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Twentieth-century Latin American art history has grown significantly over the last four decades, expanding on diverse themes such as the avant-garde, indigenism, identity politics, and modernism. However, artists of African descent have largely been written out of this narrative, which privileges artwork made by elite, white artists. The few existing studies focusing on African diasporic art in Latin America prior to the 1990s take primarily a formal approach, detaching artworks and their makers from the region’s broad range of artistic production and specific socio-political environments.

This panel aims to position artists of African descent and/or works depicting African heritage in relationship to mainstream histories of Latin American art during the twentieth century. We hope to showcase the importance of black art in the region and rethink the ways in which we have constructed the field’s conventional narratives. Contextualizing art and artists through a diasporic lens, we seek papers that investigate issues such as the impact of politics on racial identities; mobilization and resistance; racism and the erasure of blackness; and blackness and modernism, abstraction, performance, or the neo-Baroque. We welcome papers examining case studies that consider either a single geographical area or transnational exchanges with other diasporic communities. As Caribbean art history has uniquely addressed racial and identity politics while remaining sidelined from the broader field, we are also interested in studies that position art from this region in relationship to the rest of the continent.