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 » Abigail McEwen
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Abigail McEwen

Abigail McEwen, Associate Professor, Latin American Art, and Director of Undergraduate Studies
PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
office: 4206 Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building
phone: 301-405-1486
mcewen@umd.edu

Abigail McEwen specializes in the history of modern and contemporary Latin American art.  Her areas of research and teaching interest span the modern Americas, with an emphasis on the art of twentieth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico, the transnational history of abstraction, and the postwar avant-garde.  She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2010 and joined the faculty at the University of Maryland that year.  She is an affiliated faculty member of the Latin American Studies Center.

Her book Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (Yale University Press, 2016) describes the visual strategies and political purchase of Havana’s vanguardia during the Batista dictatorship. This project has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland.  She is now beginning research on a new book, titled Excentric Bodies: Exodus and Erotics in Post-Revolutionary Cuban Art, which considers a range of psychic and emotional responsiveness in art produced both in exile and on the island during the 1960s and 1970s.  McEwen’s writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and in such publications as American Art, Art Nexus, caareviews.org, and Revista Hispánica Moderna.  As a curator, McEwen has collaborated with the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. on two exhibitions: Constellations: Constructivism, Internationalism, and the Inter-American Avant-Garde (2012), funded in part by a grant from the Latin American Studies Association and the Ford Foundation; and Streams of Being: Selections from the Art Museum of the Americas (2015), organized with The Art Gallery on campus.

Recent course offerings include Modern Latin American Art to 1945, Transatlantic Dialogues in Modern Latin American Art, American Abstractions: Art and the Cold War, and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art.  She regularly teaches an introductory survey of modern art across the Americas, which approaches the history of artistic movements and ideas in the United States and Latin America from a hemispheric and intercultural perspective.

She will lead the Carillon Art and Activism Community in Fall 2018.

 

Faculty Spotlight

Full List of Publications

Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Concrete Cuba: Cuban Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s. New York: David Zwirner Books, 2016.

Introduction to Wifredo Arcay: Cuban Structures, October 12-November 20. London: The Mayor Gallery, 2015.

“Olga Albizu and the Borders of Abstraction.” American Art 29, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 88-113.

“Traveling Blackness.” Agustín Cárdenas, May 20-July 2. London: Aktis Gallery, 2015. Reprinted in Carrara, Cárdenas e la Negritudine, July 11-September 13. Carrara: Centro Storico, Galleria Duomo, and CAP Centro Arti Plastiche di Carrara, 2015.

Streams of Being: Selections from the Art Museum of the Americas, March 25-April 25. College Park, MD: The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2015.

Review of Luis Cruz Azaceta, by Alejandro Anreus. caareviews.org (4 August 2016). CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2016.101

Review of Wifredo Lam: Imagining New Worlds, edited by Elizabeth T. Goizueta. caareviews.org (23 April 2015). CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2015.48

“Relics and Erotics: Cuban Art after the Revolution” [review essay of To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art by Rachel Weiss and Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts by Rolando Pérez]. Revista Hispánica Moderna 67, no. 1 (June 2014): 109-16.

Concrete Rhythms: Sandú Darié and Luis Martínez Pedro. Miami: Tresart, 2013.

“Loló Soldevilla, Cuban Concreta” and “Cuba’s Madista: Sandú Darié in the 1950s.” In Intersecting Modernities: Latin American Art from the Brillembourg Capriles Collection, edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez, 204-29. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2013.

“The Ideology of Virtual Space: Cildo Meireles, 1968-70.” Special issue, “Immaterial Materialities,” Interstices 14 (2013): 38-48.

“Erotic Encounters: Fernández and Post-Minimalism.” Agustín Fernández: The Metamorphosis of Experience, 27-37. Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2012.

“Agustín Fernández: The Enigma of Desire.” Art Nexus 11, no. 85 (June-August 2012): 60-5.

“Agustín Fernández.” Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana 53-54 (Summer-Fall 2009): 128.

Publications

Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba
Concrete Cuba: Cuban Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s
Streams of Being: Selections from the Art Museum of the Americas
Concrete Rhythms: Sandú Darié and Luis Martínez Pedro
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Department of Art History and Archaeology
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