Megan Sullivan

Biography

Megan Sullivan specializes in the practices and theories of modernism from Latin America. Within this larger field, particular research and teaching interests include abstraction; the intersection of modernism, craft practices, and popular culture; the relationship of aesthetic modernism and social and economic modernization outside of the North Atlantic; 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, Illapa Mana Tukukuq, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, nonsite.org, October, and Oxford Art Journal.

Her current book project, tentatively titled Twentieth-Century Peruvian Art: Episodes in a History of Modernism and its Others, charts the history of modern art in Peru (ca. 1920-1980) via its intimate and volatile relationship to what could be variously referred to as the autochthonous, the vernacular, and the popular, all of which, in Peru, bear connotations of the indigenous. She has been awarded the 2023 Dedalus Senior Fellowship for this project.

Along with Ana Franco (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá), she co-organized the international workshop Forging a History of Modern Art from the Andes/Forjando una historia de arte moderno desde los Andes in 2022.

She is currently a co-editor of the journal ArtMargins (MIT Press).

Publications

Radical Form: Modernist Abstraction in South America 

Yale University Press
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2022

A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art

Edited with Alejandro Anreus and Robin Greeley, Wiley-Blackwell
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2019

“High, Low, and Beyond: The Question of Popular Art in Peru,” Art History 46.1 (February 2023): 1-33.

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Critical introduction to Alfredo Hlito, “Notes toward a Materialist Aesthetics” (1946) and Tomás Maldonado, “The Abstract and the Concrete in Modern Art” (1946), ArtMargins 12.1 (February 2023): 127-134.

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“A Taste for the Local: Elena Izcue and the Making of a Peruvian Decorative Style,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 5.1 (January 2023): 11-29.

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“La rendición de la naturaleza: luz y tiempo en los nocturnos de los hermanos Vargas,” Illapa Mana Tukukuq 19 (December 2022): 74-87.

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“Introduction,” co-authored with Alejandro Anreus and Robin Adèle Greeley, in A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), xxi-xxvii.

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“The Realism-Abstraction Debate in Latin America: Four Questions,” in Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Megan A. Sullivan, eds., A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 151-164.

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“Nature and the Machine in the Vargas Brothers’ Nocturnes: A Mediated Encounter,” Oxford Art Journal 40.3 (December 2017): 449-468.

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“Alejandro Otero’s Polychrome: Color Between Nature and Abstraction,” October 152 (Spring 2015): 60-81.

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Competing Collectivities: The Abstraction-Social Realism Debates in Mid-Century Latin America, in A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, co-edited with Alejandro Anreus and Robin Greeley (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)

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Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126