Exhibitions are the gateway to artistic visibility and are among the more typical conditions for wider

public promotion and engagement. They can often mediate between institutional power and artistic

authorship, as well as operate as pipelines to the national and global circuits of the art market. As

public-facing structures, exhibitions have historically been regarded as representing and reinforcing

institutional authority given how they underscore (or in some cases challenge) accepted categories of

value and the cultural hierarchies that sustain dominant ideas and practices. Considering the broader

potential of exhibitions to engage with and/or question dominant ideas and structures, from the DIY

and activist exhibition practices of the civil rights era countering exclusionary practices, to the

community-focused, visitor-centered, socially engaged, and decolonial curating strategies of today,

we can see how exhibitions serve as sites of knowledge production and as agents for dialogue and

change.

If we consider regional exhibition histories as essential tools for challenging dominant frameworks

and recovering alternative curatorial practices, we can ask: How might we write exhibition

historiography to account for the art world’s biases and highlight overlooked geographic and cultural

centers of production? How can we understand art history differently when we approach exhibitions

as assemblages of local knowledge sites, documentation, activism, community, and critique? What is

the significance of curatorial activism and how should or has it been effectively employed?

Latinx, Indigenous, Black, and queer exhibition practices have long interwoven curatorial practice

with activist community structures and political agendas. Landmark exhibitions, such as Chicano Art:

Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) (1990–1993) emerged through a national committee, and more

recent exhibition case studies, such as no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake

of Hurricane Maria (2022–2023), signal a continued recalibration of community voices through

advisory structures and the inclusion of local accounts. Both case studies, models for ethical

interpretive display, were produced, in part, in response to the critiques of earlier survey exhibitions.

More recent exhibitions, such as Virgil Ortiz’s Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders (2023–2024)

further challenge the way we think about objects and conceptions of time within exhibition display

by centering Native epistemologies and material understandings.

The revisiting of the controversial exhibition, Synthesis and Subversion: A Latino Direction in San

Antonio Art (1996), 30 years after the original exhibition, through Synthesis and Subversion Redux

(2025–2026) drew on an earlier curatorial framework to trace the development of local Latino art,

highlighting how exhibition remakes may either critically reactivate regional histories or invoke

earlier exhibitions as points of reference for contemporary curatorial projects.

For Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, Volume XVIII, we seek submissions that examine

understudied exhibition histories, ethical curatorial practices, and artistic interventions to museum

displays and their relations to marginalized artists, communities, and under-documented geographies

across the Americas from any historical period. We are particularly interested in exhibition histories

that foreground local and regional contexts, engage in historiographic revision, center

tribal/community-centered practices, and treat the exhibition as a contested site of knowledge

production. Papers and projects that critically engage with how exhibitions have shaped our

understanding of and/or challenged dominant narratives of the art of the Americas are highly

encouraged.