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In conjunction with Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, SFAI’s Graduate Division is sponsoring a one-day symposium on issues occasioned by the exhibition The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin american/Latino art? Curated by Anthony Torres, the exhibition opens at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts on Friday, April 18 and is on view through Saturday, May 24.
Together with the exhibition itself, the symposium aims to problematize the concept of Latino art—in particular, the tendency to essentialize it as a unified and clear-cut subject. an instance of the general eurocentric fascination with ethnic alterity, this essentializing tendency is often reinscribed unawares in certain strains of postmodern discourse and art. When ideas of pluralism or multiculturalism are tacitly conflated with ethnic and geographic difference, the yield—if unwitting, ideologically dictated nevertheless—is a conception (or fabrication) of Latino art as discrete, exotic, and wholly other.
Symposium participants will posit a countervailing vision of the category: Latino art as a historically contingent, ideological construction. neither natural nor given, Latino cultural creations are instead hybrid and fluid; they are established by contact, conflict, and experience and are inherently sympathetic to issue identification. Though often phantasmatically generated, such cultural creations are readable as living sources of inspiration that first become articulated through personal associations, iconography, and, ultimately, formal vocabularies. When recalibrated through theory-governed interventions, Latino art becomes a multivalent area of inquiry out of which innovative questions and issues can be posed about curatorial and institutional perspectives, practices, and politics—a new platform for facilitating greater crosscultural communication and a more inclusive, expanded, even global conception of “american” art.
Speakers
Gerardo Mosquera. Curator, New Museum, New York
Alma Ruiz. Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
Judith Bettelheim. Professor, San Francisco State University
Claudia Bernardi. Artist
Hou Hanrou. Curator, and SFAI's director of Exhibitions and Public Programs
Together with the exhibition itself, the symposium aims to problematize the concept of Latino art—in particular, the tendency to essentialize it as a unified and clear-cut subject. an instance of the general eurocentric fascination with ethnic alterity, this essentializing tendency is often reinscribed unawares in certain strains of postmodern discourse and art. When ideas of pluralism or multiculturalism are tacitly conflated with ethnic and geographic difference, the yield—if unwitting, ideologically dictated nevertheless—is a conception (or fabrication) of Latino art as discrete, exotic, and wholly other.
Symposium participants will posit a countervailing vision of the category: Latino art as a historically contingent, ideological construction. neither natural nor given, Latino cultural creations are instead hybrid and fluid; they are established by contact, conflict, and experience and are inherently sympathetic to issue identification. Though often phantasmatically generated, such cultural creations are readable as living sources of inspiration that first become articulated through personal associations, iconography, and, ultimately, formal vocabularies. When recalibrated through theory-governed interventions, Latino art becomes a multivalent area of inquiry out of which innovative questions and issues can be posed about curatorial and institutional perspectives, practices, and politics—a new platform for facilitating greater crosscultural communication and a more inclusive, expanded, even global conception of “american” art.
Speakers
Gerardo Mosquera. Curator, New Museum, New York
Alma Ruiz. Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
Judith Bettelheim. Professor, San Francisco State University
Claudia Bernardi. Artist
Hou Hanrou. Curator, and SFAI's director of Exhibitions and Public Programs
