Settling in as new coeditors, Mariola Alvarez and I have begun the conversations about the journal’s journey in the coming years, inspired by founding editor Charlene Villaseñor Black’s vision to create a unique interdisciplinary journal of visual culture studies on the Americas and their diaspora. She is not the only one who understood then that it was and is necessary to bring together different epistemologies, methodologies, and views that recognize the complexity of Latin American visual cultures. But the journal was also founded at a moment of reorientation in global art history.
Other art history journals, including in Europe, have been increasingly open to self-critical inquiry. For example, the editors of the journal Texte zur Kunst published a special “Art History Update” issue “to argue for an art history that deploys the pop-cultural knowledge and methodological openness of visual culture studies—without, however, disregarding the specificity of the formal codes and...
University of California Press