Biography
Oscar E. Vázquez (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara) is Professor of Art History with appointments to the Center for Latin American Caribbean Studies, the Latina/o Studies Department, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His studies in eighteenth through early twentieth century Spanish and Latin American visual cultures have examined the roles of collections, markets and patronage systems, as well as academies, pedagogy and state administrations in the production and historiography of art. His research and teaching interests range from contemporary graffiti and murals and the construction of spaces by US Latino/as, to the representation of national narratives in Mexico, Spain and the Caribbean. He is the author of Inventing the Art Collection. Patrons, Markets and the State in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) and The End, Again: Degeneration and the Visual Cultures of Modern Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). He has edited the anthology Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America (Routledge, 2020) and published essays in Art History, Word & Image, and Art Journal among other scholarly periodicals. His most recent project focuses on the practice and politics of copying the human figure as pedagogy and ideology in academies of art.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, School of Art and Design
Professor, Latina/Latino Studies
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Professor, Center for Global Studies
Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Recent Publications
Vazquez, O. (2017). The End, Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Vázquez, O. E. (2017). Vision, lamentation and nineteenth-century representations of the end of al-Andalus. Art in Translation, 9(1), 71-91. https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2017.1303994
Vazquez, O. (2015). Regenerating the 'Man-Beast': Brutishness and Degeneration Theories in Modern Spanish Visual Culture. In F. Brauer, & S. Keshavjee (Eds.), Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture (pp. 113-131). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Vazquez, O. (2013). “A better place to live”: Government agency photography and the transformations of the Puerto Rican Jíbaro. In Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (pp. 281-315). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315015262
Vazquez, O. (2012). Apropiación, anti-apropiación y parodia en la pintura española a finales del siglo diecinueve. In O. Sáenz (Ed.), Apropiarse del arte: impulsos y pasiones (pp. 259-269). Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional, Autónoma de México.