Lynda Klich specializes in twentieth-century art. Her book The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) addresses topics such as vanguardism, transnational networks between Latin America and Europe, the relationships between culture and politics, nationalism and identity, and modernism and popular culture. It positions the 1920s vanguard movement Estridentismo as an ambitious program for national cultural and social modernity, arguing that the movement’s cosmopolitan position and radical artistic production proposed models for socially-engaged intellectuals in the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The Noisemakers received the 2016 University of Maryland/Phillips Collection Book Prize and a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant from the College Art Association. Her work on Estridentismo has appeared in exhibition catalogues for The Barbican Art Gallery, London; The Belvedere, Vienna; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; the Museo de Arte de Lima; the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Klich’s current research interests include the Guatemalan modernist Carlos Mérida and the contemporary artist Damián Ortega, with whom she collaborated on the forthcoming publication Estridentópolis. Her second book examines the relationship between neocolonialist aesthetics, class, and race in 1920s-1930s Mexico.
With Tara Zanardi, Klich co-edited Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts (Routledge 2019), on the production and circulation of typographical depictions in diverse media, including costume albums, maps, photographs, postcards, and fashion. The book emerged from an international symposium held at Hunter College in October 2013 (http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/conferences/fashioning-identities). The edited volume includes Klich’s essay on the visual culture of postcards, another specialization and the subject of various collaborative exhibitions and catalogues, including The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection (MFA Boston, 2012); The Propaganda Front: Postcards from the Era of World Wars (MFA Boston, 2017); and Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation (MFA Boston, 2022).
Klich teaches classes on art in Latin America from the colonial period to the present day. Her art history seminars include La Frontera: Visual Culture of the Mexico-US Borderlands; From Tenochtitlan to CDMX: Mapping Mexico’s Capital City; Estridentismo and the International Vanguard; Latin American Vanguards; Art & Revolution: Mexican Modernisms; and Abstraction in the Americas. In fall semesters, she teaches Arts in New York City for the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter.
Klich received her MA from Hunter College and her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection.
