of the exhibition space

PDF

Evaluating art for social change: the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department in relationship to Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil; Evaluating art for social cha...

PDF

Sites of oppositional consciousness: the construction of an alternative cyborg in Trinh T. Minh‐ha’s Night Passage

PDF

Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

Asset Metadata

Creator Morán, Bianca Marisol (author)

Core Title The trouble with Radical Women: anti-Blackness, Latinidad, and contemporary curating

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/26/2020

Defense Date 04/24/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anti-Blackness,Colonialism,coloniality of power,curatorial practice,decolonial,Hammer Museum,institutional critique,Latin America,Latinidad,museum studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,PST LA/LA,radical women,radicality,The Getty

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Moss, Karen (committee chair), Belisle, Natalie (committee member), Frazier, Taj (committee member), Jones, Amelia G. (committee member)

Creator Email biancamo@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-289963

Unique identifier UC11663569

Identifier etd-MornBianca-8345.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-289963 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MornBianca-8345.pdf

Dmrecord 289963

Document Type Thesis

Rights Morán, Bianca Marisol

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA