¡Viva! New Courses on Latin American Art History Assistant Professor Andrea Vázquez de Arthur, PhD

Last fall, I joined the History of Art department at FIT as a full-time assistant professor, and I am filled with gratitude for the warm welcome I have received! Having gone to graduate school in New York City, I know what an extraordinary place this is for teaching and studying art history, and I am overjoyed to be back. Since my arrival last summer I have enjoyed getting reacquainted with the many firstrate museums in the area and, given FIT’s location, I am getting to know some of the Chelsea galleries as well.

I moved back to the New York City area from Ohio, where I was a curatorial fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art and later taught art history courses at the University of Cincinnati and at Miami University. During my fellowship at the Cleveland Museum, I had the opportunity to curate an exhibition on mola textiles. Molas are hand-sewn cotton panels that are made into blouses (also called molas) and form the centerpiece of traditional dress among Indigenous Guna women in Panama. Through my work on this exhibition, I developed a profound admiration for the ingenuity, creativity, and craftsmanship of these garments and an interest in learning more about the evolution of Indigenous American fashion. I look forward to developing several new courses here at FIT that will explore various aspects of Latin American and Indigenous American art and visual culture.

One course I have already created and am now teaching is Andean Art and Civilization (HA 242). The art of the precolonial Andes—what is today Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia—is my particular area of study and I am thrilled to share this unique artistic tradition with the FIT community. This course surveys a range of artistic styles that developed across the central Andes from the rise of complex civilization from around 3000 BC up until the 1530s. Though the artistic styles covered in this course are diverse, certain shared foundations of artistic practice demonstrate how Andean attitudes towards art and image making are as related to each other as they are distinct from those of the Western world. We often see, for example, a preference for abstraction over naturalism, an emphasis on the conceptual, and a surprising tendency to produce representational images in ways that make them practically invisible to the eye. These traits contribute to an aesthetic that at times looks surprisingly modern, which is actually what initially drew my interest to this field.

I first encountered ancient Andean art while backpacking through South America after graduating from college. Knowing very little about the history of the Andean region, I was astonished by the diversity of artistic styles represented in Peruvian museums, and I became very curious about the people who produced these works. I visited a few of the Inka sites around Cusco—such as Pisaq, Sacsayhuaman, and Machu Picchu—and before long I found myself traipsing across the Andes to explore some of the more far-flung archaeological sites of Peru, including Huacas de Moche, Chachapoyas, and Chavín de Huantar, as well as Tiwanaku and the Island of the Sun in Bolivia. This experience of traveling abroad marked a critical turning point in my life and started me down the path of studying and teaching Latin American art history.

The next course I plan to build here at FIT will focus on modern and contemporary art from Latin America. In this course, I want to explore the relationships Latin American artists had with artists and movements in Europe and the United States throughout the twentieth century, contextualizing influential artists from places like Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil within the greater history and development of modern art. This course will furthermore consider the ways in which artists and art movements of Latin America also looked inward to local histories and identities to produce work that is uniquely Latinx. Building on the theme of Latinx identity, I look forward to creating an additional course that takes a longer view of Latin American art history. By reaching back to the era of the classic Maya, moving through the colonial period, and continuing up to the present day, this course will explore the construction of Latinx identity via its various expressions in the visual arts.

Finally, I am delighted for the opportunity to contribute to FIT’s curriculum in museum studies. In teaching the course Senior Seminar: Museum Exhibition (MP 461), it has been my pleasure to get to know the students of this year’s graduating class majoring in Art History and Museum Professions and I cannot wait to hear about what they go on to do next. Over the course of the semester, we have had many spirited discussions about the strengths and weaknesses of over a dozen exhibitions here in New York—both exhibitions we have visited as a class as well as those we have learned about through student presentations. I look forward to teaching this course again with a new class of AHMP students and a fresh selection of special exhibitions on view. Once again, I am simply overcome by the cultural wealth that we at FIT are fortunate enough to have at our doorstep here in New York City.