Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and Director of Graduate Studies
Art History
Mariola Alvarez, PhD
- Email: mariola.alvarez@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9172
- Office: Tyler 201M
Mariola Alvarez is a historian of Latin American art of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a specialization in the history of abstraction in Brazil.
Contributing to a larger interest in interdisciplinarity and the relationship of art to postwar modernity, her book, The Affinity of Neoconcretism: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Brazilian Modernism, 1954-1964 (University of California Press 2023) examines Neoconcretism, a Brazilian group composed of artists and poets from the 1950s and 1960s. Her second research project will examine the art of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil. She is the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to conduct research in Brazil towards this project. She has published her research in the journals Third Text and Arts, and in exhibition catalogs on Maria Martins and art of the Asian diaspora in Latin America. She co-edited the book, New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, which expands the current research by leading scholars in the field.
PhD, Art History, the University of California, San Diego, 2012
MA, Art History, the University of Florida, 2005
Selected Work
Alvarez, M.V. (2023). The Affinity of Neoconcretism: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Brazilian Modernism, 1954- 1964. Oakland, University of California Press.
Alvarez, M. V. (2020). Japanese and Brazilian Art: Modern Abstract Art in Brazil. In Cultural
Encounters: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America & the Caribbean, 1945-Present
(exhibition catalogue), Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC; Morikami Museum,
Delray Beach, FL; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI.
Alvarez, M. V., & Franco, A. M. (Eds.). (2019a). New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin
America. New York, NY: Routledge.
Alvarez, M. V. (2019b). Calligraphic Abstraction and Postwar Brazilian Informalist Painting. In M. V.
Alvarez, & A. M. Franco (Eds.), New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Alvarez, M. V. (2017a). Galatea/bulbo Collective: Project Description. In G. Kester, & B. Kelley, Jr.
(Eds.), Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Alvarez, M. V. (2017b). Interview with Mauricio Brandão of BijaRi. In G. Kester, & B. Kelley, Jr. (Eds.),
Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Alvarez, M. V. (2016). Minor Transnational Brazilian Art: Lyrical Abstraction and the Case of Manabu
Mabe. Third Text 30(1-2), 76-89.