Collapsing Time with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
History of Art: Terra Foundation Lecture Series in American ArtShow Notes
The 2022 Terra Lectures in American Art centre on Latinx art, with an emphasis on Chicanx (Mexican American) artists, and the theme of migration – of people, ideas, and artworks, from the seventeenth century to today. Art and activism converge as these lectures move across disciplinary, chronological, and geographical borders. We consider new approaches to “American” art, its borders, and contact zones. By posing strategic questions, these four talks demonstrate avenues of inquiry to decolonise art history.
The second lecture in the series, titled “Collapsing Time with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz”, presented by Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black, brings contemporary art by Chicana (Mexican American) women artists into dialogue with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, collapsing and questioning art history’s chronological and geographical frameworks and borders. I examine portrayals of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), famed writer, intellectual, and proto-feminist nun in colonial Mexico. How can recent visual imaginings by Chicana feminist artists illuminate earlier, historical portrayals of Mexico’s “Tenth Muse”? Can the tools of Chicanx studies force a reconceptualization of art history?
Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford 2021-2022, Professor Villaseñor Black is a leading expert on a range of topics related to contemporary Latinx art, the early modern Iberian world and Chicanx studies. She is currently Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2016, she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence for exceptional teaching, innovative research, and strong commitment to university services. Professor Villaseñor Black is also editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (UC Press). Her most recent books include Renaissance Futurities: Art, Science, Invention and Knowledge for Justice: An Ethnic Studies Reader (both from 2019), the new 2020 edition of The Chicano Studies Reader, and Autobiography without Apology: The Personal Essay in Latino Studies, which she co-edited.
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More from History of Art: Terra Foundation Lecture Series in American Art
The 2022 Terra Lectures in American Art centre on Latinx art, with an emphasis on Chicanx (Mexican American) artists, and the theme of migration - of people, ideas, and artworks, from the seventeenth century to today. Art and activism converge as these lectures move across disciplinary, chronological, and geographical borders. We consider new approaches to "American" art, its borders, and contact zones. By posing strategic questions, these four talks demonstrate avenues of inquiry to decolonise art history.
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Dr John Blakinger speaks about the controversy surrounding Dana Shutz's painting of the body of Emmett Till exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennnial. Who has the right to see in an age of image overload? At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting by the artist Dana Schutz depicting the body of Emmett Till, a fifteen-year-old African-American boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, incited outrage. The artists Hannah Black and Parker Bright condemned the work as "black death spectacle." The episode resuscitated debates over the use and abuse of traumatic pictures, and the way visual images propelling the Civil Rights movement also exploited their subjects.
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