publications
Culinary Palettes:
The Visuality of Food in postrevolutionary mexican art
Lesley A. Wolff
University of texas Press, forthcoming 2025
Postrevolutionary Mexico City was a site of anxious nation-building, as rampant modernization converged and clashed with the nation’s growing nostalgia for its pre-Columbian heritage. During this volatile period, food became a crucible of meaning-making for a Mexican citizenry seeking new modes of national participation.
Culinary Palettes explores how the artistic invocation of food cultures became an arena in which to negotiate the political entanglements of postrevolutionary Mexico. Lesley A. Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, as they nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. By engaging a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive—and at times weaponized—agents in articulating competing claims to a new nationhood.
This book is part of the series Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History, edited by Jessica Stites Mor and Ernesto Capello.
Nourish and Resist:
Food and Feminisms in contemporary global Caribbean art
Edited by Hannah Ryan and Lesley A. Wolff
Yale University Press, 2024
available via A&AePortal
A revelatory exploration of the food, feminisms, and visual culture of the global Caribbean.
Food is more than what we eat; it nourishes us. For women of the global Caribbean, the evocation of food makes visible histories and ideas that remain obscured: domestic labor, community and care, generational knowledge, cultural memory, artistic expression, and acts of resistance. In this interdisciplinary and comparative volume, scholars and artists engage with foodways through decolonial and intersectional feminist lenses, addressing the resonance of these themes in contemporary art. As such, they represent new scholarly and creative interventions on Caribbean and Caribbean-diasporic contemporary art in a global context.
This anthology harnesses the potential of food to create, negotiate, and analyze the visual languages emergent from a region grappling with political occupation, tourism, and ecological crises. Contributors lend a vital perspective into feminisms, the global Caribbean, tropical visuality, cookery, and consumption and feature discussions of such artists as María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Renluka Maharaj, Joiri Minaya, Victoria Ravelo, and Tania Bruguera.
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Select essays
Germana Roquez, Gabriela and Lesley A. Wolff. 2024. "Introduction for Special Issue 'Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art.” Arts 13, no. 3 (Special Issue Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art, co-edited by Lesley A. Wolff and Gabriela Germana Roquez). Online, open access.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2022. "Still Eating: The Sheet Cake Paintings of Patrick Martinez.” Asian American x Latinx Digital Studies (AAxL Forum — Urban Palimpsest: The Art of Patrick Martinez), edited by Robb Hernández. Online, open access.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2022. "Coloniality on a Virtual Plate: Contemporary Mexican Foodways as (Counter)Visual Sovereignty.” Gender & History 34, no. 3 (Special Issue on Food and Sovereignty): 590-613. Online, open access.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2022. Review of A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico. Latin American and Latinx
Visual Culture 4, no. 1: 152-154. Book review.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2021. "Café Culture as Decolonial Feminist Praxis: Scherezade García's Blame...Coffee.” Humanities 10, no. 1 (Special Issue on Gender, Race, and Material Culture): 1-19.
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Carrasco, Michael D., Lesley A. Wolff, and Paul Niell. 2020. “Curating the Caribbean: Unsettling the Boundaries of Art and Artefact.” International Journal of Heritage Studies: 1-17.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2020. “Mister Watermelon/Señor Sandía: Fruitful Anxieties in Rufino Tamayo's Naturaleza muerta (1954).” Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art (Super/Natural: Excess, Ecologies, and Art in the Americas) 4: 29-44.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2019. “Visualizing the Plate: Reading Modernist Mexican Cuisine Through Colonial Botany.” The Recipes Project. Website.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2019. “From Raw to Refined: Edouard Duval-Carrié’s Sugar Conventions (2013).” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 12, no. 3 (Special Issue on Creolization and Trans Atlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery): 355-374.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2019. "A Chronology of the Life and Art of Ralph Norton (1875-1953)." In Ralph Norton and His Museum, by Ellen E. Roberts with contributions by Lesley A. Wolff, 208-242. West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Museum of Art.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2018. “Visualizing Mole Poblano as Heritage Process in Café de Tacuba.” Food, Culture & Society 21, no .5 (Special Issue, Mole Poblano: New Approaches to Mexico's National Dish): 618-636.
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Wolff, Lesley A., Michael D. Carrasco and Paul B. Niell. 2018. “Rituals of Refinement: Edouard Duval-Carrié's Historical Pursuits.” In Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. Exhibition catalogue. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press in association with University Press of Florida, 12 - 25.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2018. “It's All Happening in the Margins: An Interview with Edouard Duval-Carrié." In Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. Exhibition catalogue. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press in association with University Press of Florida, 56 - 61.
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Wolff, Lesley A. 2016. “Nursing the Nation: Postrevolutionary Mexican Consciousness and Consumption in Tina Modotti’s Baby Nursing.” Athanor XXXIV. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 85-92.
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