Biography
Megan Sullivan specializes in modern and contemporary art from Latin America. Her teaching, research, and advising interests include abstraction; the intersection of modernism, craft practices, and popular culture; the relationship of modernism, modernity, and modernization outside of the North Atlantic; photography; and Latin American theories of art and visual culture.
She is the author of Radical Form: Modernist Abstraction in South America (Yale University Press, 2022) and co-editor of A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021). Her writing has appeared in ArtMargins, Art History, History of Photography, Illapa Mana Tukukuq, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, nonsite.org, October, and Oxford Art Journal. Her current book project, tentatively titled In Search of the Popular: Conceptual Art and the New Urban Masses in Late Twentieth-Century Latin America, focuses on a range of conceptual approaches to the people and the popular that emerged in the 1970s—projects that accounted for key sociocultural transformations across the region (the growth of settlements on the periphery of major cities, the insertion of the rural into the urban, the rise of informal labor, etc.) while dismantling the earlier, hegemonic paradigm of the popular’s role in building a national art.
A recipient of the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring at the University of Chicago, Sullivan’s research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Dedalus Foundation, among others. Along with Ana Franco (Rice University), she co-organized the international workshop Forging a History of Modern Art from the Andes/Forjando una historia del arte moderno desde los Andes at Bogotá in 2022.
She is currently a co-editor of the journal ArtMargins (MIT Press).
