Dr. Tatiana Flores is an Associate Professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Contemporary Art at Rutgers University. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Art History and the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies. In addition to her scholarship (her book Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes, received the 2014 Humanities Book Prize awarded by the Mexico Section of Latin American Studies Association), she works as an independent art curator. In her words, “Curating exhibitions has been an integral part of my scholarly output for over ten years, as I staunchly believe that to be an effective historian of contemporary art, one must actively engage in the construction of the historical archive of the present.” Through her curatorial work, she displays her commitment “to expanding the boundaries of modern and contemporary art history beyond mainstream models from Europe and the United States and to promoting the work of women artists.” In this talk, she is going to speak about her curatorial activism in relation to her exhibition, “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago,” which was installed at the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative at the Museum of Latin American Art and also at the Wallach Art Gallery in New York in 2018. Relational Undercurrents is the first major survey of twenty-first century art of the Caribbean. The exhibition is focusing on locating thematic continuities in the art of the Caribbean islands, in order to bring together the work of artists from diverse backgrounds into conversation with one another.
