Bard College ART HISTORY and VISUAL CULTURE PROGRAM

Filed under Notes from the Chair

“Monumentality for the Masses”

The Dean of the College and the Art History Program present
a lecture

 Ana Maria León
Massachusetts institute of Technology

LEON

This lecture examines a series of texts, images, and architectural projects produced in 1930s and 1940s Argentina, and how they participated in the intellectual, poetic, and spatial construction of the city of Buenos Aires as both a real and imaginary site. Casa Amarilla, an unbuilt housing project designed by Antonio Bonet, brings together these various works in the context of the city’s population growth and the country’s unsteady politics. I argue Casa Amarilla countered the centralized power of the Argentinian state by shifting formal characteristics of monumentality and centrality from the elites to the disenfranchised masses, and inserting them into the city.

Monday, March 23, 2015
4:00 pm
Preston Theater