Dr. George Flaherty is Associate Professor of Art History and Co-Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). His research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary visual and spatial cultures in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States. His scholarly interests extend to film and media studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx studies.
Dr. Flaherty is at work on a book manuscript, titled In the Wake of Renaissances: Art Between Mexico and Black America. The book examines the axis of cultural exchange, affinity, and appropriation between Mexican and Black artists and intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s to expand the borders of the Mexican Renaissance and Harlem Renaissance. He is also developing another book project, Apertures and Thresholds: Still and Moving Image-making through Greater Mexico, which follows a century of exchange between photographers and filmmakers to treat both media, like Mexico and the U.S., as a single field of practice organized by what an image admits and who is permitted to appear in it.
His first book, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (University of California Press, 2016), received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Social Science Research Covuncil, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and a Fulbright-García Robles grant to Mexico, where he was a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Hotel Mexico was recognized with the Arvey Book Award from the Association of Latin American Art (ALAA) in 2017.
Dr. Flaherty’s scholarship has appeared in various journals, including Social Text, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Art in Translation. His article in JSAH was recognized with the SAH Founders’ Award in 2015.
Forthcoming publications look at the friendship between artists Miguel Covarrubias and Nickolas Muray, the adobe paintings of Rafa Esparza, and the cultural politics of replicas at the Museo de Arte e Historia in Ciudad Juárez
He has also contributed to several anthologies and exhibition catalogues, including Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentation in Concrete (2024), La Raza (2020), Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (2017), and Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (2014). La Raza was recognized with ALAA’s Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalog Award in 2021.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Ph.D. 2011).
Dr. George Flaherty is Associate Professor of Art History and Co-Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). His research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary visual and spatial cultures in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States. His scholarly interests extend to film and media studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx studies.
Dr. Flaherty is at work on a book manuscript, titled In the Wake of Renaissances: Art Between Mexico and Black America. The book examines the axis of cultural exchange, affinity, and appropriation between Mexican and Black artists and intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s to expand the borders of the Mexican Renaissance and Harlem Renaissance. He is also developing another book project, Apertures and Thresholds: Still and Moving Image-making through Greater Mexico, which follows a century of exchange between photographers and filmmakers to treat both media, like Mexico and the U.S., as a single field of practice organized by what an image admits and who is permitted to appear in it.
His first book, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (University of California Press, 2016), received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Social Science Research Covuncil, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and a Fulbright-García Robles grant to Mexico, where he was a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Hotel Mexico was recognized with the Arvey Book Award from the Association of Latin American Art (ALAA) in 2017.
Dr. Flaherty’s scholarship has appeared in various journals, including Social Text, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Art in Translation. His article in JSAH was recognized with the SAH Founders’ Award in 2015.
Forthcoming publications look at the friendship between artists Miguel Covarrubias and Nickolas Muray, the adobe paintings of Rafa Esparza, and the cultural politics of replicas at the Museo de Arte e Historia in Ciudad Juárez
He has also contributed to several anthologies and exhibition catalogues, including Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentation in Concrete (2024), La Raza (2020), Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (2017), and Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (2014). La Raza was recognized with ALAA’s Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalog Award in 2021.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Ph.D. 2011).