Teresa Eckmann
Teresa Eckmann is Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of San Antonio, Texas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Latin American Studies with a major concentration in art history. She was Assistant Curator at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UNM’S Center for Southwest Research, supported by the Center for Regional Studies, prior to joining the University of Texas at San Antonio as Assistant Professor in 2008. In her approach to teaching and research she further draws from previous art practice having completed a B.A. in studio art from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as her experience in the performing arts in her prior career as a member of the Berkshire Ballet and an apprentice with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre following graduation from North Carolina School of the Performing Arts.
Dr. Eckmann specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art, with a focus on contemporary Mexico. Her first book, Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican Figurative Painting and Patronage in the 1980s was published in 2011. She has contributed chapters to book publications including “(Re)Collecting Neo-Mexicanism: A Capricious Text,” in OMR Contemporary Art in (and out of) Mexico 1983-2015 (Madrid: Turner Publications, 2020), Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts, Ed. Lynda Klich and Tara Zanardi (New York: Routledge, 2018), ¿Neomexicanismos? Ficciones identitarias en México (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 2011) and Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006) and has published articles and reviews in Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma Metropolitana and British Print Quarterly. She has published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues and is a regular contributor to Christie’s auction catalogues for Latin American art. She is currently working on a monograph and the archive of Mexican artist Julio Galán (Múzquiz, 1958—2006), on whom she has presented her research in New York City, Paris, Bogotá, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and San Antonio: Julio Galán: The Art of Performative Transgression is forthcoming with UNM Press in May 2024.
She has curated or co-curated several exhibitions in her field including a retrospective exhibition of artist Alberto Mijangos (b. 1925 Mexico City—d. 2007 San Antonio, Texas) for the City of San Antonio’s SA300 Tricentennial Celebration, Alberto Mijangos: 159, A Retrospective of His Art (and Life) (Centro de Artes July 12-Nov. 17, 2018); $t@tU.S.? Prints from Puerto Rico to San Antonio (Centro de Artes, 2017); Posada’s Broadsheets: Of Love and Betrayal (UTSA Art Gallery, 2012); Rocío Maldonado: Ecos (Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato, 2011); Neo-Mexicanism, A New Figuration: Mexican Art of the 1980s, (Instituto Cultural de México, San Antonio, 2010; and the traveling exhibition Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics (National Hispanic Cultural Center, 2006-09). Her research, scholarship, teaching, and curatorial projects continue to be focused on art and visual culture of Latin America and the Caribbean—principally, on cultural nationalism and identity in 20th-21st century Mexico. As a two-time recipient of the Carlos and Malu Alvarez International Study Fund, Dr. Eckmann led a group of 20 students on a study abroad art history course to Mexico City in the spring semesters of 2017 and 2016. Currently she continues her research on Galán's collaborative relationships with international photographers.
Dr. Eckmann specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art, with a focus on contemporary Mexico. Her first book, Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican Figurative Painting and Patronage in the 1980s was published in 2011. She has contributed chapters to book publications including “(Re)Collecting Neo-Mexicanism: A Capricious Text,” in OMR Contemporary Art in (and out of) Mexico 1983-2015 (Madrid: Turner Publications, 2020), Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts, Ed. Lynda Klich and Tara Zanardi (New York: Routledge, 2018), ¿Neomexicanismos? Ficciones identitarias en México (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 2011) and Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006) and has published articles and reviews in Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma Metropolitana and British Print Quarterly. She has published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues and is a regular contributor to Christie’s auction catalogues for Latin American art. She is currently working on a monograph and the archive of Mexican artist Julio Galán (Múzquiz, 1958—2006), on whom she has presented her research in New York City, Paris, Bogotá, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and San Antonio: Julio Galán: The Art of Performative Transgression is forthcoming with UNM Press in May 2024.
