Editorial Introduction

I consider it a privilege on many levels to open the fourth volume of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Thanks to your involvement and investment, LALVC is embarking on its fourth year of publication at the University of California Press. Going forward, LALVC will continue to provide a hemispheric perspective on the art and visual culture in Latin America and the diaspora. The journal relies on a robust editorial team that combines scholars from across the field and the dedicated professional staff of the University of California Press. Together we maintain our commitment to the growth, innovation, and field-advancing potential this journal offers.It is in that spirit that we would like to extend a warm welcome to our newly appointed editorial board. We are profoundly grateful to the outgoing, founding editorial board of LALVC. This dedicated group of seasoned scholars set the course that we are pursuing with a renewed sense of postpandemic enthusiasm. The new editorial board is made up of scholars of all ranks and areas of specialization working in institutions around the world, across diverse geographies, serving dynamic constituencies. This dynamic group is poised to infuse new energy and fresh ideas into LALVC in order to support the journal’s continued growth and success.We are also delighted to welcome our new book review editor Gina Tarver, associate professor of modern and Latin American art history at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Her monograph, The New Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961–1975, published in 2016, skillfully explores the intersection of ecology, gender, and politics in Colombia. Tarver was also the coeditor with Michele Greet of the 2018 anthology Art Museums of Latin America: Structuring Representation. As book review editor of LALVC, Tarver plans to continue the work of previous editor Aleca Le Blanc by soliciting book reviews from scholars from not just the United States but also Latin America and Europe, and by ensuring that the book reviews reflect the broad chronological and geographical span of the journal as well as its methodological depth and rigor. Tarver plans to approach book reviews as a point of departure for intellectual dialogue, to broaden and deepen perspectives while fostering a community of scholarship. The book reviews presented in this issue of LALVC were a collaborative effort, but they already reflect Tarver’s goals for the journal’s book reviews section going forward.This fourth volume of LALVC offers expanded content, publishing four scholarly articles for the first time since the first issue. Erika Loic’s text explores the history of the book in Latin America and diaspora by analyzing the work of contemporary artists from the United States, Mexico, and South America, including Sandy Rodriguez (USA), Mariana Castillo Deball, Carlos Colín (Mexico), and Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Tatiana Falcón, Andrés Pereira Paz, and Cecilia Vicuña (South America). Loic’s work demonstrates how books help contemporary citizens understand Indigenous experiences with imperial conquest, colonialism, and their pervasive contemporary legacies. Michael J. Schreffler investigates decorative wooden ceilings, known as alfarjes or artesonados, in Mexican and South American churches, convents, and monasteries. He engages ecclesiastical chronicles to show how designers, builders, and viewers projected geographical concepts born out of the colonial experience onto ornamental architecture for centuries. Inna Pravdenko employs a feminist methodology in her reconstruction of the art history of Latin American women artists in the nineteenth century. Her biographical analysis of the travels of Diana Cid García (Argentina) and Eugenia Errázuriz (Chile) reconfigures the dominant art historical narrative of nineteenth-century transcultural artistic migration. Angelique Szymanek provides an in-depth examination of the contemporary Mexican artist Elina Chauvet’s installation work known as Zapatos Rojos (1993–present). This powerful decolonial artistic project is a visual counteraction to the dehumanizing, disembodying, and corporeal vanishing of Mexican women and girls that was the result of decades of abduction and murder. Both a practical protest against Mexican femicide and a critique of lingering imperial mythologies, Szymanek positions Chauvet as a critical activist artist positioned to make real sociopolitical change in the twenty-first century.The Dialogues presented in this first issue of LALVC volume 4 has been guest-edited by two scholars working in contemporary Canada: Analays Alvarez Hernandez at the Université de Montréal and Alena Robin at Western University. Hernandez and Robin have gathered together a group of scholars from across Canadian geography and academia in “Latin American Art(ists) from/in Canada: Expanding Narratives, Territories, and Perspectives.” This Dialogues is inspired by the seemingly straightforward question, “What is the place of Latin American art in Canada today?” However, as the reflections offered by the guest editors and their contributors demonstrate, this question is entrenched in the “mangle” of Canada’s complex historical and contemporary relationship to Latin America. Latin American art in Canada and Latinx Canadian art have previously lacked academic visibility and scholarly recognition. As the essays by Alena Robin, Erell Hubert, Analays Alvarez Hernandez, Tamara Toledo, Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, and Daniel Santiago Sáenz indicate, Canada’s complicated history of migration, multilingual and multicultural realities, and complicated relations with Indigenous groups are closely tied to art and visual culture.In many of the previous issues of LALVC, the content presented synergistically produced conceptual, thematic, and methodological intersections, and this issue is no different. From femicide and the decolonization of public space to reception theory and the reconfiguration of art historical narratives, the essays, Dialogues, and book reviews presented by a wide-ranging group of scholars from around the world represent a cross-section of the field today. LALVC continues to work in the confluence of the digital, visual, and intellectual in order to effect social change. Together, we are already working within the turmoil to shape a new sociopolitical reality by activating the potential of the visual as a node of scholarly inquiry.

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