Erina Duganne’s book Visual Solidarities: Art, Activism, and Central America looks at the activities of Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, a short-lived activist campaign initiated in 1983 by Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Lucy Lippard, Coosje van Bruggen, Doug Ashford, Leon Golub, Josely Carvalho, and others. Duganne’s book expands the temporal parameters of Artists Call so as to explore the contingencies and hidden congruences between its activism in the 1980s and present-day solidarity efforts initiated by a wide range of contemporary artists. Her book demonstrates how, even though most of the artworks made for Artists Call are now either lost or destroyed and its activism largely forgotten, its efforts to forge transnational visual solidarity with Central America continue to hold relevance today.
Erina Duganne is Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. Her research and writing address three interrelated areas: artist activism and solidarity practices; documentary photography and its histories; and race and its representation. She is co-author of Global Photography: A Critical History (Routledge, 2020), author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (Dartmouth College Press, 2010), and co-editor of Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Her current exhibition project on Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America opens at the Tufts University Art Galleries in January 2022. Her co-edited anthology Cold War Camera is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Fall 2022.