Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires 1936: Visión fotográfica (Buenos Aires 1936: Photographic Vision), 2nd ed., published by Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1937. Estate of Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara–La Ruche, Buenos Aires.
A Modern Buenos Aires: Architecture and Photomontage under Peronism
In conjunction with the exhibition Buenos Aires Modern, 1935–1950, Ana María León, associate professor of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, will discuss how Grete Stern’s innovative photomontages were mobilized by a wide range of entities in Buenos Aires, from municipal architects to modern artists to exiled socialist publishers. León’s research places these contradictory projects in conversation, examining how notions of the avant-garde, populism, and conservatism mingled under Peronism.
Following León’s talk, Eric Mumford, the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, will join her to discuss related themes in the exhibition along with architectural modernism more broadly.
About the Participants
Ana María León‘s work examines how spatial practices of power, resistance, and solidarity have shaped the modernity and coloniality of the American continent. She is co-founder of several collectives laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history. León is author of "Spatial Solidarities: Architecture and Resistance in 1970s Chile" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026) and "Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires" (University of Texas Press, 2021). She is an associate professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is currently working on a co-edited collection on spatial histories of unfreedom and a book project on settler modernity in Uruguay.
Eric P. Mumford is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture at WashU’s Sam Fox School, where he also holds courtesy appointments in art history and archaeology, as well as history. His academic research and teaching focuses on the history of architectural design within various midcentury metropolitan and environmental contexts, many of them related to the history of CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture.
His books include “Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s-70s,” (Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum) the catalogue for a fall 2024 exhibition which he co-curated. He is also the author of several widely known works of architectural history, including a textbook, “Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850” (Yale University Press, 2018); “The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960” (MIT Press, 2000); “Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937-69” (Yale University Press, 2009); “Modern Architecture in St. Louis” (Washington University, 2004); and an earlier museum catalogue, “Ando and Le Corbusier, volume 2” (Alphawood Foundation, Chicago, 2021).
He was co-principal investigator with Mónica Rivera on Edges of Privacy, a housing research project in 2021-24, supported by a McDonnell International Scholars Academy Global Incubator Seed Grant. He is an advisor to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Humanity’s Urban Future committee, and a steering committee member of the Genealogies of Urban Design Network.
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.