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rtejada@ucsd.edu
Biography:
Roberto Tejada is a visual arts critic, photography historian, and curator. His research interrogates twentieth-century image-making from the perspective of interdisciplinary discourses in art history, Latin American and Latino studies, cultural and critical theory, the language arts, and visual culture analysis, to the degree that these methods arbitrate between the limits of visual representation and the habits of language inflected by sexual and social difference. He received his BA from New York University and his MA and PhD from the State University of New York, Buffalo. He has taught in the Philosophy and Literature Faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); in the Art Department at the State University of New York, Buffalo; and in the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies program at Dartmouth College where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002-2003). Tejada has also guest lectured and served as a consultant at various art institutions and universities throughout Latin America and the United States. He offers courses on the histories of Latin American art and photography, Latino visual culture, and the politics of curatorial theory and practice.
Tejada is the author of Travels in the Image Environment: Camera Culture Out of Mexico, 1900 and After, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. The study explores art historical episodes in the relation between visual documents and local identities while examining how Mexican and U.S. cultures are encapsulated and transformed in photographic images, as well as in the various kinds of writing about them. By tracing the “problem of photography” in Mexico, certain case studies reveal a compelling visual culture----a series of cross-cultural image environments that move between photographic representation and rhetorical accounts, insofar as pictures and the discursive ideas they activate repeatedly travel between Mexico and the United States, and far beyond.
From 1987 to 1997, Tejada lived and worked in Mexico City where he served on the editorial board of Vuelta----a monthly journal of literature, visual art, and politics, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. Thereafter, he worked as the executive editor of Artes de México magazine and became the founding editor of the English-Spanish journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He has authored texts for various catalogues, including essays in Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide (New York: Aperture, 1996); and Mexico/New York, with photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans (New York: DAP Publishers; Mexico City: Reino Mundo, 2003). In addition to his catalogue contributions, Tejada has published critical writing on contemporary Latin American, U.S., and Latina artists and photographers in Afterimage, Aperture, Art Nexus, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Gift + Verdict (San Francisco: Leroy Books, 1999) and Amulet Anatomy (New Haven, Connecticut: Phylum Press, 2001), and he has published widely as a literary translator. Translation theory is especially relevant to his research into social formations, visual drive, and language difference----the secret kinship between variety and vision.
Tejada served as co-curator on the exhibition América Foto Latina, featuring work by Miguel Calderón, Claudia Fernández, Gonzalo Lebrija, Milena Muzquiz, Damián Ortega, Gustavo Prado, Daniela Rossell, Melanie Smith, Laureana Toldeo, and Rubén Ortíz Torres (Museo de las Artes; Guadalajara, Mexico, 2001.) He also co-curated the exhibition Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and authored the accompanying publication. He served on the judging committee of the X Biennial of Photography at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City (2002). Most recently, he co-curated “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” exhibition of still-images and time-based works at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College, on display this fall at UCSD’s University Art Gallery.
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