Symposium: The Question Is Known—(W)here Is Latin American/Latino Art?

Saturday, 19 April from 10:00am to 3:30pm
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

In conjunction with Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, SFAI’s Graduate Division is sponsoring a one-day symposium on issues occasioned by the exhibition The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin American/Latino Art? Curated by Anthony Torres, the exhibition opens at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts on Friday, April 18, from 7:00 to 10:00pm; is on view through Saturday, May 24; and presents work by such SFAI alumni as Enrique Chagoya, Geraldine Lozano, and Manuel Neri.

Symposium participants include art historian Gerardo Mosquera, adjunct curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; Alma Ruiz, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Judith Bettelheim, professor of art history at San Francisco State University; artist and human rights activist Claudia Bernardi; and Hou Hanru, SFAI's director of Exhibitions and Public Programs. The symposium is moderated by exhibition curator and art critic Anthony Torres.

Together with the exhibition itself, the symposium aims to problematize the concept of Latino art—in particular, the tendency to essentialize it as a unified and clear-cut subject. An instance of the general Eurocentric fascination with ethnic alterity, this essentializing tendency is often reinscribed unawares in certain strains of postmodern discourse and art. When ideas of pluralism or multiculturalism are tacitly conflated with ethnic and geographic difference, the yield—if unwitting, ideologically dictated nevertheless—is a conception (or fabrication) of Latino art as discrete, exotic, and wholly other.

Symposium participants will posit a countervailing vision of the category: Latino art as a historically contingent, ideological construction. Neither natural nor given, Latino cultural creations are instead hybrid and fluid; they are established by contact, conflict, and experience and are inherently sympathetic to issue identification. Though often phantasmatically generated, such cultural creations are readable as living sources of inspiration that first become articulated through personal associations, iconography, and, ultimately, formal vocabularies. When recalibrated through theory-governed interventions, Latino art becomes a multivalent area of inquiry out of which innovative questions and issues can be posed about curatorial and institutional perspectives, practices, and politics—a new platform for facilitating greater crosscultural communication and a more inclusive, expanded, even global conception of “American” art.

For more information, go to www.missionculturalcenter.org.