Harper Montgomery

Harper Montgomery teaches courses on modern and contemporary Latin American art exploring issues of post-colonialism, nineteenth-century techniques of image-making, modernism, conceptualism, and art and politics through a global lens. Specializing in the art and visual cultures of Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and the Latinx U.S., she focuses her research on criticism, magazines, prints and printed ephemera, histories of collecting and display, transnational networks, and relationships between cosmopolitan and indigenous art.

She has written essays for exhibition catalogues published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, El Museo del Barrio, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and Hunter College. Her research has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Modernism/Modernity, and the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, and her reviews and essays can be found in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, caa.reviews, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtNexus, and ASAP/Journal. Montgomery was a curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the North American curator of the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, and has organized exhibitions of Francis Alÿs, Felipe Dulzaides, David Lamelas, the collective Temporary Services, conceptual art, appropriation in contemporary art in Latin America, and nineteenth-century traveler artists’ landscapes of Latin America from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. She co-edited Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic with James Elkins (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013) and is the author of The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2017), which won the Arvey Foundation Book Award for distinguished scholarship on Latin American Art. Montgomery received her PhD from the University of Chicago and her research has been supported by the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations, two PSC-CUNY research grants, and a senior fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation. Her current research concerns the ascent of artesanía within contemporary art spaces in Latin America from the 1970s to the late 1980s.