National Hispanic Heritage Month

Aesthetics of Excess examines how the bodies of women and girls of color are racialized through cultural discourses of aesthetic value that mark them as sexual "others," and how in turn, aesthetic value is generated through the presentation of their bodies. Hernandez employs participatory research with young women of color, critical readings of art and popular culture, and autoethnography to provide new frameworks for understanding the relationships between cultural production and racialized bodies that can be variously exploitative and socially transformative.

Through individual profiles of more than eighty photographers from the early history of the photographic medium to the present, Elizabeth Ferrer introduces readers to Latinx portraitists, photojournalists, and documentarians and their legacies.

Lucia Nagib presents a comprehensive critical survey of Brazilian film production since the mid 1990s, which has become known as the "renaissance of Brazilian cinema". Besides explaining the recent boom, this book elaborates on the new aesthetic tendencies of recent productions, as well as their relationships to earlier traditions of Brazilian cinema.

In Contemporary Latina/o Theater, Jon D. Rossini explores the complex relationship between theater and the creation of ethnicity in an unprecedented examination of six Latina/o playwrights and their works: Miguel Piñero, Luis Valdez, Guillermo Reyes, Octavio Solis, José Rivera, and Cherríe Moraga. Rossini exposes how these writers use the genre as a tool to reveal and transform existing preconceptions about their culture. Through “wrighting”—the triplicate process of writing plays, righting misconceptions about ethnic identity, and creating an entirely new way of understanding Latina/o culture—these playwrights directly intervene in current conversations regarding ethnic identity, providing the tools for audiences to reexplore their previously held perspectives outside the theater.

From innovative works by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica and Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo to the breathtaking yet practically unknown ouevre of queer Ecuadorian filmmaker Eduardo Sola Franco, the exhibition takes both the aficionado and the open-minded viewer on a journey into a wealth of materials culled from the forgotten corners of Latin American film archives. Equally unprecedented in its approach and scope, the accompanying fully bilingual catalogue features major scholars and artists working across nationalities, mediums, and time periods. Lerner and Piazza assemble a mix of original content authored by key curators, scholars, and archivists from Latin America: eighteen essays and articles translated for the first time pertaining to the history of Latin American experimental film, historical image-documents that are fundamental to the history of experimental film in Latin America, and program notes from the exhibition's programs