Sonja E. Gandert

Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sonja E. Gandert’s research focuses on postwar Latinx and Latin American art, with an emphasis on Mexican American and Chicanx artists. Her dissertation is a study of Chicana/o artists active in New Mexico and Texas from the late 1960s to early 1980s whose work marshals strategies of cultural reclamation and subversive historical revisionism as a counter to racist and whitewashed U.S. settler colonial mythologies of the Southwest and the West. Other areas of interest include the history and politics of exhibiting Latinx art in the United States and modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Her research has been supported by a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a Short-Term Fellowship from the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. She has held teaching positions at Lehman College and City College, CUNY, and has worked in the curatorial departments of MoMA, the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and other university art museums and Latinx-focused arts spaces. Since 2015 she has been a co-founding Executive Committee member of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum.