Anna Indych-López

Professor of Latin American and Latinx Art
On leave 2021–22

Prof. Indych-López joined the GC faculty in 2007 and teaches courses on modern and contemporary art among Latin American, U.S., transatlantic, Afro-diasporic, and Latinx networks. Her work investigates art in the public sphere, especially in Mexico, as well as Latinx and U.S.-Mexico borderlands contemporary art, focusing on cross-cultural intellectual and aesthetic exchanges, the polemics of realisms, and spatial politics. Her 2018 book on Judith Baca probed the Chicana artist’s aesthetic strategies to activate the contested socio-political and racial histories of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. She is also the author of Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (2009) and co-author (with Leah Dickerman) of Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011, for the exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, New York). A frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art (2020) and The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism: 1910–1950 (2016), she was awarded the Stuart Z. Katz Professorship of the Humanities and Arts at City College in 2018-2019 and in Fall 2021 received the Alcaly-Bodian CUNY Distinguished Scholar Fellowship at the Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative. In Spring 2022 she will take up the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Current dissertations under her supervision:  

• Sonja Gandert, “La resolana:  Chicano Artistic Imaginaries of Place, Race, and Activism in New Mexico and Texas, 1960s -1980s”
• Tie Jojima, “Porn Art Movement, 1980–84: Body, Technology, and Subjectivity in Brazilian Art”
• Ana Perry, Assistant Professor of Art History, Oberlin College and Conservatory, “Rafael Montañez Ortiz and Affect as Institutional Critique, 1966-72”

• Horacio Ramos, “Performances of Race: The Making of an Experimental arte popular in Peru, 1979–1990”

• María-Laura Steverlynck, “The School of the South Experiment: The Pedagogy and Legacy of a New World Modernism”

Recently completed dissertations under her supervision:

• Gillian Sneed, Assistant Professor of Art History, School of Art and Design, San Diego State University
  “Gendered Subjectivity and Resistance: Brazilian Women’s Performance-For-Camera, 1974-1982,” (September 2019)
• Elizabeth Donato, ICAA Research Specialist at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  “A Series of Acts that Disappear: The Valparaíso School’s Ephemeral Architectures, 1952–1982”  (September 2019)

• Abigail Lapin, Assistant Professor of Art History, UC Irvine
  “The International Rise of Afro-Brazilian Modernism in The Age of African Decolonization and Black Power” (May 2019)

• Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Curator of Contemporary Art, Cleveland Museum of Art
  “Stills of Passage: Photography and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1978-1992” (May 2019)

• Danielle Stewart, Assistant Professor of Art History, Warwick University
  “Framing the City: Photography and the Construction of São Paulo (1930-1955)” (May 2019)

• Mya Dosch, Assistant Professor of Art History, Sacramento State University
  “Creating 1968: Art, Architecture, and the Afterlives of the Mexican Student Movement,” (May 2018) Winner: Association for Latin American Art Dissertation Prize

• Alberto McKelligan Hernández, Assistant Professor of Art History, Portland State University
  “Mónica Mayer: Translocality and the Development of Feminist Art in Contemporary Mexico” (May 2017) Winner: Carolyn G. Heilbrun Dissertation Prize from the Women's Studies Program at the Graduate Center

Selected Publications:

Books:

• Judith F. Baca. A Ver: Revisioning Art History. Los Angeles and Minneapolis: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press and University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
• With Leah Dickerman. Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art. exh. cat. New York: MoMA, 2012.
• Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Essays:

• “Panoramic Vignettes: Diego Rivera, History of Mexico.” In On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen, edited by Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
• “Celluloid América: Siqueiros, Hollywood, and Plástica Fílmica.” In Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2020.
• “Hacer circular a Zapata.” In Emiliano: Zapata después de Zapata. Mexico City: Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2019.
• “Orozco’s New School Murals: Activating Revolutionary Thought,”  (co-authored with Lynda Klich). In I Stand in My Place with My Own Day Here: Site Specific Art at The New School Collection. Duke University Press: 2019.
• “Cargadores: Collecting Rivera, Mexican Modernism, and Bearing the Burdens of Historiography.” In The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States. Studies in the History of Art/Collecting in America, edited by Inge Reiste and Edward Sullivan. The Frick Collection and Penn State Press, 2018. 
• “Mexican Muralism in the United States in the Early 1930s: The Social, The Real, and The Modern.” In Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950, edited by Matthew Affron, Mark Castro, Dafne Cruz Porcini, and Renato González Mello. Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2016.
•  “Technology, Labor, and Realism:  Diego Rivera’s Secretaría de Educación Pública Murals.” In Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, edited by Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman. University of Alabama Press, 2013. 
• “Mexican Muralism in The United States:  The Controversies and Paradoxes of Patronage and Reception.” In Mexican Muralism:  A Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin A. Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.  
• “Alfredo Ramos Martinez: Indians, Hollywood, and the Los Angeles Times.” In MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985. Long Beach, CA: The Museum of Latin American Art, 2011. (Part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative).
• "Hecho para E.U.A.: de Orozco, Los horrores de la Revolución." In La zarza rediviva: J.C. Orozco a contraluz, edited by Ernesto Lumbreras. Mexico: Instituto Cultural Cabañas, 2010.
• "Making Nueva York Moderna: Latin American Artists, The International Avant- Gardes, and The New School." Nueva York, edited by Edward Sullivan. New York: New York Historical Society, 2010.
• “’An Abstract Courbet’: The Cubist Spaces of Diego Rivera’s Murals.” In Diego Rivera in Paris: The Cubist Portraits. Dallas: The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2009.
• “Mural Gambits: Mexican Muralism in the United States and the ‘Portable’ Fresco.” Art Bulletin LXXXIX, no. 2 (June 2007).
• “‘None of Those Little Donkeys for Me’: Tamayo, Cultural Prestige, and Perceptions of Modern Mexican Art in the United States.” In Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted. Mexico: Turner Libros and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007.
• “Between Worlds: Anita Brenner, Transcultural Identity, and Mexican Art in New York.” In Anita Brenner: Visión de una época. Mexico: Editorial RM, 2007.