Folk-arts for peace: HemisFair ’68 and the Cultural Olympics in México’s 1968 Olympiad during the Global Cold War
Guest: Dr. Deborah Dorotinsky Alperstein
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM)
This lecture will center on folk art (handcraft / arte-popular) as a cultural agent during the Global Cold War in 1968. It will highlight the place of handcraft in the cultural diplomacy between Mexico and the United States during the sixties and bring to the fore two international exhibitions.
Dr. Dorotinsky currently serves as the project leader for Popular Arts, an effort to create a network of scholars both in Latin American and elsewhere whose work deals with contemporary Latin American art and specifically “popular” art objects, i.e. crafts and diseño artisanal. The purpose of the project is to critique and revise accepted categories (as well as definitions, terms, etc.) of these objects. Dr. Dorotinsky and her colleagues argue that these categories are politically contingent, often exploitative, and troublingly institutionalized.