On Feb. 6, University of California, Los Angeles, professor Kency Cornejo delivered the Manton Foundation Annual Orozco Lecture in the Hood Museum of Art. Cornejo discussed her July 2024 book, “Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America” — a text which explores artistic strategies for “Indigenous, feminist and anti-carceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings and U.S.-funded civil wars in Central America,” according to its blurb.
Discussing the focuses of her book, Cornejo’s lecture provided an overview of Central American creative responses that bring to light the racial, economic and gender violence that contributes to the region’s rise in criminalization and mass migration.
The lecture, made possible through an endowment funded by the Manton Foundation, takes place each year to promote scholarship on and provide conservation for the Orozco murals. According to Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies professor Jorge Cuéllar — who helped the Hood Museum choose this year’s speaker — Cornejo’s selection marked a shift from prior years.
“Typically the lecture has been extended to folks who work on Mexican art — and to offer it to an art historian who works on Central America, specifically, is a bit of a shift, and a statement of where Latinx and Latin American art is today,” Cuéllar explained. “To me, it fulfills Orozco’s hemispheric vision of his murals and what Orozco has represented to the Americas.”
Ultimately, Corneja was chosen for her contributions to academia, Cuéllar said — adding that her book, the first on Central American art, was a “turning point in Central American studies.” Even before her most recent publication, though, Cuéllar said he had admired Cornejo’s scholarship.
“Kency’s work guides us and teaches us that we need visuality, we need literature, we need expressive culture,” Cuéllar said.
According to Cornejo, “Visual Disobedience” represents roughly 20 years of research on how art can work to resist coloniality and other systems of oppression in Central America. While the book contributes to the fields of art history and Latin American studies, it also serves as a “personal connection,” she added. Cornejo’s family is Central American and has faced a number of the issues explored in the chapters of “Visual Disobedience” — a reality which led her to become “personally invested in these politics,” she added.
Cornejo reflected on her experiences traveling to Central America across a two decade-long span to research local artists in countries such as El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala. While there, she conversed with creatives about the aftermath of the El Salvadoran civil war, which was marked by increased violence and crime. Those discussions ultimately influenced the core concepts of her book, she said.
“[The violence] was the core of our conversations — migration, gender violence, attacks on LGBTQ communities, anti-indigenous violence and aggression, migration and separated families, the rise of criminalization of poor youth and racialized and gendered people,” Cornejo said. “These conversations helped shape the focus of the book, which is the context behind the migratory crisis.”
Through these conversations, Cornejo learned more about the reality of Central America in the post-war period, what caused people to leave the region and how that context influenced local artists’ work. That dialogue helped the central premise of “Visual Disobedience” — its focus on the Central American migrant experience — come into clearer focus. Cornejo challenged the dehumanizing narrative of Central American migrants often perpetuated in the media.
“Usually the images [in the media] were of people arriving at the border who seemed to come from nowhere, with no connections, no histories, no story,” Cornejo said. “What did they leave behind? Why were they forced to leave? Why did they decide to risk their lives or that of their families?”
In the book, Cornejo also aimed to shed light on the United States’s global impact— a role she said “everybody in the country should be able to understand.”
“[Students] think that learning about Central American art has nothing to do with learning U.S. history, but they are surprised to see how you can’t understand Central American realities and politics without understanding the role the U.S. has had in the region,” Cornejo said.
In turn, Cornejo decided to utilize “non-traditional mediums” — such as Jorge de Leon’s “El Circulo” performance art and Dalia Chevez’s “Falso Franco” installation — to provide context for the realities of life in Central America. By highlighting Circulo, Chevez and their contemporaries, Cornejo explores the cyclical nature of violence and system of surveillance in the post-war region. In the book, she presented these more physical and interactive mediums through photos.
Cornejo’s focus in “Visual Disobedience” aligns with her broader scholarship — her specializations include “creative interventions in the context of anticolonial and antiracist social movements,” according to Cuéllar. Employing non-traditional mediums in the book demonstrates how art can serve as an act of defiance against colonial standards, she added.
“[Non-traditional mediums] represent the conceptual political shift where artists are starting to theorize and historicize the realities, not through the left-right wing dichotomies of before, but through an understanding of how colonialism functions through the institutions and in the art world,” Cornejo explained.
Cornejo’s book features 80 artworks, depicting scenes ranging from female cosmetic surgeries to volunteers writing messages to migrated family members on balloons and releasing them into the sky. In an interview with The Dartmouth, Cornejo highlighted one piece in particular — Edgar Calel’s “B’atz constelaciones de saberes” — as being “very emblematic of many of the issues” explored across her work. The photograph addresses Indigenous resistance, migration and erasure as well as Indigenous resilience and movement, mobility and creativity — themes that are central to the book, she said. She ultimately chose this work for her book’s cover.
Throughout the lecture, Cornejo highlighted additional artworks that reflect her book’s topics, such as indigenous resistance in Guatemala and feminism throughout Central American art. She emphasized the importance of her chapter on migration, which discusses the criminalization of Central Americans across borders, as well as the rise of prisons in Guatemala and Costa Rica. The chapter includes art, too, such as Regina Jose Galindo’s “Las Escucharon Gritar y No Abrieron Las Puertas” and Jhafiz Quintero’s “Máximas de Seguridad.”
“El Salvador offered the current administration to hold deportees in their mega-prison — if that seemed like a shock, it’s because people have not been paying attention,” Cornejo said. “The book shows how this has been unfolding and how artists, for years, have been exposing these injustices and warning people about what has been happening.”
According to Cuéllar, the themes discussed in both Cornejo’s book and lecture offer an “important corrective” to Central American stereotypes. He noted that those from Central America, despite frequent media narratives, are not “passive actors” or “just a suffering subject” at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“They are not just the gang members that we see tattooed, these kind of scary boogeyman figures,” he added.
Alyssa Gagen ’26, who attended the event, said the art history department and lectures organized by the Hood allow students at Dartmouth to consider other cultures and learn about their struggles.
“Art can be a powerful tool through which to learn about history and current injustices because it can promote expansive thinking that you may not experience when reading a textbook or learning through a standardized system,” Gagen said.
Cuéllar said he ultimately hopes Cornejo’s lecture will provide a humanizing perspective on Central Americans.
“This lecture demonstrates the incredible richness of cultural expression and human dignity that is at the heart of who Central American people are in the face of insurmountable generational and historical challenges,” he said.
