Expanded Printmaking in Latin America

In this seminar, we examine the centrality of print-based media for the Latin American avant-garde during the twentieth century, when artists turned to technologies of reproduction to forge geopolitical agency and sustain cultural exchange. As a theoretical precursor, we begin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Indigenous and viceregal artists mobilized the “logic of the copy” to reformulate invention and lineage within–and on the edges–of European prints. We then explore subsequent print-based experiments, from the early twentieth-century Parisian poèmes-peints and typographic matrices of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro to the anti-imperialist networks of Mexican graphic workshops which reached artists in Harlem and post-independence India. Throughout the course, experimental print and media shift our attention away from art historical ontologies that privilege European originality and influence toward a material culture strategically grounded in the copy, distributed authorship and solidarity. Students will engage in printmaking workshops and view works on site and in the collections of NYC museums and archives.