Migratory Modernisms: Race, Ethnicity, and Twentieth-Century Jewish Art of Latin America

While Jewish people arrived in the Americas as early as the sixteenth century, Jewish migration grew significantly across Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century in response to rising anti-Semitism around the world. This panel invites contributors to consider Latin American modernism by Jewish artists and/or about Jewish-ness in relationship to changing notions of race and ethnicity caused by migration. Being Jewish is an ethnicity as well as a religion that includes many racial identifications. How did artists think about their Jewishness as a marker of identity and/or inspiration for their creative practices? Did artists emphasize, minimize, or erase their Jewish backgrounds? How did they seek to express Jewish culture, migration, trauma, or history in their work? Finally, how have these artists’ Jewish backgrounds been understood in art historiography? Examples may include: Diego Rivera’s declaration that his marrano heritage was central to his art-making and politics; José Gurvitch and Lasar Segall’s modernist meditations on migration and the Holocaust; Jewish refugees in the Caribbean during World War II; the construction of Holocaust memorials in Latin America; contributions of Jewish artists to international exhibitions such as the São Paulo Bienal and the Havana Bienal; and Latin American artists working in experimental practices whose Jewish identity remains relatively understudied, such as Gego and Anna Bella Geiger. We invite papers examining these and related questions through studies of individual artists, or thematic papers that consider the contribution of Jewish artists in twentieth-century Latin America.