Art and Visual Culture under Chávez examines the state of art and visual culture under the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The deep-rooted divisions between chavistas and the opposition are manifested in the visual arts. Contemporary Venezuelan art adopts a variety of traditional and non-traditional media, including video and digital art, and oscillates between expressing personal experiences and collective ones. The government’s cultural policy, however, challenged the established parameters of art by imposing nationalist agendas in museums. Emphasizing the dichotomy between both positions, this book will be structured in the form of a debate.
Tatiana Flores is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013), which received the 2014 Humanities Book Prize awarded by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She also serves as Curator at Large for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA. Her writings have appeared in World Art, Third Text, and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, with a joint appointment in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies.