Dr. Pilar Garrett

Biography

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. She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century art and architectural histories in Latin America. Her scholarly interests encompass institutional exhibition histories, architectural modernism, intellectual history, material cultural studies, and the politics of race and space within the built environment. Currently, she is conducting research for her dissertation titled 'Objects Distinction: Making Race, Space, Region Exhibitions Brazilian Popular Art, 1930-1965.' This project investigates the emergence of Brazil’s museums and exhibitions dedicated to displaying 'popular art,' a category of material culture produced largely by self-trained anonymous makers from the rural interiors of the country. The project offers a novel analysis of how 'popular' relates to Brazilian material culture histories and the imagined built space, thereby positioning exhibitionary complexes as sites for local state-makers and cultural arbiters who are tasked with negotiating diverse understandings of racial, spatial, and regional modernity during the midcentury. Pilar's research employs analytical frameworks from Black spatiality studies and new materialist theory, focusing on the affective nature of architecture and the agency of material things, while arguing for the complicity of exhibitions in the production of Brazil’s racialized spatial geographies.

Research Interests