Florencia San Martín is an assistant professor of art history at Lehigh University, where she teaches and writes about global contemporary art, art and culture in the Americas, and the history of photography. Her monograph Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished (forthcoming with Duke University Press) is the first academic survey of the internationally acclaimed artist Alfredo Jaar. Based on ten years of archival research, interviews with the artist and his contemporaries, and a transdisciplinary analysis of works, the book argues that decolonial time has been centrally informing Jaar’s art from the outset of his career in the early 1970s, propelling him to create an aesthetic project that is essentially unfinished, just as the decolonial itself. Understanding decolonial temporality through the concepts of mourning, accountability, and failure, the book further argues that Jaar’s art has been shaped by two interconnected historical events: the 1973 U.S.-backed military coup in Chile and its corollary neoliberal system, adopted there for the first time globally. Across an introduction, three chapters “Mourning”, “Accountability”, and “Failure”, and a conclusion — “The End of the World”—, this study ultimately proposes decolonial time as critical analytic that reimagines art history, decolonial theory, and memory studies together, offering a refreshing paradigm from where to think about global contemporary art today.
Prof. San Martín is also 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). In turn, she is editor of Todavía somos el Tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe (2024), the catalogue accompanying the homonymous exhibition commissioned in 2023 by the Chilean government at the National Center of Contemporary Art in Santiago. Florencia's articles, book chapters, and book reviews have been published in venues such as ASAP/J; Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture; TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World; Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH); Illapa Mana Tukukuq; Poiésis; Anales de Literatura Chilena; Iberoamericana Vervuert; and Wiley Blackwell.
Prof. San Martín’s research has been supported by prestigious national and international grants, including fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Chilean National Fund for the Development of Culture and the Arts, 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 numerous museums and institutions, including the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, the Free University in Berlin, 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.