Jennifer Josten

Jennifer Josten's research charts the flow of artists, forms, and ideas among and between Latin America, Europe, and the United States since 1940. She teaches and mentors undergraduate and graduate students on a wide range of topics related to US Latinx and Latin American art and architecture. 

Josten's 2018 book Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico examines the dramatic cultural and political transformations of the 1940s–1970s in and beyond Mexico through the lens of the polyvalent artistic and critical practice of Mexico-based German artist Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990). (Preview here on Google books.) She has contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and anthologies, including El Dorado: A Reader (Americas Society, 2024), Mexichrome: Fotografía y color en México (Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2023), Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey (Davis Museum at Wellesley College, 2019), Pop América: 1965–1975 (Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, and McNay Art Museum, 2018), and Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 (LACMA, 2017), among others.

Josten is passionate about teaching in exhibitions, and she incorporates visits to Pitt’s University Art Gallery and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art (which sits just across the street) into all of her courses. In this video, Josten discusses a few artworks from LACMA’s 2017 exhibition Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985. In this podcast, which was recorded in the context of the 58^th Carnegie International exhibition, Josten discusses the history and current activities of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile, with Ignacia Biskupovic, the museum’s head of community engagement.

Josten is currently at work on two book projects. One focuses on contemporary art from Mexico in international exhibitions; the other examines the cultural politics of Cold War-era silkscreen posters in the Americas and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. She spent the 2019–20 academic year in residence at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) as an Institute of American Cultures Visiting Scholar.