Katz Center for Mexican Studies
Mexican Studies Seminar: Zoë Ryan and Tabea Linhead
The Mexican Studies Seminar invites visiting and UChicago scholars to present their work in an informal atmosphere, providing Mexican studies faculty and students with the opportunity to debate and discuss scholarly research and inquiry on Mexico from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives. For more information on upcoming or previous Mexican Studies Seminars: mexicanstudies@uchicago.edu • 773-834-1987
Zoë Ryan "There is Design in Everything: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury"
Abstract: In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury brings together the work of Clara Porset, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Sargent, and Sheila Hicks, reflecting the unique experiences of these designers and artists in Mexico between the 1940s and 1970s. Despite their singularities, they created work that reflected on artistic traditions, while at the same time opened up new readings of daily life at a time of great social and political change.
The pieces in this exhibition, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, resulted from a complex dynamic of cultural learning and exchange. Each practitioner went beyond replication and applied their newfound knowledge and practices to create their own unique output while crediting the sources of their inspiration. These works highlight the importance of these still-influential contributions to art and design and make the case for a continued evaluation of Mexico’s creative landscape and a more inclusive history of modern art and design.
Bio: Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. A curator and author, her projects focus on exploring the impact of architecture and design on society. She is currently organizing In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury, to open in September 2019. Her recent projects include Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute, a major new installation of the modern and contemporary architecture and design collections at the Art Institute, and As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History, the first publication to explore in depth the important role that exhibitions have played in the history of these fields of practice. Her past exhibitions include: Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye (2015), Fashioning the Object: Bless, Boudicca, and Sandra Backlund (2012), and Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (2011). In 2014, she was the curator of the second Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future Is Not What It Used To Be. Ryan has taught graduate seminars on design history and theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the Design Trust International Advisory Council, Hong Kong.
Tabea Linhard “A Mexican Sector in Berlin”
Abstract: This presentation focuses on the letters that German writer Anna Seghers (1900-1983) wrote to Clara Porset between 1947, when Seghers returned to Germany after a six-year-long exile in Mexico, and 1952, the year Seghers’s husband Lászlo Rádványi also left Mexico, joining his wife in Berlin. Seghers’s letter to Porset stand out not only because the Cuban designer appears to be the writer’s sole friend who corresponded with her in Spanish, but also because of the intimacy and candor of the letters. Porset was, in many ways, an ideal interlocutor for Seghers: both women were exiles in Mexico and they shared a predilection for Mexican visual arts. In Seghers’s letters to Porset it becomes evident that the writer sees post-war Berlin, with its ruins and ghosts, from a perspective undoubtedly marked by her Mexican years. The paper closes with a brief reading of an essay on Dolores del Río that Seghers wrote for her German audiences in 1947. In the text Seghers expresses her frustration that resulted from her inability to convey to her readers at home what her Mexican years meant for her. Stated differently, the essay shows that while Mexico traveled back to Berlin with Seghers, Porset may have been among the very few who could envision the implications of Seghers’s yearning for a “Mexican sector” in Berlin.
Bio: Tabea Alexa Linhard is Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature and International and Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the co-author of Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space (2018), and author Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (2014) and Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (2005). She is currently completing Unexpected Routes (1931-1945), a study of refugees’ escape routes in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II.