Liz Munsell is Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & MFA Programs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a guest curator at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. A Fulbright Scholar to Chile in 2006, Munsell holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Letters and Visual Studies from Tufts University, where she minored in Latin American Studies (2005), and a Masters in Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Chile (2009). She is currently working on a long-term research project and exhibition on Chilean conceptual art commissioned by Harvard University, which travels to the Museo de la Solidaridad, Santiago (September 2015), and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (October 2016). Munsell’s latest exhibitions include Conversation Piece (MFA, Boston, October 2014–April 2015); Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection (CIFO Art Space, Miami, and MFA, Boston, December 2013–July 2014), Performing Portraiture: Video Art from the Collection of Manuel de Santaren (MFA, Boston, July 2014–July 2015), and Cuban Virtualities: New Media Art from the Island (Tufts University, September–December 2013, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, December 2014–February 2015). Munsell’s writings have been published in English, Spanish, and Japanese in print and online publications including Bomb Magazine and Artforum.
This essay concerns the “south of the south, the south of South America,” written from the north of the north, the north of North America. Drafted from a position of physical distance between author and subject, and troubled by the power dynamics of north gazing south, this selection…
