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 innovative artistic production proposed radical 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. Klich’s 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. Her additional research interests include Guatemalan modernist Carlos Mérida and contemporary artist Damián Ortega, with whom she collaborated on the 2022 publication Damián Ortega: Estridentópolis (Barcelona: Editorial RM). Her second book, in preparation, examines the relationship between neocolonialist aesthetics, class, and race in 1920s-1930s Mexico.
With her Hunter colleague 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 has received CUNY’s Feliks Gross award for outstanding assistant professors (2020) and Hunter College’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (2023).
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. During the 2023-24 academic year, Prof. Klich is on sabbatical and is a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center.
