Research Interests
- Histories of architectural modernism
- Vernacular art and architecture
- Institutional and exhibition histories
- Histories of collecting and display
- Museum theory
- Intellectual history
- Histories of race and the built environment
- Material cultural studies
- Politics of space
Education
BA, Honours in History, University of British Columbia
MA, Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Museum Studies, New York University
Bio
Pilar Dirickson Garrett is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century art and architectural histories of Latin America. Pilar's scholarly interests include institutional and exhibition histories, histories of architectural modernism, intellectual history, material cultural studies, and politics of race, space, and the built environment.
Pilar is currently conducting research for her dissertation titled “Objects of Distinction: The Making of Race, Space, and Region in Exhibitions of Brazilian Popular Art, 1930-1965.” The project investigates the emergence of Brazil’s first museums and exhibitions dedicated to the display of “popular art” – a category of material culture produced largely by self-trained and often anonymous makers from the country’s rural interiors – as they arose in the Northeast of the country through the interwar and immediate postwar periods. Offering a novel analysis of the “popular” as it relates to both Brazilian material culture and histories of imagined and built space, the project positions these constellated exhibitionary complexes as sites through which local state-makers and cultural arbiters were able to negotiate diverse understandings of racial, spatial, and regional modernity at midcentury. Embracing analytical frameworks from Black spatiality studies and new materialist theory, Pilar’s research centers the affective nature of architecture and the agency of material things to argue for the complicity of exhibitions of material culture in the production of Brazil’s racialized spatial geographies.
Pilar’s scholarship has been generously supported by the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School, the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and the Foreign Language Areas Studies (FLAS) Program through the U.S. Department of Education, among others.