Leticia Alvarado’s Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation will analyze pairs of contemporary artists of color from distinctly racialized communities whose work shares formal qualities and strategies for negotiating a hostile present. In the pairing of artists conventionally siloed along identitarian lines in studies of art and race, such as Enrique Chagoya and Yinka Shonibare, Xandra Ibarra and Doreen Garner, and Firelei Báez and Wangechi Mutu, this project centers theories of affect in its reading of aesthetic gestures to elaborate resistive strategies of informed engagement.
Leticia Alvarado is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Her research is situated at the nexus of Latina/o/x, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies. Her first book, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production was published by Duke University Press in 2018. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Thought, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, as well as in the award-winning museum catalogue Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA.