Abstract: In this presentation, I aim to problematize the tensions that arise when decolonial epistemologies are co-opted by institutions, among them museums, that uphold a liberal multiculturalism which celebrates difference but does not dismantle colonial power relations. I will then present the experience of the decolonial feminist schools carried out by GLEFAS (Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudios, Formación y Acción Feminista) in different parts of Abya Yala as autonomous initiatives that put the decolonization of knowledge into practice.

Ochy Curiel Pichardo was born in the Dominican Republic and resides in Colombia. She is a decolonial feminist activist and co-founder of the Latin American Group for Feminist Studies, Training, and Action (GLEFAS). She holds a PhD and a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the National University of Colombia, where she is also a professor. She is also a singer-songwriter. She has written numerous articles in which she intertwines race, class, sex, sexuality, and nation. Among her publications, the following books stand out: The Heterosexual Nation: Analysis of Legal Discourse and the Heterosexual Regime from the Anthropology of Domination (2013) and A Coup d’État: Ruling 168-13. Continuities and Discontinuities of Racism in the Dominican Republic (2021). She has been invited as a speaker at numerous events across different continents and has received several acknowledgments, such as the honorary distinction from Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) for her political and theoretical contributions in 2022, and an award for excellence in teaching from the Faculty of Human Sciences at the National University of Colombia in 2016.

Abstract : The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the consolidation of what was then called Natural History—a scientific framework that legitimized the hierarchization of humanity by incorporating stereotypes constructed through otherness. In this presentation, I analyze the naturalist ideas that circulated during this period about Africa and its inhabitants, as well as about the lowland regions of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, a Spanish colony in the American continent that encompassed what are now Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Venezuela. By studying the allegories of Africa found in drawing and painting manuals and the descriptions produced by naturalists of the territories they visited, this research shows how the interaction between visual culture and Natural History contributed to the perpetuation of harmful images and imaginaries—both of the bodies of Black women and of territories with predominantly Afro-descendant populations in the Latin American countries that formed part of the viceroyalty.

Angélica M. Sánchez Barona is a Historian, Economist, and Art Historian specializing in Colonial History, the History of the Arts and Cultures of the eighteenth century, Afrodiasporic Feminisms, and Intersectionality. She is a PhD candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is affiliated with the Afro-Latin America Research Institute (ALARI) at Harvard and with the Interseccionalidades research group of the Casa Cultural El Chontaduro Association in Cali, Colombia. She is co-editor (with Vergara-Figueroa and de la Fuente) of the collection Afro-Colombian Studies: Essential Readings (2025), and has published articles and book chapters such as Instruments of Persuasion: Painting Manuals and the Visual Construction of Africa and Africans in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, Eighteenth Century (2024), and I Am Free, I Come to Enslave Myself! 1976 (2019). She is currently affiliated with the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center, which awarded her the William R. Tyler Fellowship for the 2024–2026 period.

Abstract: Forty years after the end of the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina, censorship practices targeting artworks remain present, often motivated by political, religious, and gender-related disputes. This paper analyzes 21st-century cases in which artistic productions were censored or faced attempts at censorship for addressing relationships between gender and Catholic religion. The research begins by identifying episodes that occurred in both countries and by comparatively analyzing their social, legal, and institutional contexts. The methodology combines documentary research, a review of public debates, and an examination of the narrative strategies employed by artists and by censoring actors. The findings indicate that, despite democratic consolidation, controversy surrounding gender representations linked to Catholic imagery remains a sensitive area and reveals persistent tensions related to freedom of expression, authoritarian memory, and contemporary disputes over cultural legitimacy.

Aline Miklos is a researcher and program manager with international experience in human rights, cultural rights, transitional justice, and the safeguarding of the rule of law. She holds a PhD in Law and Social Sciences and a Master’s degree in Art History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Her career has focused on freedom of expression and artistic creation, censorship, and issues related to gender and ethnic-racial minorities. In addition to her academic work, Aline has more than ten years of experience in the field of human rights and currently serves as Advocacy and Rule of Law Guarantees Coordinator at the Vladimir Herzog Institute.

