PhD Candidate Guillermo S. Arsuaga has been awarded 22-23 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellowship at MoMA.
The Mellon-Marron Research Consortium (MRC) is a partnership between The Museum of Modern Art and five regional graduate art history programs—Columbia University; The Graduate Center, City University of New York; the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Princeton University; and Yale University—supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron. The MRC provides a framework for the Museum’s participation in the training and education of the next generation of art historians and curators.
The Mellon-Marron Research Consortium hosts one MRC Fellow from each participating program annually to work with an experienced curator on scholarly curatorial projects at the Museum. In addition to gaining hands-on experience in museum practice and receiving mentoring from established curators, fellows also benefit from professional development programs, as well as opportunities to network with colleagues in other Consortium-member graduate programs. More about the program can be found here.
Guillermo S. Arsuaga is an Architect and Ph.D. Candidate in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University School of Architecture. His research interests lay in the intersections among architecture, politics, borders, island territories, and internal colonization processes during the Cold War era. His dissertation, “Island Exceptions: The Building of a Minor Empire in the Late Franco Regime in Spain,” explores the ways in which architecture was crucial in sustaining an extreme environmental extraction that shifted the Franco Dictatorship from a Fascist autarkic phase in the 1940s to a liberalization of the economy in the 1960s and 1970s, which gained the favor of Western democracies. In so doing, he aims to develop a theory on internal colonization through the process of “islanding.”
His interdisciplinary work has been exhibited in several international venues, such as the Venice Biennale 2018 and the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art. Arsuaga’s research has been supported by the Swedish Committee for Contemporary Art, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Center for Digital Humanities.
The Mellon-Marron Research Consortium is led by Leah Dickerman, Director, Research Programs, and guided by a steering committee that also includes MoMA’s Associate Director, Sarah Suzuki, and representatives from the five partner programs:
Columbia University
Branden Joseph, the Frank Gallipolli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Director of Art Humanities
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor of Twentieth-Century European and American Art
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Christine Poggi, the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director and Professor of Fine Arts
Princeton University
Hal Foster, the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology
Yale University
Craig Buckley, Assistant Professor, History of Art