ARC with Maia Gil’Adí (Johns Hopkins University)

Join the UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC) for a discussion of Maia Gil’Adí’s essay, “Wood, Cloth, Plaster: Marisol’s Surface Work.”

Please email clooby@humnet.ucla.edu for a copy of the paper.

In this essay, Maia Gil’Adí examines the work of Venezuelan artist Marisol to reconsider the relationship between material form, diaspora, and hemispheric politics. Gil’Adí argues that the unfinished surfaces and fragmented bodies of Marisol’s sculptures produce encounters structured by opacity and estrangement, challenging expectations of interpretive depth. These aesthetic strategies, she suggests, register the affective consequences of displacement while reframing how the political appears in visual art. She situates Marisol within a broader Venezuelan cultural tradition that mobilizes incompletion as both an aesthetic form and a political condition.

Maia Gil’Adí is a Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence (Duke University Press, 2025), examines how portrayals of destruction paradoxically foreground pleasure while revealing the ongoing nature of imperial, racial, and ethno-national violence. Her work has appeared in MELUS, Latino Studies, ASAP/Journal, and American Quarterly. She is also the President of the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present.