By As part of Long Beach State’s Faculty Research series, Assistant Professor Paulina Pardo Gaviria was selected to present pieces of her current research project, “Latin American Women in Art and Science” on Sept. 20 at the University Library.
Gaviria, who teaches Latin American and Latinx art history on campus, conducts research with a focus on the work of Latin American artists Sandra Llano-Mejía, Teresa Burga, Claudia Andújar and Leticia T.S. Parente.
Specializing in the history of contemporary art in the Americas, Gaviria states that she is currently midway through her research for this project. Her focus is on highlighting a pattern amongst female artists in Latin America, with a concentration on medical science and health throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
“I’m interested in seeing the development of medicine in these regions during a time where the eradication and control of tropical diseases was being created,” Gaviria said.
With Gaviria’s scholarly background as a Latin American and Latine art history professor, she discovered this pattern while working on her doctoral dissertation in 2020.
Her most extensive research has been done on Leticia T.S. Parente, a Brazilian chemist and professor whose art career spanned only seven years, starting in the mid ’70s. Those seven years were also the most intense years of Brazilian dictatorship.
“The confluence of science and art in her work led me to start identifying other artists who might have had similar trajectories,” Gaviria said.
Parente’s art installations involved the body– most times her own– and explored ideas of female body image, Brazilian nationalism during dictatorship and vaccines that could rid the population of racism, classism and the idea of eugenics.
Conversely, Llano-Mejía created an art installation where she used her expertise in art to showcase the differences in her heart rate depending on who or what she was interacting with.
Though these two artists did not interact or know of each other and came from two different nations within Latin America, they displayed art related to medical science in ways that spoke to their socio-political landscapes only two years apart from each other.
Gaviria feels this is a coincidence, but also not surprising at all. She states she was thinking about access to vaccinations at this time but also the trusted medical personnel in different regions.
Latin American women who used science as a channel of information in their art may share similarities, but Gaviria studies how their experiences differed depending on what their nations were experiencing.
“Different connections and disconnections exist within each region and we cannot view [Latin America] as a whole block,” Gaviria said.
