In her research, Delia Solomons explores intersections between exhibition practices, transnational exchange, politics, and visual culture across the United States and Latin America in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book, Cold War in the White Cube: U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art (1959–68) (Penn State University Press, 2023), narrates the sudden surge of exhibitions on Latin American art organized by U.S. institutions amid escalating Cold War inter-American tensions in the 1960s. The project studies art’s role in constructing panamerican, Latin American, and U.S. imaginaries on U.S. soil in the years surrounding the Cuban Revolution and Alliance for Progress. This research has been supported by the Humanities Initiative, Kress Foundation, Institute of Fine Arts, and Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.
She is currently developing her second book, a monograph devoted to the sculpture of Paris-born Venezuelan-American artist Marisol. Solomons has previously published three essays on Marisol. Her article in The Art Bulletin examines how Marisol’s The Generals (1961-62) unleashed a surprising critique of monuments, nationalism, bellicose masculinity, the lavender scare, and Cold War propaganda about hemispheric unity. Her essay in Marisol: A Retrospective (Buffalo AKG Museum, 2023) explored Marisol’s images of monstrous motherhood in relation to science fiction films, nuclear anxiety, the baby boom, and the author’s own conflicted positionality as a mother. In an essay for MoMA’s post: notes on art in a global context, Solomons considers the layered, poignant relationship between Marisol’s sculpture Love (1962) and her friend Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You” (1960).
Solomons also co-edited the journal of visual culture’s themed issue “Armed/Unarmed: Guns in American Visual and Material Culture” (Winter 2018/19), co-curated the exhibition Sari Dienes (The Drawing Center, New York, 2014), and has contributed essays to Alex Da Corte: Mr. Remember (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2022),Journal of Curatorial Studies, and The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States (The Frick Collection and Penn State University Press, 2018).
Selected Publications:
Book:
Cold War in the White Cube: U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art, 1959–1968. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. February 2023.
Edited Journal Issue:
Co-edited with Faye Gleisser, “Armed/Unarmed: Guns in American Visual and Material Culture,” Special Themed Issue of the journal of visual culture, Vol. 17, Issue 3 (Winter 2018/19). (Inclusive in this volume: an introduction, six featured essays, a curatorial roundtable, and a portfolio of artworks).
Essays and Articles:
“Babies, Nuclear Giants, and Other Monsters.” Marisol: A Retrospective. Ed. Cathleen Chaffee. Buffalo: Buffalo Albright-Knox Art Museum, Buffalo, 2023. 66–87.
“To Break Through the Animation Cel, in Technicolor.” Alex Da Corte: Mr. Remember. Eds. Lærke Rydal Jørgensen, Mathias Ussing Seeberg, William Pym, and Alex Da Corte. Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2022. 48–59. Exhibition catalogue essay.
“Having a Coke with Marisol and Frank O’Hara,” in post: notes on art in a global context. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021. https://post.moma.org/having-a-coke-with-marisol-and-frank-ohara/
“Marisol’s Antimonument: Masculinity, Pan-Americanism, and Other Imaginaries,” The Art Bulletin Vol 102, No 3 (Fall 2020): 104-29.
“Hot Styles and Cold War: Collecting Practices at MoMA and other Museums in the Sixties.” In The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States. Edited by Edward Sullivan. New York: The Frick Collection and The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.
“Staging the Global: Latin American Art in the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals of the 1960s.” Journal of Curatorial Studies Vol. 3, Nos. 2–3 (June 2014): 290–319.
Sari Dienes, with Alexis Lowry. Exhibition brochure. New York: The Drawing Center, 2014.
“Cronología,” with Lori Cole. In Jordana Mendelson, ed. Encuentros con los años ’30. Exhibition catalogue, 398-405. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012.
“Bruce Nauman.” In Meredith Malone and Rachel Nackman, eds. Notation: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process. Online exhibition catalogue. St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2012.