Radical Art and Mass Print Media in Cold War Brazil: A Conversation with Mari Rodriguez Binnie 

In this Research and Academic Program Lecture, Mari Rodriguez Binnie (Williams College) will discuss her new book The São Paulo Neo-Avant-Garde (University of Texas Press, 2024) where she examines how artists challenged a military dictatorship through mass print technologies in the 1970s and 1980s in São Paulo, Brazil. Often working collaboratively, these artists established alternative networks of exchange locally and internationally to circulate their work. In this first English-language book to focus entirely on conceptual practices in São Paulo in this period, Binnie examines these artworks and their engagement with politics and mainstream art institutions and practices, unearthing a scene critical to the development of contemporary Brazilian art. Binnie will be in conversation with Brynn Hatton, the Kindler Family Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Hatton’s research explores how global art workers from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s have differently imagined Vietnam as an idea rather than a place, and a crucible around which various political identities were and continue to be forged. 

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium.

Image: Rafael França, Untitled (detail), c. 1979. Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo Collection, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of Hugo França. Photograph by Renato Parada.