Register here: $8 online; $10 onsite; free to Barnes Collection members, students and the Swarthmore community (use code SWARTHMORE2025). The conversation will be followed by a book signing and reception in the Lower Level Lobby of the Barnes Foundation.
Join us for a conversation between Paloma Checa-Gismero, author of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global, with leading historians of contemporary and Latin American art, Tatiana Flores and Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide, as they unpack how contemporary art biennials became the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. In their exchange, they will discuss how art biennials contributed to shaping contemporary art as we know it, their relationship with their host cities, and the book’s contribution to the discipline of art history within and beyond the classroom.
In Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials, examining three well-known biennials: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world in which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero helps us understand how the contemporary art world became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.
Paloma Checa-Gismero is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Swarthmore College. Before working as an art historian she was active as an artist and an art critic and translated Lucy Lippard’s experimental autobiography I See / You Mean (1973) to Spanish.
Tatiana Flores is a scholar of the visual culture of the hemispheric Americas, specializing in modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx art. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013). Committed to public-facing work, she has been active as an independent curator for over two decades. Flores is senior editor and founding editorial board member of ASAP/Journal. Her co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History was released in 2024.
Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at New York University and author of Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions and the Spanish Civil War, published by Ashgate (now Routledge) in 2013. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Curatorial Assistant in the Departments of Painting and Sculpture and Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art. Her book on the history of MoMA’s modernist canon and the idea of “Latin American” art will be published next year by Routldege.
This event is made possible by a Scholarly Promotions grant from the Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore Libraries and the Barnes Foundation.
