Delia L Solomons

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).