Andrew W. Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow (2018-19)
Department of Drawings & Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Michaëla de Lacaze is an Andrew W. Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Drawings & Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018-2019). She holds a B.A. in Art History from Harvard University as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art from Columbia University, where she specialized in Latin American and Latinx art. The first chapter of her dissertation “Populist Counter-Spectacles and the Inception of Mass Media Art in Argentina: Marta Minujín’s Happenings, Performances, and Environments from the 1960s” received the 2016 Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. After completing a fellowship at the National Museum of Korea, she joined the curatorial team for the Korean Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. She was also the editor of its exhibition catalogue Counterbalance: The Stone and the Mountain.
In this essay, Michaëla de Lacaze engages in a close reading of Happy Bicentennial (1976), one of the most radical pieces of mail art created by artist and poet Clemente Padín during the Uruguayan authoritarian regime of the 1970s.
