Andrea Giunta | AMEFRICANA: Rosana Paulino and the Red Atlantic

In 2024, for the first time, Buenos Aires witnessed a solo exhibition by an Afro–Latin American artist at the Museum of Latin American Art: Rosana Paulino. Amefricana. Though celebrated in Brazil and across the world, her work had never before been the subject of a solo exhibition in Latin America. This lecture reflects on the circumstances that made such an exhibition not only possible but also urgent. It also pauses on the unsettling force of certain archival images interwoven into her work—images that resist silence, unsettle the gaze, and open wounds in the fabric of collective memory. Why did Rosana Paulino choose to make these images visible in her art? And what new meanings did she forge in doing so, as she confronted the hidden legacies of slavery and racism in Latin America?

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Andrea Giunta (Ph.D., Universidad de Buenos Aires) Andrea Giunta is Professor of Latin American and Global Art History at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a renowned writer and independent curator. Her publications and curatorial work have helped redefine the field of modern Latin American art history and its canon. She is the author of several groundbreaking books, such as Diversidad y arte latinoamericano (Siglo XXI, 2024),  The Political Body:  Stories of Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America (University of California Press, 2023) Rethinking Everything/ Pensar todo de nuevo / Puisqu’il fallait tout repenser (Paris, delpire & co, 2021), Contra el canon. El arte contemporáneo en un mundo sin centro (Siglo XXI, 2020), Feminismo y arte latinoamericano. Historias de artistas que emanciparon los cuerpos (Siglo XXI, 2018), Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics. Argentine Art After the Sixties (Duke University Press, 2007) and When Does Contemporary Art Begin? (ArteBA 2014). She was co-founder director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2013) where she was Chair Professor of Latin American Art History and Criticism. She was curator of the controversial retrospective exhibition on León Ferrari’s works (Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2004), co-curator (with Agustin Pérez Rubio) of Verboamérica, permanent collection of Latin American Art at MALBA (2016), and co-curator (with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill) of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Hammer Museum, LA / Brooklyn Museum, New York / Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, 2017-2018), Chief Curator Bienal 12, Mercosur, Brasil, Femine(s). Visualities, Actions, Affects, curator of Rethiking Everything (Rolf Gallery Buenos Aires 2020, Les Recontres de Arles, 2021), When the World Changes. Questions on Art and Feminisms (Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires, 2021), and of Rosana Paulino. Amefricana, MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2024. Visiting Professor at Duke University, Durham, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, among others. She was awarded the Guggenheim, Getty, Rockefeller, Harrington, Tinker fellowship – as Visiting Professor at Columbia University, Spring 2017 – and the Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professorship at Humboldt Universitat, Summer 2021. Her essays on Latin American and international postwar art have been published in academic journals, books and catalogue exhibitions in the Americas and Europe. She is member of the acquisition committee of MALBA since 2014 and Member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Argentina.

DISCUSSANT

Rachel Price, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University
 

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