This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions—the museum, the art market—are not only products of colonial legacies, but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice—racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Latinx artist Tamara Kostianovsky began using her discarded clothes as artistic material shortly after immigrating to the United States, addressing cultural and physical displacement, assimilation and identity, and the brutal history of Latin America. Today, these emotionally charged materials coalesce in a post-colonial vision for an ecological future. Tamara Kostianovsky creates sculptures from textiles that address the relationship between landscapes, the body, and violence. This volume highlights distinct bodies of her work including sculptures of butchered carcasses, slayed birds, and severed trees. Built with layers of texture, colour, and emotion, these works dive head-first into the tension between beauty and horror, confronting histories of systemic violence and transforming them into utopian environments.

Relational Undercurrents accompanies an exhibition curated by Tatiana Flores for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, which forms part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. This initiative examines the artistic legacy of Latin America and U.S. Latinos through a series of exhibitions and related programs. This exhibition catalog and volume edited by Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens calls attention to the artistic production of the Caribbean islands and their diasporas, challenging the conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America. The editors offer an "archipelagic model," which proposes a mapping of the Caribbean from the perspective of its islands as distinct from its continental coasts. The exhibition, organized around the four themes of Conceptual Mappings, Perpetual Horizons, Landscape Ecologies, and Representational Acts, highlights thematic continuities in the art of the insular Caribbean, placing Hispanophone artists in visual conversation with those from Anglophone, Francophone, Dutch, and Danish backgrounds. It includes over eighty artists, among them Tania Bruguera, Allora & Calzadilla, Christopher Cozier, Jorge Pineda, Edouard Duval-Carrie, and Ebony G. Patterson. In accompanying essays, curators, critics, and scholars discuss particular artistic traditions in Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Haitian art and theorize the broader decolonial and archipelagic conceptual frameworks within which such works are produced. Relational Undercurrents will be on display that the Museum of Latin American Art from September 2017 through January 2018. Publication by the Museum of Latin American Art in collaboration with Fresco Books / SF Design, LLC. Distributed by Duke University Press.

Relational Undercurrents accompanies an exhibition curated by Tatiana Flores for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, which forms part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. This initiative examines the artistic legacy of Latin America and U.S. Latinos through a series of exhibitions and related programs. This exhibition catalog and volume edited by Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens calls attention to the artistic production of the Caribbean islands and their diasporas, challenging the conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America. The editors offer an "archipelagic model," which proposes a mapping of the Caribbean from the perspective of its islands as distinct from its continental coasts. The exhibition, organized around the four themes of Conceptual Mappings, Perpetual Horizons, Landscape Ecologies, and Representational Acts, highlights thematic continuities in the art of the insular Caribbean, placing Hispanophone artists in visual conversation with those from Anglophone, Francophone, Dutch, and Danish backgrounds. It includes over eighty artists, among them Tania Bruguera, Allora & Calzadilla, Christopher Cozier, Jorge Pineda, Edouard Duval-Carrie, and Ebony G. Patterson. In accompanying essays, curators, critics, and scholars discuss particular artistic traditions in Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Haitian art and theorize the broader decolonial and archipelagic conceptual frameworks within which such works are produced. Relational Undercurrents will be on display that the Museum of Latin American Art from September 2017 through January 2018. Publication by the Museum of Latin American Art in collaboration with Fresco Books / SF Design, LLC. Distributed by Duke University Press.