Florencia San Martín

Assistant Professor, Art History

610-758-6084

fls322@lehigh.edu

113 Research Drive Building C., Room 257

https://lehigh.academia.edu/FlorenciaSanMart%C3%ADn

Education:

PhD, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

MA, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

MFA, New York University

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Focus Areas

Art History

Additional Interests

Global Contemporary Art
Latin American art and culture
History of Photography
Memory Studies
Hemispheric Studies
Critical Theory
Decolonial Methodologies
Poetry

Personal Statement

I am an art historian specializing in global contemporary art, the art of the Americas, and the history of photography. I am particularly interested in the question of art and decolonial time and in the intersections of art, memory, literature, politics, journalism, universal jurisdiction, and human rights.

Biography

Florencia San Martín is an art historian specializing in contemporary art, the arts of the Americas, and the history of photography. Currently a Frank Hook Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, Professor San Martín is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of art history, cultural criticism, and Latin American and memory studies. Influenced by global social movements, anti-imperialist public scholarship, and decolonial poets, writers, and activists, her work more specifically examines the question of decolonial time and the possibilities of liberation through aesthetic forms that embrace hope and disobedience under our current neoliberal rule.

Professor San Martín's first academic monograph, Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished (Duke University Press, 2026), analyzes the work of Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity, which obscures the violence of colonization and globalization. Instead, the book argues that Jaar’s work represents decolonial time, exposing the limits of the violent systems we oppose but inhabit. Understanding decolonial temporality through the three main concepts in the book—mourning, accountability, and failure—this study offers a refreshing paradigm for thinking about global contemporary art today from the perspective of the Americas. Including a foreword by civil rights attorney and general secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, this study received a 2025 Millard Meiss Publication Fund from the College Art Association.

Prof. San Martín is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (Routledge, 2024); Dismantling the Nation: Contemporary Art in Chile (Amherst College Press, 2023); and the special issue “Decolonizing Contemporary Latin American Art” (Arts/MDPI, 2019). She is also the editor of Todavía somos el tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe (Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, 2025), the catalog accompanying the homonymous exhibition commissioned by the Chilean government to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup. In turn, her articles and reviews have been published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese in venues such as ASAP/J; LALVC, Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture; TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World; JSAH, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; Illapa Mana Tukukuq; Poiésis; Anales de Literatura Chilena; Art Nexus; and NACLA, The North American Congress on Latin America, and her research has been supported by institutions including the College Art Association, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She has also been invited to speak at numerous institutions, including the Free University in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Research & Creative Work

Books

Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished. Duke University Press, 2026.

The Jorge Tacla Archives. Santiago: Arrabal, Artbook D.A.P, 2022.

Edited Volumes

Todavía somos el tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe. Santiago: Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, 2024.

Dismantling the Nation: Contemporary Art in Chile. Co-edited with Carla Macchiavello and Paula Solimano. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2023.

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History. Coedited with Tatiana Flores and Charlene Villasenor Black, eds. New York / London: Routledge, 2023.

Edited Journal Issues

“Decolonizing Contemporary Latin American Art.” Coedited with Tatiana Flores. Arts, an open access journal published online by MDPI (2019-2020)

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

“Time, Love and the Museum.” In Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, ed. Amelia Jones and Jane Chin Davidson, 467-479. Wiley Blackwell, 2024.

“El tiempo decolonial del duelo.” In Alfredo Jaar: El lado oscuro de la luna, 187-206. Santiago: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2024. Exhibition catalogue.

“On Failure and the Nation State: A Decolonial Reading of Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America.” In The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History, ed. Tatiana Flores et al, 151-163. New York and London, Routledge, 2023.

“La fotografía en la obra de Pedro Lemebel.” In La vida imitada: Narrativa, performance y visualidad en la obra de Pedro Lemebel, edited by Fernando Blanco, 233-246. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2020.

“Decolonial Temporality in Alfredo Jaar’s The Kissinger Project.” ASAP/Journal 4, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 345-376.

“Political and Decolonial Allegories Made of Light: Reflections on Minimalism in the Americas.” In Dan Flavin. Luz y espacio, 48-59. Bogotá: Medellín Modern Art Museum and Editorial Planeta, 2019. Exhibition catalogue.

“To Not Forget Twice. Art and Social Change in Artists’ Books from Latin America.” In Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ Books in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Marshall Weber, 59-80. New York: Booklyn Ed., 2018.

“Yeguas del Apocalipsis: Cultura Loca y Neoliberalismo en el Chile de Casa Particular.” ILLAPA Mana Tukukuq 4, no. 14 (2017): 74-85.

Selected Reviews

Alfredo Jaar: The End of the World. Forthcoming with Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2025.

Review of Karen Benezra, Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America (University of California Press, 2020). In Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 9 no. 6 (Spring 2021): 126-131.

San Martín, Florencia. Review of Macarena Gomez-Barris, Beyond the Pink Tide. Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (University of California Press, 2018). Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3 no. 1 (Jan. 2021): 120-122.