Source: The Independent Florida Alligator
By Timothy Wang
When Mexican multimedia artist Eduardo Abaroa arrives on campus for the first time Aug. 2, the first thing he’s doing is paperwork. Lots of it.
A Latin American artist/writer residency program at UF will pay for his housing, his salary for a semester, his living expenses and his plane ticket to fly him from Mexico to the U.S.
“The whole month is dedicated to me getting a bank account and settling down and setting everything up,” Abaroa said.
The UF Center for Latin American Studies will welcome him as its first artist in residence for the Fall semester. Abaroa will be teaching a course called “The Art of Sharing,” which will analyze the history of modern and contemporary art’s development in Latin America.
“I think the course is important because we are not used to people being that different from ourselves,” he said. “I think that it is important to remind ourselves time and time again that the world is a very, very complex place and a very beautiful place, and art is precisely the way to look at it under the new light.”
Abaroa said his friend Abraham Cruzvillegas, a Mexican conceptual artist, will also visit the class and give a public talk Sept. 24.
The class’s final project is an exhibition opening Nov. 15 to the public at the University Galleries’ main space, according to Jesús Fuenmayor, an art curator and program director of the University Galleries.
Fuenmayor said he recommended Abaroa and 19 other artists to the Center for Latin American Studies. Abaroa was selected in August 2023 after the center’s selection committee narrowed it down to three finalists.
“In Florida, we have a population that has a lot of connections to Latin America… so I think it's natural that we at the University of Florida are engaging Latin American artists in our program,” Fuenmayor said. ”The best part of the beauty of Florida lies there, it has so many people from different places in Latin America. It's a cultural process of understanding how to relate to people that are coming from that continent to the U.S."
The program, which previously brought Latin American writers Gabriela Alemán and Ave Barrera to UF, began with a meeting between a former university president and the director of the Center for Latin American Studies.
Carlos de la Torre, the center’s director, said he met former UF President John Lombardi at a book launch in October 2021 and talked with him about promoting the humanities.
While he was UF’s president in 1991, Lombardi showed an interest in Hispanic issues, such as making a speech at the Hispanic Student Association’s Hispanic Heritage Week opening ceremony. He also is an expert on Latin American history, having written several books on Venezuela.
Lombardi told de la Torre to consider tapping the Kislak Family Foundation, a nonprofit that supports education, arts and humanities, animal welfare and environmental preservation, to fund a residency program. De la Torre obliged.
The Kislak Family Foundation awarded the center in 2021 a grant paying $320,000 over the course of five years to bring a Latin American artist or writer to teach and live on campus for one semester.
“The Kislak Foundation has a strong commitment to Latin American studies and found the proposal of significant interest and so awarded the grant,” wrote Lombardi, who is on the foundation’s board of trustees, in an email to The Alligator.
Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán, who is known for novels like “Humo” and short story collections like “Family Album,” arrived in Fall 2022 as the program’s first writer in residence.
Alemán said her class, which focused on analyzing Latin American literature, brought together students from a diverse swath of fields.
“I had someone who was doing a master's in agriculture,” she said. “There were people from education. There were business majors. There was an architect.”
Alemán said she thinks students enjoyed class because it was in Spanish and liked her reading material. One former student told her he had taken other writing courses and started publishing his own stories.
“I think this program that Latin American Studies is offering provides what the humanities in general do, which is to open your point of view to understand other worlds, to see the world through other eyes,” Alemán said.
Ave Barrera, a Mexican writer known for writing novels such as “The Forgery” and “Restoration,” arrived the following Fall semester as the program’s second writer in residence. During her residency, Barrera led her own book club and taught a graduate course.
Carlos de la Torre, the Center for Latin American Studies director, said the students’ positive reception of Barrera and Alemán’s classes gave the center “a great excuse” to hire a professor who can teach creative writing in Spanish: Luis Felipe Lomelí.
Lomelí hosts a book club called “Meet the Author Club de Lectura” where students read contemporary Latin American stories and get the opportunity to discuss them with the authors themselves. The club is returning this Fall.
The grant for the residency program will end in 2026.
“I’ll reapply,” De la Torre said. “I hope I am successful.”
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