She has curated or co-curated several exhibitions in her field including a retrospective exhibition of artist Alberto Mijangos (b. 1925 Mexico City—d. 2007 San Antonio, Texas) for the City of San Antonio’s SA300 Tricentennial Celebration, Alberto Mijangos: 159, A Retrospective of His Art (and Life) (Centro de Artes July 12-Nov. 17, 2018); $t@tU.S.? Prints from Puerto Rico to San Antonio (Centro de Artes, 2017); Posada’s Broadsheets: Of Love and Betrayal (UTSA Art Gallery, 2012); Rocío Maldonado: Ecos (Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato, 2011); Neo-Mexicanism, A New Figuration: Mexican Art of the 1980s, (Instituto Cultural de México, San Antonio, 2010; and the traveling exhibition Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics (National Hispanic Cultural Center, 2006-09). Her research, scholarship, teaching, and curatorial projects continue to be focused on art and visual culture of Latin America and the Caribbean—principally, on cultural nationalism and identity in 20th-21st century Mexico. As a two-time recipient of the Carlos and Malu Alvarez International Study Fund, Dr. Eckmann led a group of 20 students on a study abroad art history course to Mexico City in the spring semesters of 2017 and 2016. Currently she continues her research on Galán's collaborative relationships with international photographers.
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Books by Teresa Eckmann
Eckmann situates and defines neo-Mexicanism, examining its motivations, influences, sources, and precedents. She examines the ways the intentions of the artists coincide with, or differ from, the way Neo-Mexicanist art has been promoted and interpreted, and looks at the relationship of Neo-Mexicanism to the social, cultural, and historical contexts from which it emerged. She considers who promoted and collected this art, and to what ends, and to what extent the patronage of Neo-Mexicanist art has influenced the development and construction of this so-called movement.
Book Chapters by Teresa Eckmann
From D.A.P. 's website:
https://www.artbook.com/9788417141974.html
TURNER
OMR
Contemporary Art in (and out of) Mexico, 1983–2015
Introduction by Osvaldo Sánchez. Text by Patricia Ortiz Monasterio, Jaime Riestra, Teresa Eckmann, et al.
A richly illustrated history of Mexico City’s leading contemporary art gallery
OMR is one of the most influential contemporary art galleries in Latin America. Founded in Mexico City in 1983 by Patricia Ortiz Monasterio and Jaime Riestra, OMR has been a major influence on the arts in Mexico, showing avant-garde artists that have now become some of the protagonists of the Mexican contemporary art scene, including Julieta Aranda, Gabriel Rico and Jose Dávila, as well as international figures such as Ryan Brown, Daniel Silver, Matti Braun and Troika.
Gathering materials from the OMR archive and being its first tribute, this beautifully designed publication traces the gallery’s history, including a visual timeline, testimonials, biographical notes and texts by curator and art critic Osvaldo Sánchez, art historian and academic Teresa Eckmann, art historian and curator Daniel Garza Usabiaga, artist and curator Guillermo Santamarina, art historian and curator Victor Palacios, and architect Mateo Riestra.
During the subsequent decade Galán worked with Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome. Galán was the only Mexican invited to participate in the collective exhibition Magiciens de la Terre presented the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and the only Mexican included in the same museum’s 100 Best Contemporary Artists exhibition in 1990. Curator Klaus Kertess chose Galán as one of four non-U.S. citizens included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Galán further secured individual exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), the latter awarding Galán the coveted MARCO Prize in 1994.
Certain of Galán’s paintings, those few within his oeuvre that appear to incorporate Mexican national imagery in a didactic, direct way including Me quiero morir (1985), China poblana (1987), and Tehuana en el Istmo de Tehuantepec (1987) were absorbed into neo-Mexicanism, the post-modern Mexican artistic tendency that revisited known signs of identity, icons, and historic figures, blurred the boundaries of the sacred and the profane, high and low, exploited the kitsch or cursi (lowbrow), with an approach that was sometimes nostalgic, and often irreverent. Neo-Mexicanism’s message was ambiguous—the artwork read at times as folkloric in its apparent celebratory replication of stereotype, while at other times, as conveying irony and parody with appropriated and repurposed imagery in a critical post-modern approach. Of the artists who worked in this manner including Mexico City-based Javier de la Garza, Rocío Maldonado, Germán Venegas, and Nahum B. Zenil among others, Galán was arguably the most universal and complex in his visual language. Scholars and curators find his work to be a “constellation of contradictions,” enigmatic, inaccessible, veiled, fragmentary, and embodying a “chameleonic perplexity.” He was of the Border, or “on the Border” (as Francesco Pellizzi put forth in his 1989 essay) and crossed multiple borders geographically, conceptually, and in his image-making.
