Art History Professor Roberto Tejada wins Fulbright Distinguished Chair

SMU Professor Roberto Tejada, Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History at Meadows School of the Arts, has been named the 2012-2013 recipient of the Fulbright-FAAP Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts.

The award from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program will allow Tejada to engage in scholarship with faculty and students at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP) in São Paulo, Brazil.

One of four distinguished chairs in different disciplines established in Brazil by the Fulbright Scholar Program, the FAAP Distinguished Chair was created to call attention to U.S. scholars’ contributions to the development of the visual arts in Brazilian universities and in the arts community. FAAP is a prestigious arts school and cultural center in São Paulo, housing both a theater and the Museum of Brazilian Art.

Dr. Tejada, an internationally known specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino/U.S. visual culture, will spend four months at FAAP in fall 2012 interacting with graduate and undergraduate students.

He said he is greatly looking forward to the opportunity.

“My research in visual studies has encompassed a series of questions in the overlapping domains of art history, inter-American studies and critical theory,” he said. “I’ve had the opportunity to write about contemporary Brazilian artists for exhibition catalogs and other publications in Mexico and the United States, and I’ve more recently been devoting research to the greater art world of São Paulo. By contrasting contemporary art from Brazil and the United States, I look to locality as being critical to the production of art — as important as any meaning is to its representational effects.

“My goal as the Fulbright-FAAP Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts is to establish the groundwork for productive exchanges between the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, collecting institutions in the Dallas area, and other U.S. and international stakeholders in Brazil’s contemporary arts,” he said.

Tejada is the author of many books, including National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He also served as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007).

Tejada lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México. Tejada is also the author of several poetry collections, including "Mirrors for Gold" (Krupskaya, 2006) and "Exposition Park" (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). In addition, he founded and continues to co-edit the journal "Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas."

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