Book on Mexican art reveals echoes of colonial history


 

Associate professor of the history of art and visual studies María Fernández’s most recent book explores Mexico’s visual culture in relation to the country’s history, collecting case studies of Mexican art and architecture from the 17th to the early 21st century.

The book, “Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture” (University of Texas Press, 2014), recently was chosen for the Association for Latin American Art’s 2015 Arvey Book Award, given annually for the best work on Latin American art history.

Topics Fernández investigates include how art and architecture in Mexico have reflected power dynamics and forms of violence that were established in the colonial era – before Mexico became independent of Spain in the early 19th century – and have persisted since.

Organizing episodes from four centuries of art and architectural history around a consistent historical theme of cosmopolitanism, Fernández highlights the role of art in uniting the local and the global, and the universal and the particular. She argues that the established forms and meanings in Mexican art both reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories and ways of being in the world, as well as ideas of identity and subjectification.

Fernández’s teaching has included courses in Mesoamerican art, Latin American colonial art and architecture, and modern Latin American art. She taught her first course in the history and theory of digital art in 1994, when the field was scarcely recognized.

Her research interests include the interrelations of Latin American art and modern technologies; cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s and its repercussions in later art and theory; feminist art and technology; and the aesthetics of interaction and responsiveness. She is co-editor of “Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices” (2002) and a forthcoming volume of essays, “Latin American Modernisms and Technology,” and is at work on a book investigating cybernetician Gordon Pask’s contributions to theater, art and architecture. 

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