Galán constantly performed identity through his flamboyant lifestyle, when posing for the camera lens, and most significantly, through his self-representation in transgressive imagery and text. This essay for Fashioning Identities examines select paintings by Galán, and photographs of him, in relation to the neo-Mexicanist framework, arguing that when Galán chose to work with fixed notions or stereotypes of mexicanidad (Mexicanness) he did so self-consciously, exploiting such signs as a means of undermining, breaking down, and subverting heteronormative, or simply normative categories, to then reasemble them thereby challenging and “refashioning” identity constructions—be they sexual, national, institutional, patriarchal, colonial, or other.
Articles by Teresa Eckmann
engage with lo popular in his artwork, and with what purpose? Galán
excelled at post-modern collage, looking to some of the same objects
and past cultural and artistic expressions as the Mexican modernists
who preceded him by a half-century; through the lens of artifice, he
layered fragments from a variety of textual and visual sources, reorienting
the language of lo popular as gender-expansive and culturally
inclusive. Through self-portraiture, he addressed in his artwork
the performance and construction of gendered identity. This analysis
draws on the study of scholars Susan Sontag, Francisco de la Maza, and
Gerardo Mosquera of the language of “low” art; formal analysis of a
select group of Galán’s paintings and sculpture further reveals the variety
of sources within lo popular for his imagery, and his Camp-Cursi-
Kitsch approach.
Public Talks by Teresa Eckmann
Esta conferencia, impartida por la investigadora de historia de arte Dra. Teresa Eckmann, examina hasta qué punto y con qué fines Galán desplegó sus ideas artísticas y su autoimagen de manera performativa.
Interviews by Teresa Eckmann
Book Reviews by Teresa Eckmann
Exhibitions Curated with Exhibition Catalogue by Teresa Eckmann
Additionally, printmakers from San Antonio, expressing social conscience while often drawing on humor and personal situation, create dialogue with their audience through narrative, poetic visual statements that consider the difficult and highly relevant themes of immigration, exile, persecution, gun culture, mental health, gender expectations, intolerance, and cultural appropriation. Unifying these 77 prints reproduced here is the important function of text and letters, not to deliver meaning only, but as key compositional elements that visually communicate these artists' engagement with "status," broadly defined here as the "current state of affairs."
Eckmann situates and defines neo-Mexicanism, examining its motivations, influences, sources, and precedents. She examines the ways the intentions of the artists coincide with, or differ from, the way Neo-Mexicanist art has been promoted and interpreted, and looks at the relationship of Neo-Mexicanism to the social, cultural, and historical contexts from which it emerged. She considers who promoted and collected this art, and to what ends, and to what extent the patronage of Neo-Mexicanist art has influenced the development and construction of this so-called movement.
From D.A.P. 's website:
https://www.artbook.com/9788417141974.html
TURNER
OMR
Contemporary Art in (and out of) Mexico, 1983–2015
Introduction by Osvaldo Sánchez. Text by Patricia Ortiz Monasterio, Jaime Riestra, Teresa Eckmann, et al.
A richly illustrated history of Mexico City’s leading contemporary art gallery
OMR is one of the most influential contemporary art galleries in Latin America. Founded in Mexico City in 1983 by Patricia Ortiz Monasterio and Jaime Riestra, OMR has been a major influence on the arts in Mexico, showing avant-garde artists that have now become some of the protagonists of the Mexican contemporary art scene, including Julieta Aranda, Gabriel Rico and Jose Dávila, as well as international figures such as Ryan Brown, Daniel Silver, Matti Braun and Troika.
Gathering materials from the OMR archive and being its first tribute, this beautifully designed publication traces the gallery’s history, including a visual timeline, testimonials, biographical notes and texts by curator and art critic Osvaldo Sánchez, art historian and academic Teresa Eckmann, art historian and curator Daniel Garza Usabiaga, artist and curator Guillermo Santamarina, art historian and curator Victor Palacios, and architect Mateo Riestra.
