Valerie Fraser
Principle Investigator
Department of Art History and Theory
University of Essex
Valerie Fraser specialises in the art and architecture of Latin America and Spain with particulr emphasis on the early colonial period and the 20th/21st centuries. She was formerly Director of the Latin American Centre and Co-Director, with Professor Dawn Ades, of ESCALA, the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America.
She is the author of a number of books including "Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America" co-authored with Oriana Baddeley (Verso, 1989), "The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Vice-Royalty of Peru 1535-1635" (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and "Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America" (Verso, 2000), and has published articles on a diverse selection of subjects and artists including Guaman Poma, Roberto Burle Marx, Ferndando Montes, María Thereza Negreiros and Herman Braun-Vega, as well as contributing numerous texts to ESCALA's fully-illustrated online catalogue.
She has worked on a number of exhibitions including "Kahlo's Contemporaries" held at the University Gallery in 2005, and "Latin American Art: Contexts and Accomplices" at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, 2004.
She has won a number of major awards from the AHRC including funding for the original online catalogue of ESCALA, "Latin American Art and the UK", a one-year project examining the presence and critical reception of Latin American art and artists in Britain, where she worked alongside Isobel Whitelegg and Taína Caragol, and most recently for directing the Meeting Margins research project (2009-2011).
Her research for Meeting Margins will include an investigation of the impact of Stanley William Hayter's Parisian Atelier 17 print workshop on printmaking in Latin America, as well as intra-Latin American exchanges such as the widespread support of the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago de Chile organized following the coup in 1973.
Read Valerie Fraser's departmental profile including full publication list
