Florencia San Martín is an assistant professor of art history at Lehigh University, where she teaches and writes about contemporary art and culture in the Americas, history of photography, and theories of memory, gender, and the decolonial.
Her monograph Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished (under contract with Duke University Press) is the first academic survey of Chilean-born, New York-based artist Alfredo Jaar. Based on ten years of archival research and interviews with the artist and his contemporaries, the book argues that both the 1973 U.S.-backed military coup in Chile and its corollary neoliberal system injected there for the first time globally have been informing Jaar’s art since the beginning of this career in the early 1970s, from works related to Chile-U.S. relations to projects that expose the catastrophic humanitarian and ecological consequences of free market rule across the world. Reading Jaar’s art through the concepts of “mourning”, “accountability”, and “failure,” the book further proposes decolonial time as a critical analytic to reimagine memory studies and art history together, providing a fresh understanding of Jaar’s art by relating it fist to the ongoing legacies of coloniality from the perspective of the Americas.
Prof. San Martín is co-editor of the volumes The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (Routledge, 2023); 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 editor of the exhibition catalogue Todavía somos el Tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe, which accompanied an exhibition commissioned by the Chilean government she co-curated in 2023 at the National Center of Contemporary Art in Santiago. In turn, her essays, book chapters, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as ASAP/J; LALVC, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; TRANSMODERNITY; Iberoamericana Vervuert; Illapa Mana Tukukuq; Revista Poiésis; and Wiley Blackwell.
Prof. San Martín’s research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; and the universities of Lehigh, Rutgers, and California State. She regularly presents at academic conferences in the United States and abroad and has been invited to speak at museums including the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China; the Rhode Island School of Design; the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín, Colombia; and the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, where she also serves in the Collections Committee.
Prof. San Martín holds a PhD and MA in Art History from Rutgers University, an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, and a BFA in Studio Art from Catholic University in Chile.