“Anchored Absences: Selected Works by Doris Salcedo and Enrique Ramírez” addresses how the works of these artists link the past to the present and make memories manifest by wielding evocative associations through particular materials and places. In my study of the works Sumando ausencias (Adding Absences, 2016), Fragmentos (Fragments, 2018), and Quebrantos (Shattered, 2019) by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, I delve into the political context of these works, discuss the different groups with which Salcedo collaborated in their production, and analyze the materials she employed and their associations. Drawing from discussions on the relationship between art and politics, as well as debates about the activity of creating public memorials, I examine how, through these public artworks, Salcedo contributes new images and representations of the cost of Colombia’s civil war (1960s-present) to collective visual culture. In the second part of this study, I analyze the strategies the Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez uses to produce the films Brisas (Breezes, 2008) and Los durmientes (The sleepers, 2014), which assemble layers of antithetical visual and auditory elements and deter a linear construction of history. I engage with writings that deal with the fragmentary and plural nature of memory, the use and repression of images, and the role of architecture and geography in holding and activating memory to discuss how Ramírez unsettles the narratives held by Chile’s dictatorship (1973–1990) in contested spaces. I conclude that by making innovative images of political events, the works by these artists create new frameworks to conceptualize violence. Therein lies the power of image production.

Despite his critical role in the development of American Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Postwar Assemblage, gay Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio remains at the margins of the historiography of these movements. Born in Manila, Philippines, the artist immigrated to the United States in 1930 where he lived and worked until his death in 1990 at his home city of East Hampton, New York. He is among the few Philippine-descended artists living in 20th-century America producing museum-collected works. Since America’s colonial occupation of the Philippines in the 19th-century, immigration has been increasing as a result of migrant labor, military recruitment, and economic exchange. However, the Philippine diaspora’s artistic contributions and visual identity before 1980 are largely under-researched in the United States. Queer artists of color, especially Filipinx-Americans, rarely feature in the dominant narratives of American modernity. Ossorio deeply inflected the trajectory of the American avant-garde yet his marginal place in the history demonstrates how art communities excluded queer and Philippine-American identities in the 20th-century during the development of two major American modernist movements. The scholarship has increased since Ossorio’s death in 1990 as a result of museum and gallery exhibitions. Previous writers focus on biographical description or contextualize Ossorio’s work within a broad movement category without considering Ossorio’s Filipino-American and gay identities in advanced detail from queer and critical race frameworks. These studies lack specific theoretical analysis around race, sexuality, and colonialism on Ossorio’s identity and his artistic communities. Through the analysis of his paintings and archival documents, this thesis argues that Ossorio’s negotiation of these intersecting minority categories is central to understanding his artistic production and his relationship to the American avant-garde. This research applies the current literature on queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory on Filipinx-American identity to Ossorio’s life and artwork. I center the work of Philippine psychologist Virgilio G. Enriquez with additions from Filipinx-American scholars Martin F. Manalansan IV, Vicente Rafael, Denise Cruz and American scholars art historian Richard Meyer and queer theorist Judith Butler when examining the artworks Untitled 1944 (1944) and Astonished Mother (1950) in the context of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism respectively.

Art and law have a troubled relationship that is defined by steep hierarchies placing art subject to law. But beyond the interplay of transgressions and regulations, manifest in a number of high-profile cases, there are more intricate connections between the two disciplines. By expanding the notion of law into the concept of a hybrid collectif of legality, the hierarchies flatten and unfamiliar forms of possible interactions emerge. Legality, the quality of something being legal, serves as a model to show the capricious workings of law outside of its own profession. New juridical actors—such as algorithms—already challenge traditional regulatory powers and art could assume a similar role. This thesis offers a point of departure for the involvement of art in shaping emergent legalities that transcend existent jurisdictions through computer code.