Drawing from a larger project titled Abstraction and Extraction, Price will examine the ways in which philosophies of natural resource extraction intersect with aesthetic theories of abstraction, and how the two have converged and diverged in Latin American art and literature. Special focus will be on the work of mid-century Cuban concrete artist Sandú Darié, and the continuities between his geometric abstraction, his kinetic art, his 1969 documentary Petróleo cubano and his work for the 1975 Okinawa Exhibition, “The Sea We Would Like to See.”

Rachel Price, Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University. She is  the author of The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain, 1868-1968 (Northwestern UP: 2014) and Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (2015).