Join us for a conversation about the special exhibition Un/Popular Art: Redefining a Latin American and Caribbean Tradition with curators Dr. Emmanuel Ortega and Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte. Featuring a range of mediums whose origins span Latin America and the Caribbean, this exhibition challenges conventional understandings of "folk art” by offering nuanced perspectives on ideas of authenticity, foreign influence on artistic production, and Native identification. Moderated by the Crow Museum curator, Dr. Natalia Di Pietrantonio, this conversation will explore the exhibition’s innovative approach to display to better understand the diverse artistic traditions that continue to shape the region’s visual culture today. 

Ananda Cohen-Aponte Ananda Cohen-Aponte is Associate Professor of History of Art at Cornell University who specializes in the visual culture of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America. She is author of Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes, published by the University of Texas Press in 2016. She has published articles and essays on colonial Latin American art, issues of equity and inclusion in the discipline of art history, and contemporary Latinx art in a range of scholarly journals and edited volumes, including Colonial Latin American Review, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and Art Journal. She is a Getty Scholar for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Emmanuel Ortega is a Curator, the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library (2023–2024). Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, ex-votos, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. His recently curated art show titled "Contemporary Ex-Votos Devotion Beyond Medium" produced an accompanying catalog published by the New Mexico State University Art Museum this spring. An essay titled “Beyond European Palettes: The Overlooked Contributions of Indigenized Artists in the Historiography of Painting in Mexico.” will appear this fall as part of the Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Aesthetics and Imperialism, 1800-1950. His book Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge. 

TICKETS

$10 - Public

Free - Crow members and UTD students, faculty and staff

UT Dallas Campus

Image: El Sol y la Luna (Sun and Moon), mid-20th century, plywood, wool, yarn, beeswax, Mexican, Wixarika (Huichol), UT Dallas Art Museums, Gift of Elizabeth Boeckman, B-TC.0392