Megan A. Sullivan’s book project charts the history of modern art in Peru (ca. 1920-1980) via its intimate and volatile relationship to what could be variously referred to as the autochthonous, the vernacular, and the popular, all of which, in Peru, bear connotations of the indigenous. The central premise of the study is that the history of modern art in Peru, and the emergence of post-modern modes of artmaking, can be best told not along the lines of stylistic developments, but rather as a function of the rise and fall of a particular attitude of so-called high art toward its others, real and imagined. While the construction of relations with such constitutive others is a common feature of modernism in general, this research project aims to understand the particular forms that such relationships take in a postcolonial context where those others exist not as distant fantasies, but rather as tenacious presences asking for recognition and calling for the construction of a shared sense of belonging.

Megan A. Sullivan is assistant professor in the Department of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, where she focuses on practices and theories of modernism from Latin America. She is the author of Radical Form: Modernist Abstraction in South America (Yale University Press, 2022) and co-editor of A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021).