During the subsequent decade Galán worked with Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome. Galán was the only Mexican invited to participate in the collective exhibition Magiciens de la Terre presented the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and the only Mexican included in the same museum’s 100 Best Contemporary Artists exhibition in 1990. Curator Klaus Kertess chose Galán as one of four non-U.S. citizens included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Galán further secured individual exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), the latter awarding Galán the coveted MARCO Prize in 1994.
Certain of Galán’s paintings, those few within his oeuvre that appear to incorporate Mexican national imagery in a didactic, direct way including Me quiero morir (1985), China poblana (1987), and Tehuana en el Istmo de Tehuantepec (1987) were absorbed into neo-Mexicanism, the post-modern Mexican artistic tendency that revisited known signs of identity, icons, and historic figures, blurred the boundaries of the sacred and the profane, high and low, exploited the kitsch or cursi (lowbrow), with an approach that was sometimes nostalgic, and often irreverent. Neo-Mexicanism’s message was ambiguous—the artwork read at times as folkloric in its apparent celebratory replication of stereotype, while at other times, as conveying irony and parody with appropriated and repurposed imagery in a critical post-modern approach. Of the artists who worked in this manner including Mexico City-based Javier de la Garza, Rocío Maldonado, Germán Venegas, and Nahum B. Zenil among others, Galán was arguably the most universal and complex in his visual language. Scholars and curators find his work to be a “constellation of contradictions,” enigmatic, inaccessible, veiled, fragmentary, and embodying a “chameleonic perplexity.” He was of the Border, or “on the Border” (as Francesco Pellizzi put forth in his 1989 essay) and crossed multiple borders geographically, conceptually, and in his image-making.
Galán constantly performed identity through his flamboyant lifestyle, when posing for the camera lens, and most significantly, through his self-representation in transgressive imagery and text. This essay for Fashioning Identities examines select paintings by Galán, and photographs of him, in relation to the neo-Mexicanist framework, arguing that when Galán chose to work with fixed notions or stereotypes of mexicanidad (Mexicanness) he did so self-consciously, exploiting such signs as a means of undermining, breaking down, and subverting heteronormative, or simply normative categories, to then reasemble them thereby challenging and “refashioning” identity constructions—be they sexual, national, institutional, patriarchal, colonial, or other.
engage with lo popular in his artwork, and with what purpose? Galán
excelled at post-modern collage, looking to some of the same objects
and past cultural and artistic expressions as the Mexican modernists
who preceded him by a half-century; through the lens of artifice, he
layered fragments from a variety of textual and visual sources, reorienting
the language of lo popular as gender-expansive and culturally
inclusive. Through self-portraiture, he addressed in his artwork
the performance and construction of gendered identity. This analysis
draws on the study of scholars Susan Sontag, Francisco de la Maza, and
Gerardo Mosquera of the language of “low” art; formal analysis of a
select group of Galán’s paintings and sculpture further reveals the variety
of sources within lo popular for his imagery, and his Camp-Cursi-
Kitsch approach.
Esta conferencia, impartida por la investigadora de historia de arte Dra. Teresa Eckmann, examina hasta qué punto y con qué fines Galán desplegó sus ideas artísticas y su autoimagen de manera performativa.
Additionally, printmakers from San Antonio, expressing social conscience while often drawing on humor and personal situation, create dialogue with their audience through narrative, poetic visual statements that consider the difficult and highly relevant themes of immigration, exile, persecution, gun culture, mental health, gender expectations, intolerance, and cultural appropriation. Unifying these 77 prints reproduced here is the important function of text and letters, not to deliver meaning only, but as key compositional elements that visually communicate these artists' engagement with "status," broadly defined here as the "current state of affairs."
Featuring artwork by:
Albert Alvarez
Fernando Andrade
Richard Armendariz
Ruth Buentello
Juan de Dios Mora
Joe De La Cruz
Jenelle Esparza
Ana Fernandez
Yenifer Gaviña Franco
Raul Gonzalez
Mari Hernandez
Ernesto Ibanez
Rigoberto Luna
M. Guadalupe Marmolejo
Tess Martinez
Destiny Mata
Arlene Mejorado
Andrei Renteria
Daniela Riojas
Jose Sotelo
Juan Zavala Castro