Janina Sofía López

Janina López studies contemporary Latinx art with a focus on public art and the Chicano Movement. Her dissertation, “The Royal Chicano Air Force’s Comuniversidad: Public Art and Education in Northern California since 1969,” examines the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF), an artist collective based in California’s capital, Sacramento. Organized around murals and silkscreens, the dissertation interrogates the RCAF’s critical pedagogy and role as artist-educators within a rapidly changing educational landscape of Northern California in the 1970s. This builds on Janina’s MA thesis about the 1977 Southside Park Mural, which situates the RCAF’s use of public space and civic architecture as a visual argument of Chicano presence. More broadly, Janina’s research interests include art education and artists as educators; the built environment and public memory; carceral aesthetics of the Mexico-U.S. border; collaborative and collective artist practices; discipline and subfield development and historiography; interdisciplinary methods and methodology.

In AY25-26, Janina is the Will Barnet Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has previously held research fellowships with the ICAA at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and with Monument Lab. In AY22-23 Janina held a graduate appointment in the University Art Gallery, where she supervised undergraduate internships, developed public programming, contributed to curatorial projects, and led gallery-based workshops for art history and museum studies classes. Janina has worked on projects about pedagogy and abolition with Pitt’s Kinloch Commons, the School of Education, and Pitt’s Center for Urban Education.