The Insurgent Archive: A Conversation on Art and Institutional Practice

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Mari Carmen Ramírez is the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and founding Director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Yasmin Ramirez holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Born in Brooklyn, she was active in the downtown art scene of the early 1980s as a club kid and art critic for the East Village Eye. Attracted to street art and hip hop, she became acquainted with emerging artists and writers, many of whom are now icons of the 1980s.

This event is part of the series: CURA: CONTINUA: ART, CURATING, AND PRACTICES OF RADICAL CARE

Co-Sponsored by the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Art and Archaeology

The word “curate” commonly describes the professional management, selection, and presentation of works of art. But the term’s etymology lies in the Latin curare, meaning to care for, to heal, to cure. This series of conversations underscores the critical significance of these connotations within contemporary artistic practices in Latin America and its diasporas. To curate, in this sense, is not simply to care for works of art. It is to care for relations between artists, institutions, and histories; to attend to discontinuities in these relations; to weave and sustain networks; to navigate institutional structures in ways that allow for opacity and insurgency alike. Departing from their own practices of radical care within the curatorial field, speakers will address topics including the transformative role of museums and archives; the hemispheric and cross-racial commitments of Latin American and Latinx art; the imperatives of feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial thought; and strategies of forming and imagining artistic community.

Zoom details to follow.