Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela (Volume 8) (Studies on Latin American Art and Latinx Art)

Winner, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art, College Art Association, 2024Winner, Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book on Venezuela, Venezuelan Studies Section, Latin American Studies Association 2024Co-winner, Best Book Award, Visual Culture Studies Section, Latin American Studies Association, 2024Shortlist, On the Brinck Book Awards, School of Architecture + Planning, University of New Mexico, 2025Venezuela's turbulent twentieth century saw boom and bust as the former Spanish colony transformed into a major postwar cultural player. In this sweeping study of visual and material production, Sean Nesselrode Moncada explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. An innovative, transdisciplinary reevaluation of Venezuelan modernism, Refined Material reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another. Read more