Gabriela Germana’s New Teaching Position, Curated Exhibition, and Invited Talks
In the fall of 2019, doctoral candidate Gabriela Germana joined the faculty at the University of South Florida as Visiting Instructor in Contemporary Art. Gabriela is thrilled to be part of USF’s School of Art and Art History, which offers degrees in art history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The School has a strong emphasis in studio art and also houses the Institute for Research in Art (consisting of the Contemporary Art Museum and the nationally renowned Graphicstudio). During the fall semester Gabriela taught an undergraduate survey class, “Contemporary Issues in Art,” and a graduate seminar, “Contemporary Indigenous Art: From Local Traditional Aesthetics to the Global Contemporary Art World.”
In the fall Gabriela also curated the exhibition Resistance & Change: Tablas of Sarhua, Contemporary Paintings from the Peruvian Andes at the Pensacola Museum of Art. The exhibition explored the history of the tablas of Sarhua, from their traditional uses in the rural community of Sarhua to the changes brought about when Sarhuinos migrated to the city of Lima. Through works by Primitivo Evanán Poma and the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua-ADAPS, as well as works produced by a new generation of Sarhuino painters, the exhibition examined the continuities of the tablas tradition over time as well as its transformations and most current forms.
The exhibition project received funding from the Ministry of Culture of Peru, which allowed painters Primitivo Evanán Poma, Valeriana Evanán Vivanco, and Venuca Evanán Vivanco to attend the exhibition opening, to paint a mural in the façade of the museum, and to host two workshops.
Gabriela was also invited to participate in Picturing the Body Politic: The Arts of Latin America, a conference organized by FSU alumna Dr. Lesley Wolff at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Gabriela gave the talk “My Body is Not Your Body: Contemporary Peruvian Artists and Discourses on the Body.” She was invited by the San Antonio Museum of Art to consult on its plans for the reinstallation of the permanent folk art gallery, and to give a public lecture titled “In Between Arts: The Unsettled Histories of Retablos Ayacuchanos and Tablas de Sarhua (Peru).” Finally, she presented the paper “Between Folk Art, Touristic Souvenir, and Art Pieces: The Circulation and Construction of Discourses for the Paintings of Sarhua, Perú” at the 2019 CASCA-AAA Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC.
Gabriela specializes in contemporary Andean art with emphasis on the relationship between traditional and Indigenous aesthetics within the global art context. Her dissertation, under the direction of Dr. Michael Carrasco, examines the history of the paintings made by Sarhuino artists, both in the nineteenth-century peasant community of Sarhua and in Lima in the 1970s, and the manner in which they have constantly responded to and challenged modern Western aesthetics and knowledge.
