Portrait by Casey Kelbaugh. | Carolina Caycedo, Complex, Nutty, and Slightly Sweet: I Am Kernza, 2026. Colored pencil on paper, 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Chris Young.
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.
Dec 7 at 5:30pm • Kuehner Court, Weil Hall
Metagraphics: Situationist Comics and Sixty Years of French Student Revolt
In autumn 1966, a group of students sympathetic to the Situationist International (IS) were elected to the University of Strasbourg student union (AFGES). They used its entire budget to publish two pamphlets: the text “On the Poverty of Student Life” by Situationist Mustapha Khayati, and a four-page comic by student André Bertrand called The Return of the Durutti Column. This unique comic, assembled in collage and laden with visual and textual references, was reprinted in full or in part around the world. The furor around its appearance was the first in a chain of protests eventually leading to France’s May 1968 uprisings.
As students protest the austerity that structures their lives today, we look back to understand why a comics zine played a role in igniting France’s last great protest movement. We must engage the concept of metagraphics – later called hypergraphics – first articulated by Lettrist movement founder Isidore Isou, and carried forward separately by Situationist International founder Guy Debord. These two, related movements produced a body of fascinating comics which reveal that hypergraphic writing and détourned comics are not just part of our radical and avant-garde histories, but are a living legacy that finds reflection in contemporary work pointing to comics’ future.