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Deanna Ledezma

Lecturer

Contact

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

Archives are more than boxes of historical documents studied by historians. As this course demonstrates, archives are also sites of creative practices, interventions, and collaborations. Focusing on archival practices in contemporary art, this course examines how artists make work with preexisting archives and produce new collections of their own. We will investigate how artists have activated archival collections, countered exclusions in archives, critiqued colonial archives, and developed archives with and for marginalized communities. The course will provide an overview of key terms and major themes in critical archival studies, such as memory, ephemera, critical fabulation.
Readings will include texts by the following scholars, curators, and archivists: Sarah Callahan, Tina Campt, Michelle Caswell, Maria Eugenia Cotera, Ann Cvetkovich, Okwui Enwezor, Saidiya Hartman, Carolyn Steedman, and Diana Taylor. Along with these writings, we will learn about the art practices and archives of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists: William Camargo, Guadalupe Rosales, Wendy Red Star, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, Diana Solís, Stephanie Syjuco, and Fred Wilson. In addition to the Flaxman Library Special Collections, we will visit archives held in Chicago institutions, such as the Newberry Library, the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, and the Harold Washington Library Center. During these class trips, we will meet with archivists and librarians.
Coursework will include written reflections on assigned readings and field trips, a creative project based on an archival collection, and a final research paper and presentation on a self-selected topic.

Class Number

2279

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

1923

Credits

3