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, she is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of art history, cultural criticism, and Latin American and memory studies. Influenced by global social movements, transnational solidarities, public scholarship, and decolonial poets, writers, and activists, Prof. San Martín's 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.
Her 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.
Originally from Santiago, Chile, she holds a BFA from Catholic University, an MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, and an MA and PhD in art history from Rutgers University.