2026 ISLAA Plataforma: Alfredo Jaar with Julia Bryan-Wilson

Tuesday, September 8, 7-8:30 pm
Segal Theater, CUNY Graduate Center
Reception to follow

About Alfredo Jaar:

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who considers social injustices and human suffering through thought-provoking installations.

Through photography, film and installation he provokes the viewer to question our thought process around how we view the world around us. Jaar has explored significant political and social issues throughout his career, including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between the first and third world.

Jaar's work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013, 2026), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020); SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2023), and KINDL, Berlin (2024).

The artist has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over eighty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020. In 2024 he was awarded the IV Albert Camus Mediterranean Prize. In 2025 he was selected as the recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal and received the 11th Prix Pictet. 

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.

About Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies and core faculty in Columbia's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, theories of artistic labor, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. 

She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale, 2023). 

Bryan-Wilson served for six years as Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), where she co-curated the major group exhibitions Women’s Histories (2019), Histories of Dance (2020), and Queer Histories (2024). With Natalia Brizuela, she curated the first US retrospective of Lotty Rosenfeld at the Wallach Art Gallery in 2025, it travels to the Berkeley Art Museum in 2026. Her group exhibition GUTSY: On Feminist Infrastructure appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland, and her show Louise Nevelson: Persistence, was an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale in 2022. In 2024 she served as the President of the International Jury of the 60th Venice Biennale.

A widely published critic, Bryan-Wilson’s texts have been published in Afterall, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, differences, 4Columns Grey Room, The London Review of Books, October, the Journal of Modern Craft, Oxford Art Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and many other venues.

The ISLAA Forum :Latin American and Latinx Art Pre-Dissertation Plataforma is an annual event that provides support to CUNY Graduate Center doctoral students of Latin American and Latinx art and visual culture for the development of research projects and fosters an international network of scholars throughout the Americas.