From the Editors

This issue of ARTMargins offers a broad variety of perspectives on key problems of current cultural analysis, including colonialism, the problem of class from the point of view of specific historical contexts, and the need to gather multiple perspectives on art's global circulation and the critical methodologies we use to engage with it. In the opening article, “A Monument in Conflict: Transnational Resistance and the Politics of Commemoration in La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers's I Am Queen Mary,” Kristine Nielsen discusses a 2018 monument that highlights the history of Danish colonialism and Denmark's role in the Atlantic slave trade. I Am Queen Mary commemorates a 19th-century rebellion against Danish colonial control in the Caribbean, taking as its emblem an Afro-Crucian resistance leader who has largely been erased from official archives. Nielsen contextualizes the monument, which combines traditional figurative features with a novel subject and a complex set of international references, within ongoing debates about monumental form and the formation of collective memory. Through careful analysis of the monument and the controversies surrounding it, Nielsen argues that I Am Queen Mary invites reflection on the stakes of commemoration itself in our present moment.Moving back to the 1960s, Ana M. Franco's article offers a revisionist take on Colombian abstraction. Against formalist readings that have sought to position this work within international trends of Cold War painting, Franco extends a strongly contextualist interpretation of the work of Álvaro Herrán, Miguel Ángel Cárdenas, Guillermo Wiedemann, and Leonel Estrada. She unearths previously unexplored relationships between the found materials and improvised techniques of 1960s abstract painting and those of informal urban architecture in Colombia, arguing that Informalist abstraction functioned as an aesthetics of underdevelopment that was, as such, resistant to the government's rhetoric of modernization and developmentalism.This issue also features a timely roundtable exploring the connections between art, culture, and class in the present. ARTMargins editorial collective members Angela Harutyunyan and Sven Spieker asked respondents—a diverse group of art historians, critics, artists, and curators—about the role of class nowadays, in a moment when its constitutive role has been largely obscured. The roundtable interrogates the intersection of class with categories of race, gender, citizenship, and geography, examining the role of class in the production of works of art, the structures of the art world, and the practices of art history and criticism.Branislav Jakovljević's review article offers an insightful analysis of recent volumes of interviews by two key critics who came of age in the decades after the Second World War. Exit Interview (2024), a series of conversations between art historians Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster, is read alongside The Yugoslav Art Space: Ješa Denegri in the First Person (2024), a book of interviews with the eminent Yugoslavian art historian and critic Ješa Denegri by two of his former students. Jakovljević uses the coincidence of these books' simultaneous publication to reflect on the shared concerns and divergent commitments in the work of both authors—one positioned centrally, the other peripherally. What Jakovljević draws from reading across these volumes is a shared reflection not only on the history of art criticism but also on the possibilities for such critical practices in the present.The issue's Artist Project, a photo essay by Piotr Bujak entitled This Is the Way: The Landmarks, challenges us to see the design and infrastructure of urban Tokyo anew. Harnessing the concept of the “anti-route” and featuring maps and images of police boxes and public restrooms across the city, Bujak's project highlights walking, rest, and bodily care as subtle tools of contestation and resistance. The project extends an invitation to symbolically reclaim public space from the various forms of control and implied values that are embedded in its design.The Document section features Brazilian art historian and curator Walter Zanini's 1974 article “New Direction for the Museum of Contemporary Art.” Translated and introduced by Paulina Pardo Gaviria, the article offers an overview of Zanini's curatorial practices during his tenure as director of the Contemporary Art Museum (Museu de Arte Contemporânea) at the University of São Paulo, from 1963 to 1978. Zanini's text is structured around opposing paradigms of curatorial practice—the forum and the temple—that established a new way of thinking about the role of the contemporary art museum. Gaviria's introduction contextualizes Zanini's attempt to model the museum as a forum—a site of discussion and exchange, rather than just a place for contemplation—within the history of Brazilian art museums, international discussions on curatorial practice, and Brazil's military dictatorship. In doing so, she positions this text as a foundational document for current museum practice not only in Brazil, but also globally.