Assistant Professor, Art History
Sabrina Carletti is Assistant Professor of Art History. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary Latin American art and culture, with particular attention to the intersections of artists’ practices, literature, media, and the production of knowledge. Her scholarship rethinks the historiography of Latin American art by asking how the conceptual terms through which we describe artistic practice shape what art is understood to do.
Prof. Carletti’s current research projects study modernism and the historical avant-gardes, histories of reading and print culture, visual culture, pedagogy, environmental humanities, and exchanges between Latin America and Europe. Her first book, Xul Solar: Reading and Modernity in Argentina, argues that reading was a mode of artistic experimentation amid the cultural and technological transformations of twentieth-century Argentina. She is currently at work on a second book, Bodies of Trash: The Works of Antonio Berni, Guillermo Galindo, and Cecilia Vicuña, which examines how artists across the Americas transform discarded materials into critical reflections on labor, migration, and ecological change.
Carletti’s interdisciplinary perspective is rooted in her early work as a theater and puppetry director in Argentina, where she first explored the relationships among images, objects, language, and music. These formative interests continue to shape her scholarship.
Before joining the University of New Mexico, she was a 2022-24 Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Art at The Leonard A. Lauder Center for Modern Art hosted by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, Texas A&M University, and Lafayette College.
University of New Mexico Courses (Fall 2026)
ARTH 2130: Modern Art
ARTH 429/529: Topics in Art History: Models of Thought and Life: Worldmaking and Social Change in Latin America
Selected Previous Courses
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
History of Art Since 1945
Nineteenth-Century Painting and Sculpture
Survey of Art: Renaissance to Modern
Global Histories of Architecture
Theory and Practice in Visualization
Selected Publications
“Maya Lin.” In The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960–2020, Vol. 1, edited by Lori Brown and Karen Burns. Bloomsbury, 2025.
“Guillermo Evar González Méndez.” The Modern Art Index Project. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025.
“Carlos Astrada.” The Modern Art Index Project. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025.
“Asociación Amigos del Arte.” The Modern Art Index Project. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025.
Current Research
Xul Solar: Reading and Modernity in Argentina (book manuscript under consideration).
“Alberto Aguilar’s Yo soy museo and Its Public.” In USLAF Publics, edited by Marisa Lerer and Adriana Zavala. Forthcoming, 2026.
“Aldo Pellegrini.” The Modern Art Index Project. Forthcoming, 2026.
“Victoria Ocampo.” The Modern Art Index Project. Forthcoming, 2026.
“Guillermo de Torre.” The Modern Art Index Project. Forthcoming, 2026.
Working title: Bodies of Trash: The Works of Antonio Berni, Guillermo Galindo, and Cecilia Vicuña (book project)
“Amalia Pica’s Things” (article)
Professional Service:
Co-chair, with Stephanie Huber, of the forthcoming College Art Association Annual Conference (CAA) 2027 panel, “Grounds for Knowledge: Suelo, Objecthood, and Ecological Epistemologies in the Americas.” This object-based panel examines ground as both a material condition and an epistemological framework within the environmental humanities of the Americas. Drawing on Rodolfo Kusch’s concept of suelo, an existential and ecological matrix from which thought emerges, it asks how knowledge is shaped by territory, environment, and lived experience.
Education:
Princeton University
Ph.D., Art and Archaeology, 2019
Princeton University
M.A., History of Art, 2012
University of California, Berkeley
B.A., History of Art, High Honors, 2008
Long Beach City College
A.A., General Studies, 2005