Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Ana María Reyes, Boston University

Abstract: When Colombian artist Beatriz González brought furniture assemblages associated with the most private spaces of the domestic sphere into the museum, they disrupted spectators’ expectations. In dialogue with a rapidly globalizing art world, they engaged concurrent artistic practices such as assemblages, ready-mades, and installations. They also made visible the porous and mutually reinforcing domains of public and private life. They complicate the status of commodities as either functional or fetish, and toy with the boundary between the sacred and the profane. Transgressing the boundaries of artistic autonomy, these works converge into the social and political. In so doing, they invite their audiences to recognize and critique the politicized character of private life and identity-formation during the Cold War.

Bio: Dr. Ana María Reyes is an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Center for Latin American Studies and American and New England Studies at Boston University. She is also Affiliated Researcher at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and founding member of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project. Her book The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019) was awarded the Association of Latin American Art History’s Arvey Award for best book in 2020. The book studies symbolic violence in the context of Cold War aesthetic and modernization discourses. She co-edited with Maureen Shanahan Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (University Press of Florida, 2016) on cultural bolivarianisms as a case for the arts and humanities in democratic thinking. She is currently working on a new book, To Weave and Repair: Symbolic Reparations in Colombia’s Peace Process. 

Register in advance at this link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJclfu2rqj4jE9ReOi_8vKeThYZ4xMuIOLGr