Scholarship and Biography
Camila Maroja specializes in modern and contemporary art within a Southern context. Her areas of interest include exhibition history, localized experimental art practices since the 1960s, the creation of art historiographies, cultural exchanges between South and North, the difficulties of cross-cultural methodologies and interpretations, location of global art, and the relationship between Brazil and Latin America. Maroja’s work engages with the geopolitical circulation of objects and ideas in the Americas and beyond, and aims to put marginal discourses at the center of art history.
Maroja is the author of several articles and book chapters that examine art in the 20th and 21st centuries. These include analyses of seminal exhibitions’ such as curator Ángel Kalenberg’s 1977 audio-visual for the Latin American section at the 10th Paris Biennial and a counter-critique of artist Ernesto Neto collaboration with the Huni Kuin at the 2017 Venice Biennial to propose a reading that reveals the indigenous knowledge contained in the artwork. Her book project, Framing Latin American Art, examines how artists and critics in Brazil have mobilized the tropes of earlier generations to construct something that could be named as “Latin American.” The manuscript looks at artworks, archival sources, and art criticism to study the current Latin American canon not as a stable construct defined by central institutions, but as an evolving local product in the making for over 50 years.
Maroja’s research has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Research Foundation, and the Cogut Center for International Humanities at Brown University. At Brandeis, Maroja is also core faculty at the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies Program.
Teaching Interests
Professor Maroja’s teaches modern and contemporary art from a localized Southern perspective. In addition to upper-level seminars on museum studies and selected topics such as indigenous art practices, she regularly teaches surveys of modern and contemporary Latin American art. Her courses aim to engage actual works of art in campus collections, area museums, and artists’ studios.