Editorial Commentary

At the most recent Latin American Studies Association conference in San Francisco, I attended a session in which multiple speakers presented on art and visual culture. Though the panelists have all published extensively on the topic and work in academia, none of them currently teaches in an art history department. In the question-and-answer portion of the session, one speaker went so far as to distance themselves from the discipline, stating that their current research is not art history, though they analyze well-known artists in the contemporary art world. As I attended subsequent sessions at LASA 2025, I continued to witness this phenomenon, with scholars from all fields centering visual images in their argumentation about coloniality, histories of slavery, gender and sexuality studies, and body politics or the theme of the conference, “Poner el cuerpo en Latinx América.” I introduce this topic not to police disciplinary borders, just the opposite. I urge art history to continue to open itself to other fields of study and methods of producing knowledge. I left the conference questioning the rejection of art history by that speaker and why emerging scholars may find belonging in other disciplines.Tatiana Flores’s 2024 article “On the Impossibility of Global Modernisms” offers insights into the conservatism of art history.1 Flores spends the first part of the essay considering the sticky issue of how time and space have dictated the formation of the discipline: art history is constituted by the intersection of periodization and area studies. Surveys, the building blocks of an art history education, rely on moving students spatially around the world and across historical periods to make claims about the development or forward progress of art and visual culture. Flores pointedly argues that the categories of both time and space within art history continue to be Western constructs, based on her readings of such scholars as Walter Mignolo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. These authors underscore how time as a linear concept and the supremacy of the West or the North Atlantic have become universals and thus remain unmarked or “natural,” which Flores connects to the way the Western canon of art history promotes white supremacy. The need, especially when researching, writing, and teaching about modern and contemporary art, to return to the familiar terms of art movements or linear periodization is now applied to “peripheral” artists and places. This reaffirms the dominance of white Western cultural values.Flores proposes the philosopher George Yancy’s theory of “un-suturing” as an anti-racist approach to art history, which he describes as the “constant striving” and one that “require[s] practice, a reiterative opening and wounding, habits of uncovering the stench of white mendacity.”2 Flores calls for all academic disciplines to undertake this difficult work or, as she writes, “there must be an acknowledgment of the problem: the hegemony of white supremacist thinking and gazing, along with its all-encompassing, pervasive, impermeable nature.”3 To return to the dual constitutive parts of art history, the organization of the field as shaped by time and space must be broken open and examined for its “stench of white mendacity”; therefore, its epistemology must be questioned. As Junyoung Verónica Kim and Naveen Minai have written, “Defined as the study of knowledge, epistemology as a Western historical construct always already categorizes what is knowledge …and determines the ways in which we know and study. The definition of knowledge governs how we work as students, teachers, and as scholars. In short, epistemology underpins and scaffolds the historical development of academia as infrastructure, institution, and set of practices.”4 In her essay Flores points to the ways white supremacy shapes this construct in art history; Kim and Minai also add “cisheterosexism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism,” which “create the conditions under which knowledge is produced in academia.”Kim and Minai ultimately state that “what counts as knowledge is often about who counts as human.”5 Academic disciplines assign more value to particular humans, and within art history, to specific cultural products. Art history privileges a linear development toward realism or its avant-garde deconstruction (the “Western canon”), as shown in fine art mediums like painting and sculpture. The global turn within the discipline has often meant the ability to make legible “non-Western” production under these parameters. In the field of Latin American and Latinx art history, artists have felt the need to approximate themselves to the great European styles as a way to demonstrate “modernity” and, by default, their value as humans within the larger political and economic order. Decolonial strategies make this desiring machine visible within the field, as well as the larger construction of this place called “Latin America,” based on whiteness. Moreover, recent art history scholarship has reevaluated the relationship between the human and nonhuman as an attempt to realign the Western emphasis on the individual (white) man as the privileged locus of signification.With her “anachronistic” application of anthropological theory, Mary K. Coffey’s essay “Rocks: José Clemente Orozco and the Geontologies of Mexico’s Pedregal” in this issue of LALVC reconsiders the artwork of one of the most well-known names within Latin American art history in order to ask difficult questions of the field. These include the desire on the part of the art historian to dislodge an object from its origin point (both temporal and artistic intention) and re-view it from our present historical moment. For Coffey, the lenses are the urgencies of climate disaster, racial capitalism, and the ongoing violence of colonialization. As she notes, although these may not have been Orozco’s conditions of artistic production, they nevertheless serve as useful lenses to understand how the Indigenous people of Mexico could both be integral to the development of national mythmaking and dehumanized, disposable, and dispossessed.In “Hunters, Warriors, Rulers: Images of Violence from the Peruvian North Coast (1200 BCE–850 BCE),” Hugo C. Ikehara-Tsukayama returns to the representation of war and hunting in Moche cultural production. He argues that rather than reflect a lived reality, the imagery integrated characteristics of the warrior and hunter into the rulers’ identities as part of a larger political ideology. Ikehara-Tsukayama challenges historians to re-view these objects not as documentary evidence but instead as political messages or modes of communication. Interestingly for the people of the Peruvian North Coast this meant a symbiosis of the human and nonhuman, or the visual synthesis of the human and animal as a way to draw relations of violence between the beings, while also making connections between the elites and supernatural beings who often took the form of animals.In “Destellos fugaces: Dinámicas de promoción y visibilización del arte de Centroamérica, 1950–2010,” Sofía Vindas-Solano and Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby analyze the curatorial projects of José Gómez Sicre and Virginia Pérez-Ratton and their presentation of Central American art and its impact on the historiography of the region. Focused on a transnational approach to art history and thus a repudiation of the field’s insistence on national projects, the authors promote the visibility of art from the region, a persistent blind spot in the history of modern art from Latin America. They also demonstrate the value of institutional histories and narratives based on individual figures. Simultaneously, they emphasize the limitations experienced by Gómez Sicre and Pérez-Ratton within their specific historical conditions to amplify the awareness of art from Central America.