Gretel Acosta

Gretel Acosta López teaches contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literature and visual culture. Her research examines narrative fiction as a form of contemporary artistic practice: the novels, short stories, and literary essays written and published by visual artists, which she calls art-to-read propositions, works that demand reading as their primary mode of reception and ask audiences to inhabit them over time.

She is currently developing her first book manuscript from her dissertation, Arte contemporáneo para leer, which studies Fabio Kacero (Argentina), Pablo Helguera (Mexico and United States), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Mexico), and Cuban artist and publisher Yornel Martínez. The project argues that these books are contemporary art because of what their narratives do: intervene in the art world, construct alternative archives, and produce knowledge from within contemporary art through the fictional pact. Against Anglo-American accounts of artists’ writing, it recovers a distinctly Latin American conceptualism, one that is political, communicative, and deeply entangled with fiction.

Trained first as an art historian at the University of Havana before completing her Ph.D. at Tulane, she curated NANO: Arte conceptual cubano 1980-2015, a collateral exhibition of the Twelfth Havana Biennial, and nano II (Remake) at the Center for Development of Visual Arts in Havana, and co-curated Post Truth, Pleasure and Pain (Works by Cuban Artists) at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem. Awards include a Southern Regional Education Board Doctoral Award, a Remake Curatorial Grant from Havana’s Center for Development of Visual Arts, and the NEH Summer Institute Engaging Latinx Art.

Research interests

Contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx literature and visual arts; narrative fiction as artistic practice and Spanish-language artist writings; Latin American conceptualism; curatorial and editorial studies; artists’ books and independent publishing; expanding canons and rethinking received art histories; public-facing projects and interdisciplinary dialogue.

She is developing her first book manuscript from her dissertation, along with a curatorial project that materializes the central questions of this research: what is the impact of the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries; how are these artistic propositions read; and how can it be made visible to a broad public what literary fiction opens for contemporary art, and contemporary art for literature. She is developing display strategies and public programming that give audiences the sustained time these works demand, and that treat bilingual publics as central rather than incidental.

Selected Publications

“Ediciones: Proyecto Editorial como archivo y colaboración en Cuba.” MIFLC Review, vol. 22, 2023, pp. 127-137.

“Las Tomas de Posición de Vicente Huidobro al Interior de la Vanguardia: Creacionismo y El Creacionismo.” Chasqui, vol. 51, no. 1, 2022, pp. 255-268.

“De la Serie.” Lenguaje Sucio: Narraciones críticas sobre arte cubano, edited by Andrés Isaac Santana, Editorial Hypermedia, 2019. With Raquel Cruz and Daniel González. TAG: Cosas de jóvenes. Cúpulas Ediciones, 2015.