Joshua ("Josh") L. Gómez
PhD Student: Art and Visual Culture of Mexico
Email:
About
Joshua “Josh” L. Gómez is a Ph.D. student studying the art and visual culture of Mexico throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. His dissertation examines how pulque, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented maguey sap, informs notions of Indigeneity across time within local and international discourses. He argues that pulque and Indigeneity were mutually constitutive in their integration into the national sphere. His work seeks to demonstrate how artistic and commercial enterprises continue exploiting Native peoples, labor, and geographies.
Josh is also an interdepartmental graduate student concentrator in the Gender and Women's Studies program at UIC and additionally works on contemporary Latix feminist artists, museum practices, and notions of domesticity and memory.
He was previously the 2022-2023 Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Assistant to the Permanent Collection at the National Museum of Mexican Art. He was a curatorial assistant for the traveling exhibition "Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium" and wrote an essay for the accompanying exhibition catalog titled "Visualizing Invisible Labor: Constructing Space through Women’s Devotional Practices." His essay, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’ Venus Envy, Chapter 1: Domesticana Defiance and Ephemeral Memories,” was published in Intervenxions 3rd printed volume by the Latinx Project at NYU in September 2024.