Visual Disobedience

“As a scholar whose works straddles Latin American and diasporic Latinx art history, I need this book. Countless others like me will learn from this important and unique study. Kency Cornejo brings a depth of understanding to the issues and artists she showcases who bear witness, resist, and stand up with extraordinary courage and creativity against violence. Visual Disobedience will be a stand-out work in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and is essential to the wider history of contemporary art in the Americas.” - Adriana Zavala, coauthor of Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City

“Kency Cornejo masterfully themeatizes the subversive acts of visual disobedience that she finds in a large array of artists and artworks from the Central American region. Building from a variety of decolonial projects and theoretical positions, this splendid text illuminates highly creative works that visualize and further advance the struggle against the naturalization of poverty and early death, rape, feminicide, imprisonment as well as the violence of nation-state institutions and borders. This book is an anticolonial act of resistance and insurgency that demonstrates the reach and density of visual combative decoloniality in and from Central America.” - Nelson Maldonado-Torres, author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity

"Visual Disobedience analyses 40 artists and over 80 artworks to reach a critical understanding of how US imperialism and its legacies fuel the mass exodus of refugees and asylum seekers arriving at the US-Mexico border. . . . The result is a book of great significance that provides a pressing empirical statement not only of how North American and European perspectives still dominate the realm of art—as they do in so many other areas of contemporary reality—but of how this has propelled something of an artistic backlash that is raising art in the region to global prominence." - Gavin O'Toole, Latin American Review of Books

"Visual Disobedience is a brilliant and necessary book that makes a valuable contribution to the study of Latin American art and will influence the discipline for a long time to come." - Gavin O'Toole, Morning Star

"The title, “Visual Disobedience”, is fully earned by the stunning diversity of the images of eighty artworks filling its pages. . . . Kency Cornejo observes how art from Central America has been rendered invisible by the art world and the cultural establishment as a whole. Her book is a vital and welcomed step forward in challenging this erasure." - Sean Sheehan, The Prisma

"Cornejo offers eye-opening analyses of how Central American artists engage in conceptual and visual strategies to combat racial and social injustices and gender and political violence resulting from colonialism and decades of civil war and political instability. . . . Highly recommended. All readers." - L. Estevez, Choice

"Cornejo offers a refreshing yet nuanced take for readers on the subject matter." - Storm Jade Brown, Cultural Studies

"The book is an important contribution to Latin American art histories because of its careful conceptual framework, extensive research, and exploration of pressing sociopolitical questions in Central America. It establishes the relevance of aesthetics for the disentanglement of power structures." - Irene Rihuete-Varea, CAA Reviews

"This book is not only a significant contribution to art history but also a timely addition to decolonial studies, as well as Latin American and US Latinx studies. It is essential reading for scholars of Indigenous, feminist, Black and diasporic, and antiracist visual practices across the Americas." - Cristina E. Pardo Porto, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture

"Cornejo’s book is nothing short of a landmark for the discipline." - Ángeles Donoso Macaya, NACLA Report on the Americas