Index# 12290
Check with department for MAJOR/MINOR credit
The course explores key tropes that have informed the formation of a particularly Brazilian identity through the lenses of nature and culture. Though these might seem to be contradictory categories, they nevertheless constitute ways for thinking about Brazil’s unique character. Beginning with texts and images related to the conquest, the course takes a panoramic tour of Brazil, through its cultural products and their relation to place. We will study indigenous cultures of the Amazon; Brazil in the European imaginary; colonial artists in the Northeast and Minas Gerais; the representation of race and class through text and image; the conceptualization of modernity in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasilia; and the dichotomy of utopia and dystopia that has recurred in the country’s history. Given the professor’s expertise in art and literature in particular, there will be a strong emphasis on these areas, but architecture, urbanism, film, and music will also be addressed.
The course carries with it a one-credit study abroad component in Brazil. An eight-day program is planned for Winter 2020.
About Professor Flores
Professor Flores is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Art History and an affiliate of the Critical Caribbean Studies Program. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American art, she is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013).
Professor Flores is active as an independent curator and art critic. She was an invited expert for the launch of the Getty Foundation initiative Pacific Standard Time 2: Latin America – Los Angeles, which is supporting exhibitions of Latin American art in Southern California in 2017, and is advising on two related exhibitions. She also served on the selection panel for About Change: Latin American and Caribbean Artists in the Twenty-First Century organized by The World Bank Art Program in 2011-2012. Her recently curated exhibitions include Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions (Washington, D.C., 2011), Disillusions: Gendered Visions of the Caribbean and its Diasporas (New York, 2011), and Medios y ambientes (Mexico City, 2012). Flores was the 2007-2008 Cisneros Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. A regular contributor and advisor to Art Nexus, her writings have appeared in such journals as World Art, Third Text, Woman's Art Journal, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, and ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. She is a member of the editorial board of ASAP/Journal, the scholarly journal of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and also serves as field editor for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in New York.