Deborah Cullen-Morales, PhD
Deborah Cullen-Morales is a 2019-20 CSRC research scholar. Her current research focuses on the recent and lifetime work of Raphael Moñtanez Ortiz (b. 1934, artist and founder of El Museo del Barrio, New York), whose papers are located at the CSRC. Cullen was director of curatorial programs at El Museo del Barrio, where she worked for over fifteen years. Among her many projects there, she engaged closely with the contributions of Montañez Ortiz. She curated Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000 (2008) and edited its related anthology. She also curated Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer (2010) and authored the Rafael Ferrer, volume 7 in the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series from CSRC Press. Over the past decade, Cullen has contributed to Curaduría de Latinoamérica. 20 entrevistas a quienes cambiaron el arte contemporáneo (forthcoming 2020, CENDEAC, Spain); Archivos fuera de lugar 2. Desbordes discursivos, expositivos y autorales del documento, (MUAC y Ex Teresa Arte Actual, México DF, 2019); The Art Museums of Latin America: Structuring Representation (Routledge, 2017); Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell (CSRC Press and VPAM, 2017); Marisol: A Retrospective (Memphis Brooks Museum of Art & Marquand Press, 2014), Sociales: Débora Arango Llega Hoy (MAM-Medellín & MOLAA, 2012); Asco: The Elite of the Obscure, (LACMA & Williams College Art Gallery, 2011), and co-edited Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World (2012, Yale University Press). She has been a recipient of an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award, Center for Curatorial Leadership fellowship, J. Paul Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship, and a Faith Ringgold “Anyone Can Fly” Foundation Professional Scholars Grant.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, PhD
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is an independent curator and art historian and a 2019-20 CSRC research scholar. Her current research project is Xican-a.o.x. Body, a forthcoming multidisciplinary touring art exhibition that looks at Chicanx art and culture through experimental art in Los Angeles and other US cities, plus border zones with Mexico, from the 1970s to the present. The exhibition aims to complicate the dominant understanding of Chicanx art and culture by focusing on the conceptual and experimental nature of visual practices utilizing the body, from self- to collective representation. Artists include Asco, Judith F. Baca, Barbara Carrasco, Isabel Castro, Rafa Esparza, Ken Gonzales-Day, Esther Hernández, Yolanda López, Celia Muñoz, Sylvia Salazar Simpson, Shizu Saldamando, John Valadez, Pattsi Valdez, and Ricardo Valverde, among others. Xican-a.o.x. Body is curated by Fajardo-Hill with Gilbert Vicario and Marissa del Toro, and organized by American Federation of Arts and the Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition will open in May 2021. In spring 2020 Fajardo-Hill will be a visiting lecturer and Fellowship Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) at Princeton University,
LeighAnna Hidalgo, PhD candidate
Hidalgo is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and a 2019-20 IUPLR-Mellon dissertation fellow at the CSRC. Her research interests include self-employment, cross-racial movements, urban space, and visual research methods. Her dissertation project, “Street Vendors of Los Angeles: Visual Narratives of Contested Urban Terrains,” draws on a five-year community-based visual ethnographic study with the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign, an effort led by Latinas in alliance with Black women to decriminalize street vending in Los Angeles.
Jennifer Josten, PhD
Jennifer Josten is the 2019-20 CSRC Institute of American Cultures visiting scholar. Jennifer is associate professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where she holds a secondary appointment in Hispanic languages and literatures and is a core faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on the art and architecture of Greater Mexico and Latin America, transnational artist-based networks of the Cold War era, and the presence of the pre-Columbian past in modern and contemporary art and design. She is the author of Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018), and she has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs such as Pop América: 1965–1975 (Nasher Museum of Art & McNay Art Museum, 2018) and Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 (LACMA, 2017). During her fellowship year, Josten will research and write two chapters for her current book project on networks of artists in California, Mexico, and Cuba whose work embraced graphic and environmental design during the late 1960s. One chapter will explore David Botello's and Johnny Gonzalez's visionary designs for sculptural monuments for East Los Angeles, and the other will focus on antiwar posters designed by Rupert García, Malaquías Montoya, Alfredo Rostgaard, and others.
Carlos A. Rivas, PhD candidate
Rivas is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA Department of Art History and a 2019-20 IUPLR-Mellon dissertation fellow at the CSRC. His dissertation project, “Three Years of Surveillance: Aerial Views of El Salvador from the Descripción Geográfico-Moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 1768-1770,” examines a Central American eighteenth-century atlas and its corresponding census data that has rarely received scholarly consideration. Rivas employs art history research methodologies to conduct formal and iconographical analyses that not only interpret the visual data of the DGM, but also contextualize the maps within the larger history of Spanish colonial cartography in Mesoamerica
