A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Black and white portrait of a woman wearing glasses

Deanna Ledezma

Lecturer

Bio

Deanna Ledezma (she/her) is a Lecturer in the Departments of Art History, Theory, and Criticism and Liberal Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois Chicago and specializes in the history and theory of photography, Latinx art and visual culture, and life writing.

She is currently completing her book manuscript Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography. Her previous publications have appeared in Art Journal, Photography & Culture, caa.reviews, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and the book Reworking Labor. Her forthcoming essay on the photographic archives of Diana Solís will be published in Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships (Rutgers University Press, 2025). Green Lantern Press and Walls Divide Press have distributed her nonfiction essays.

Complementing her scholarship, she collaborates with artists on creative projects, including publications, archival research, and exhibitions. The place where the creek goes underground, an exhibition by Anthony Romero (Dartmouth College) with Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios (SAIC), opens at Harvard Radcliffe Institute in September 2024 with a forthcoming artists’ publication in November 2024. Ledezma, Rios, and Romero co-created the installation Ballad of the Uprooted for the exhibition Re:Working Labor (SAIC Sullivan Galleries, curated by Ellen Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg, 2019). Ledezma and Rios were also awarded the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) Truth and Reconciliation Thematic Residency in 2019.

She has also written introductory texts for Diana Solís's artist's book Luz: Seeing the Space Between Us (2022) and the exhibition catalog for Akito Tsuda: Pilsen Days (Chicago Public Library, 2024). In 2023, Nicole Marroquin (University of Michigan) and Ledezma co-curated the group exhibition Contigo, Diana Solís at Co-Prosperity.

For more information, please visit her website.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This is an undergraduate survey of modernism and postmodernism in Latin America from the 1920s through the present. Topics will include national identity and 'anthropophagy' in the first wave of modernism in the region, debates over Surrealism and realism in the 1930s, the transition from 'concrete to 'neo-concrete' form and the link between architecture and developmentalism in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, conceptual art and politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent sculptural, photographic, performance, and relational practices.

Specific topics include the cosmopolitan avant-garde that appeared in Mexico at the start of the 1920s, the theorization of anthropofagia in Brazil and indigenismo in Peru, Cuba?s Grupo Minorista, Mexican muralism and surrealism, Joaquin Torres-Garcia?s introduction of abstraction to Uruguay and Argentina, links between art and architecture in Venezuelan and Brazilian developmentalism, the rise of kinetic and participatory approaches in the 1950s and 1960s, conceptual art as a response to the dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, Latinx and Chicanx actions and performance in the United States, the politics of memory in post-dictatorship/violence art in Chile and Colombia, persistent questions of borders and internationalism in contemporary approaches to ?relational aesthetics? in Central America and the Caribbean, and many other examples.

This course requires weekly reading responses, two papers, and a final exam.

Class Number

1134

Credits

3

Description

This course examines the dynamism and complexities of Latinx artistic and cultural production in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present. An imperfect yet ultimately generative identifier, Latinx is a gender-neutral term for people of Latin American and/or Caribbean birth or descent living in the United States. In addition to studying the formation of Latinx identities among artistic and creative practitioners, the course will study the context-specific histories that have shaped the aesthetics, ideological frameworks, and socially engaged practices of Latinx art and visual culture.
We will read a variety of texts and publications that debate, conceptualize, and critique Latinx art and visual culture, including academic essays and book chapters, interviews and dialogues, exhibition catalogues, primary documents and manifestos, artists¿ books, and zines. Throughout the class, we will investigate issues concerning race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, intersectionality, migration and diaspora, social and political activism, family and kinship, religion and spirituality, art markets, and cultural reclamation.
Students can expect to complete weekly reading responses, a midterm exam, a 3-5-page essay on an exhibition or artwork, a final research paper, and a class presentation about their final paper topic.

Class Number

1055

Credits

3

Description

How have Latinx authors addressed the representation of Latinidad in literature and other cultural forms? How does the study of these representations change or revitalize our understanding of literature more broadly? These classes offer students with the opportunity to undertake a detailed study of thematic material related to Latinx literature, including its connections to Latinx culture more broadly. Depending on the instructor, the period and works may vary.

Artists/Works/Screening/Reading/Content Area examples to be determined, based on the specific course being offered under this topic, but will include key texts and other cultural forms (i.e.films, television, and comics) by Latinx authors and artists.

This 3000-level Humanities course, including readings, reading responses, essays, mid-terms, and finals.

Class Number

1234

Credits

3

Description

The Latinx population currently consists of approximately 61 million people or about 18.5% of the U.S. population; by 2050, the U.S. Census estimates that the Latinx population will make up 30 percent of the total U.S. population. This course examines the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories of those commonly identified as Latinas/os/xs in the United States. Course work will vary but typically includes reading responses, short papers, and a final project and presentation..

This course combines the close reading of required texts with detailed classroom discussions, providing students with the tools needed to question, discuss, and examine topics, such as, the social construction of race and ethnicity, immigration, colonialism, forms of resistance and social movement activity, colorism, poverty and education.

Students should expect to produce a body of work consisting of three essays during the semester, and a final presentation of a project that is shared with the class.

Class Number

2255

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary course focuses on issues of identity and artistic production in modern and contemporary art from the nineteenth century to the present. Situated in the context of the United States, the class examines how individual and collective identities shape the production, categorization, and reception of art. While the terms ¿modern¿ and ¿contemporary¿ remain largely undisputed, categories of identification adopted by and placed upon artists are neither universally accepted nor applied. Even as more nuanced understandings of intersecting identities (including race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion) develop, simplistic and reductive ideas concerning the correlation between identity and aesthetic persist. In our investigation, we will study how histories of migration, settler colonialism, activism, and the emergence of political identities intersect the art worlds and visual culture.

Class Number

1127

Credits

3