Book Launch: The Space of Latin American Women Modernists

A panel will examine Dr Camilla Sutherland’s recently published book, The Space of Latin American Women Modernists (University of Wales Press, 2024), and foster an interdisciplinary dialogue.

Participants include Dr Ian Merkel, a historian (RUG); Dr Kathryn Roberts, a literary scholar (RUG); and art historian and curator Diana Cuéllar Ledesma (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

This book offers a fresh reading of Latin American modernism through the lenses of gender and space. By analysing the contributions of eight contemporaneous women – four writers and four plastic artists – it reveals how they constructed and conceived of their identities as cultural practitioners through distinctly spatial tactics. Organised around four spatial themes (domestic architecture, the natural world, travel and the public sphere), this multidisciplinary, comparative monograph sheds new light on the works of well-known figures such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, while recuperating artists that remain virtually unknown, such as Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado. Through discussion of their work within a transnational context, this study positions these Latin American women practitioners within a broader narrative of modernism from which they have often remained absent.