PHAIS Seminar Series Week 23: Dr Tatiana Flores (Art History)

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

The We Within: Oceanic Imaginaries of Caribbean Art

Dr Tatiana Flores, University of Virginia

This lecture considers the representation of the ocean in the work of Caribbean artists and writers, including María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Édouard Glissant, Juana Valdés, Nadia Huggins, and Suchitra Mattai. It departs from the critique of Western humanism and its purported universal subject in the art of Campos-Pons and discusses how the artist calls forth a specific “we”: the victims of colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade. Moving from the figural to the abstract sea, the essay turns to representational strategies for rendering the ocean’s vast immensity and the silenced histories contained therein.

Biography

Tatiana Flores is the Edgar F. Shannon Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. A scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx art, she is the author of the award-winning monograph Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013) and curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, distributed by Duke University Press, 2017). Among her recent publications is the co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2024). A former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), Flores is senior editor of ASAP/Journal. She authored the widely cited article “‘Latinidad Is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” published in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2021).

The speaker will deliver this seminar on Zoom but a room will be available on campus for those who wish to attend in person.

Image: Juana Valdés
The Deepest Blue, 2023
36 ceramic panels
50 x 175 x 3 in. 
Location: Cruise Terminal F, PortMiami, 1103 N Cruise Blvd, Miami, FL
Collection: Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places Trust
Photo: Zachary Balber