Lynda Klich
BGC Visiting Fellow
Hunter College, CUNY

Casa Zuno: Neocolonial Gesamtkunstwerk

In this talk, BGC Fellow Lynda Klich examines Casa Zuno—the private home built from 1923-26 in Guadalajara by José Guadalupe Zuno, then governor of Jalisco, Mexico—as immersive neocolonial space. From its architecture (based on eighteenth-century palaces in the capital Mexico City) to its wood-carved doors and furniture (based on Catholic monasteries and churches), Casa Zuno encapsulates how intellectuals deployed colonial aesthetics to mold an idealized, modern, revolutionary, Mexican citizen.

Lynda Klich is an art historian specializing in modernism in Latin America. Her first book, The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) examined Latin American and European transnational networks and the relationships among culture and politics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and modernism and popular culture. It received the Phillips Collection Book Prize. While a visiting fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, she will focus on a book project that considers colonial revival aesthetics and race in 1920s-30s Mexico. Klich was co-editor and contributor to Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (Routledge, 2018; paperback 2021). She also is curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection, the subject of various collaborative projects with the MFA Boston, including the recent exhibition and catalogue, Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation (2022). Klich is Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she earned her MA. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Tuesday, September 26, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.