ABSTRACT
Many institutions favored exhibitions driven by Eurocentric aesthetics and art market darlings, and multiple curators, in their zeal to counter folklorist or identity-driven stereotypes, ignored artistic movements that would have been most familiar to a Southern California public. Latinx art tended to occupy a separate category, thus creating distinct publics for Latin American and Latinx exhibitions. Frameworks based on archipelagic, hemispheric, and New World models are all productive avenues for remapping the art of the Americas in a manner that is ethical, inclusive, and avoids falling prey to Eurocentric value judgments. One of the key thinkers for archipelagic studies is Edouard Glissant, whose Poetics of Relation advocates for “a poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible”. Glissant’s model acknowledges a totality, but not in the overarching, universalist manner of Western philosophy, but rather one that is opaque, unknowable, and unpossessable, “leading away from anything totalitarian”.
