SOKOL LECTURE: Erina Duganne, “Artists Call’s Revolutionary Futures”
David M. Sokol Lecture in the Arts of the Americas
February 4, 2022
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Zoom
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“The modern concept of revolution,” writes Hannah Arendt, is “inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold.” This temporal formation of revolutions as initiating new futures was primary to the solidarity efforts of Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, a short-lived activist campaign initiated in 1983 by Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Lucy Lippard, Coosje van Bruggen, Doug Ashford, Leon Golub, Josely Carvalho, and others. Through a series of exhibitions as well as performances, poetry readings, film screenings, concerts, and other cultural and educational events organized in New York City to raise money in support of Central American self-determination, agency, and culture, Artists Call sought to dismantle the unrelenting legacy of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, in which the Reagan administration’s interventionalist policies in Central America were implicitly entangled. This talk considers both the campaign’s efforts to harness revolution’s politics of liberation to envision changed futures and how this revolutionary change was likewise curtailed. Still, rather than see revolution’s attendant disappointments and incongruities as indications of the campaign’s failure, the talk seeks to pry open time’s layered, multi-dimensional, and multi-durational qualities and thereby show how Artists Call’s visual solidarity continues to hold resonance today.
Erina Duganne is Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. Her research and writing address three interrelated areas: artist activism and solidarity practices; documentary photography and its histories; and race and its representation. She is co-author of Global Photography: A Critical History, author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography, and co-editor of Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain. Her current research project on Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America consists of two parts: An exhibition, which opens at the Tufts University Art Galleries in January 2022, and an in-progress book manuscript, for which she was recently awarded an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
This event is co-sponsored by UIC's Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Art History Colloquium.
For a Zoom link, please email arthistory@uic.edu.
Date posted
Dec 10, 2021
Date updated
Jan 20, 2022