'Indigenismo' and the Limits of Cultural Appropriation: Frida Kahlo and Marina Núñez del Prado

In this talk Camillia Sutherland will turn a critical eye on the indigenista movement that flourished in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century, specifically as it relates to gender and the visual arts. She will offer two interrelated case studies. One is perhaps the most internationally well-known woman artist, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). The other has been all but erased from art history, Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado (1910-1995). Both women drew heavily from indigenous culture in their works and employed modes of self-fashioning rooted in performed indigeneity. As members of a cosmopolitan elite, Kahlo and Núñez del Prado’s engagements with indigenous culture can be framed as appropriative. However, what Sutherland seeks to explore here is the extent to which gender and location complicate our interpretation of the racial tensions at the heart of Latin American modernism.

Camilla Sutherland is Assistant Professor of European Culture and Literature and Co-Director of the Mexico Study Center at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is Latin American section editor of Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2020) and contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines. This year she launched the inaugural issue of Mistral: Journal of Latin American Women's Cultural & Intellectual History, of which she is Editor-in-Chief.