George F. Flaherty, Ph.D.

Historian of Latin American and Latinx visual, spatial, and media cultures

Get in touch at gflaherty@gmail.com

BOOK PROJECTS

IN PROGRESS

Cross-Border Renaissances: Revolutionary Art between Mexico and Black America

Cross-Border Renaissances examines two contemporaneous sociocultural phenomena from the 1920s and 30s that are generally understood to be distinct: the nexus of art making and cultural politicking in post-revolutionary Mexico (“Mexican Renaissance”) and the U.S. New Negro Movement (“Harlem Renaissance,” though exceeding this geographic designation). Broadly speaking, these “Renaissances” were stoked by urban, cosmopolitan elites that saw originary and traditional cultures and their historical trajectories as raw materials for the articulation of new collective identities and futures. This project retraces the dense circuits of exchange, affinity, and appropriation among visual/performing artists, critics, dealers/collectors, and other cultural agents traveling and thinking across the Mexico-U.S. border (and beyond), revealing a thoroughly entangled field of personal and professional relationships and creative expressions that complicate established notions of source, influence, solidarity, and homage.

Artists considered in the project include: Charles Alston, Miguel Covarrubias, Aaron Douglas, José Chávez Morado, Loïs Mailou Jones, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo

RESEARCH SUPPORTED BY

UT Austin: Faculty Fellowship, Harry Ransom Center; Houston Endowment Grant, Faculty Development Leave Fellowship; Jeanette and Ferris Nassour Fellowship in Art History; and Dean's Semester Leave Fellowship

IN PRINT

Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the '68 Movement (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)

In 1968 a street and media-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in Mexico City. The '68 Movement was targeted in a state-sponsored massacre at a massive new housing complex ten days before the city hosted the Olympic Games. Both the complex and the mega event were symbols of the country’s rapid modernization but also decades-long political disenfranchisement and urban redevelopment that rendered citizens “guests” of the government and its allies. In spite of institutional denial, censorship and impunity, the massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary public culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and narrators among Mexico’s intelligentsia.

Hotel Mexico asks: How was urban space—material but also literary and cinematic—harnessed as a recalcitrant archive of 1968 and continues to serve as a framework for de facto modes of justice today. The '68 Movement’s imaginary and tactics are interwoven and compared with other efforts, both official and countercultural, to reevaluate or renew Mexico’s post-revolutionary modernity. Among the book's objects of inquiry are architecture, urbanism, literature, visual arts, and film—among them, Mario Pani’s housing complex Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (1958–64), kinetic environments created for the 1968 Olympics, and David Alfaro Siqueiros last major mural, The March of Humanity (1964–71).

AWARDS

2017 Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art

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