Abstract: The region of Central America has long been overshadowed by its histories of colonialism and as a target of US empire. Consequently, popular representations of the isthmus reinforce a narrative of tragedy and victimhood. Meanwhile, its art narratives have been excluded from the dominant canons of art history. Yet beyond omission, what is the correlation between the erasure of a people’s creativity and a negation of a people’s humanity? A discussion of visual coloniality sets the stage for a theorization of visual disobedience as a tactic of resistance from a post-war Central American region. Through visual disobedience—as a defiance to both nation-states and visual coloniality—artists theorize and expose the region’s most pressing issues at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and criminalization. A focus on Black, Indigenous, nonbinary and women artists in this context reveals both epistemic and political interventions, and the possibility for art histories otherwise.

Kency Cornejo is an art historian of contemporary art and activism in the Americas. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research and teaching specializations include art and visual culture of Central America and its diasporas, creative expressions within anti-colonial and anti-racist social movements, and decolonial aesthetics and methodologies in art. Her book, Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America (Duke University Press, 2024), explores three decades of art and decoloniality in the region and has earned the 2025 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford Foundations, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award Grant. Kency Cornejo was born to Salvadorans immigrant and raised in Compton, California.

Abstract: This paper looks at how changes in disciplinary approaches to 19th-century portraits of Haitian leaders by the artist Louis Rigaud (from history paintings to ethnographic objects to modern art) transformed their research, exhibition, and collection value. In the process, it uncovers what becomes visible beyond Western disciplinary boundaries of art history, while modeling a more prismatic way of seeing.

Erica Moiah James is an art historian, curator and Associate Professor at The University of Miami. She was previously the founding director and chief curator of the National Gallery of The Bahamas and Assistant Professor of Art History and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research centers on indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and the African Diaspora. Select publications include Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (NKA2019); La Luz de Cosas/’The Light of Things (El Museo2023), and “Prismatic Blackness: Art, Being and Aesthetics in the Global Caribbean” (2024) in Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art (HarvardUP2024). Recent curatorial projects include Didier William: nou kite tout sa dèyè (MoCA-NoMi) and Nari Ward: Home of the Brave (Vilcek Foundation). Her current book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (DUP 2025).

Abstract: This work proposes a reflection on the leading role of Black singers in 20th-century Latin American music, understanding their voices as an epistemic framework of memory, resistance, and production of aesthetic and political meaning. To support this approach, the research employs the figure of Eshu, a Yoruba Orisha redefined in the diasporic context, linked with communication and rhythm, as the conceptual foundation of a “laryngeal epistemology.” From this perspective, the larynx – as a physical and symbolic space for vocal emission – is regarded as a means of expression involving body, culture, and spirituality, in which singing and speaking function as vectors of asé (vital force) and òfò (enchanting power of words). Thus, the voice of these artists is analyzed as a weapon-tool capable of tensioning and denouncing colonial, racist, and patriarchal oppression. It is noteworthy that, although the research uses Yoruba references as an analytical approach, it does not intend to homogenize the diverse cultural backgrounds of Latin America, when examining the careers and repertoires of Toña La Negra (Mexico), Mercedita Valdés (Cuba), Elza Soares (Brazil), and Victoria Santa Cruz (Perú) as living archives of the Black diaspora.

Danielle Almeida works at the intersection of art, education, and strategic management, developing projects addressing economic and racial justice in Latin America. She holds a degree in Music from the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel) and a Master’s in Education Sciences from the University of Monterrey (UDEM, Mexico). Among other activities, she was a guest teacher and researcher at the Independent Studies Program at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and a researcher at the Academy of the Arts of the World in Germany. Focusing on inclusion policies and affirmative actions for Black populations, she coordinated the first study on the profile of Afro-entrepreneurship in Latin America. She is currently a Content and Institutional Development Manager at Museu das Favelas.

Abstract: My presentation will be about Afro Cuban women artists and the specific conditions they contend with. Although my focus will be on visual artists, it is crucial to acknowledge that the iconic representations of Black Cubans and Black Cuban women first emerged in literature and then were popularized in performing arts, cinema and tourism. I will describe the historical and political constraints that have impacted artistic treatment of racial and gender identity in Cuba in recent decades in order to understand how the revolution generated the parameters of acceptable creative expression. I will show how the decriminalization of religion, the economic hardships that began in the 1990s and the explosion of tourism in the past thirty years have affected the artistic choices of Afro-Cuban artists in general and Afro-Cuban women in particular. In my presentation, I will consider works by such artists as Belkis Ayon, Magdalena Campos, Gertrudis Rivalta, Susana Pilar, and Laura Gilbert.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. Fusco is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours (2001) and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008).