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).
