This photo of the windowsill in my office, taken on one of the first, quiet days of summer on campus, shows some of the books I am looking forward to reading over the next few months. There is a selection from the slew of exciting new books in my field (Erber, Lucena, and Price), and a few that deal with modernity, globalization, and democracy in and beyond Latin America (García Canclini, Franco, Mitchell). Even though I‘m working on a book on abstraction this summer, I hope to get a taste of some of the innovative new work on twentieth-century realism that I’ve been hearing about (Potts, Fore). Right now, I’m reading Jennifer Roberts’s Transporting Visions in hopes of extracting some methodological lessons, and just for the pleasure of it!
Pedro R. Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)
Rachel Price, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014)
Daniela Lucena, Contaminación artística. Vanguardia concreta, comunismo y peronismo el los años 40 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2015)
Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013)
Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013)
Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012)
Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)
Megan A. Sullivan teaches modern and contemporary Latin American art in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on a book manuscript on geometric abstraction in mid-twentieth-century South America, and is coediting The Blackwell Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art.