Rebecca M. Schreiber’s book Visualizing Displacement in the Americas: The Aesthetics of Mobility and Immobilization analyzes artworks created collaboratively by U.S., Mexican, and Indigenous artists with migrants/refugees from the northern triangle of Central America, focusing on the connections between asylum-seekers’ experiences—in particular, of displacement, mobility, and immobilization—and their aesthetic practices. Through her examination of artworks by EDELO Migrante (Caleb Duarte, Mia Eve Rollow, and Saúl Kak Mendez) with migrants and refugees, and Cinthya Santos Briones’s Spaces of Detention, a collage project with formerly detained migrants and refugees, Schreiber develops the concept of a counter-realist aesthetic to highlight the form and practice of these and other artistic collaborations.
Rebecca M. Schreiber is Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and holds affiliations with the Latin American Iberian Institute and the Feminist Research Institute. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century visual art and culture through the lens of migration in the United States, Mexico, and Central America. She is the author of The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism (2019), and of Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Schreiber was a consultant for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945” (2020). She advised on public programming for the traveling exhibition The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility, which was part of the Getty Foundation’s sponsored initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in Albuquerque. Schreiber is currently an editorial board member for Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures and the Journal of American Studies.