Papers by Delia Cosentino
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Vol. 1 No. 1, January 2019, 2019
Mexico in the 1930s was ripe for a cartographic refashioning. A decade after the end of the Revol... more Mexico in the 1930s was ripe for a cartographic refashioning. A decade after the end of the Revolution and during a period of authoritarian leadership known as the Maximato (1928–34), a triad of commercial lithographic maps took shape in concert with a heady blend of political, economic, and artistic developments. By the first decades of the twentieth century, pictorial maps had become a global phenomenon, but in this transforming nation perhaps more than any other, the production, circulation, and consumption of such imagery offered the opportunity to imagine a uniquely animated geography coming into its own. Through cartography, governing forces recognized an advantageous way to shape the view of Mexico as a cohesive entity with a rapidly developing infrastructure and an evolving relationship with its own Indigenous past and present. These pictorial mappings not only produced new epistemological frameworks for promoting and expanding a modernized Mexican geography, but also reveal their own role in the unfolding of a unique urban and touristic landscape. Through these images dating to the first half of the 1930s, an international cadre of artists, travelers, publishers, government officials, and other boosters disseminated an integrated vision of Mexican cultural space and thereby coproduced the territory itself. Employing ever-greater cartographic scale over time and placing the focus increasingly on Mexico City, the colorful maps had, by the second half of 1930s, transformed national identity into a geographic ideal whose physical and conceptual legacy endures today.
Artl@s Bulletin 7, no. 2 , 2018
By the 20th century, 16th-century maps of Mexico City were not new, but their value was renewed b... more By the 20th century, 16th-century maps of Mexico City were not new, but their value was renewed by an urban elite grappling with the nation's historical geography. The capital saw fresh developments, including modern architecture and industry, while early excavations offered glimpses of Aztec Tenochtitlan buried beneath. This stratigraphic tension necessitated a reckoning; of concern here is the way that visual and intellectual cultures engaged in a particular cartographic reckoning. Colonial maps filled a void as artists, architects, art historians, and others worked to reconcile Mexico City’s modern identity with its ancient foundations.
Artl@s Bulletin 7, no. 2 , 2018
Maps have the special capacity to create and project spatial frameworks through both their physic... more Maps have the special capacity to create and project spatial frameworks through both their physical and stylistic forms. The close study of maps as constructed objects re-centers the principle element of any art historical problem, relational thinking through visual culture. A cartographic representation examined as an element of its historical context can simultaneously articulate a specific perspective on a particular place, and reveal broader dialogues of which that viewpoint is one part. The articles brought together here examine a variety of local mappings contingent on more global thinking in the transatlantic world, from the colonial period to the twentieth century.
Dialogo, 2017
Examines an expansive mural project by Chicago-based painter Hector Duarte, located in his hometo... more Examines an expansive mural project by Chicago-based painter Hector Duarte, located in his hometown pueblo of Caurio de Guadalupe, Michoacan, within the context of the massive immigration reform protests across the US in 2006. Study discusses how form, subject matter, and the process of creation of Mariposas migrantes transcends boundaries, including art historical categories and national borders. Includes a map capturing the geographic distribution of hundreds of diverse artists who have collaborated on the project, reifying Duarte's transnational vision.
Ceramic Trees of LIfe: Popular Art from Mexico, 2003
Books and Journals by Delia Cosentino
Book Reviews by Delia Cosentino
Monograph by Lori Boornazian Diel, UT Press, 228
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Papers by Delia Cosentino
Books and Journals by Delia Cosentino
Book Reviews by Delia Cosentino