Join art historian Alba Campo Rosillo for a guided tour in English of the exhibition «Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections», which is on at the Thyssen Museum until October 20. This exhibition was put together by a curatorial team that includes Thyssen curator Juan Ángel López-Manzanares (project director) together with Andrea Pacheco González (independent curator and director of the FelipaManuela Center), Yeison F. García López (director of the Espacio Afro cultural center), and Alba Campo Rosillo (art historian and independent curator).

The exhibition «Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections» examines how colonial power structures can be seen in works of art. A selection of paintings in the collection reveal “invisibilized” stories of racial domination, commercial exploitation, and the struggle for civil rights. The tour with Alba for the International Institute will focus particularly on the depiction of enslaved African workers, the landscapes of North America as new «Arcadias», and the construction of Native Americans as noble yet doomed from the perspective of European settlers.

If you would like to learn more about how the Thyssen Museum is tackling head-on the history of colonial power and stereotypes, don’t miss this unique opportunity to walk through the exhibition with one of its curators.

Alba Campo Rosillo is one of the four curators of the 2024 exhibition «Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections». Previously, she co-curated the 2021-22 exhibition American Art from the Thyssen Collection. Alba authored the essay «Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Dissemination of American Art» for the exhibition catalogue that accompanied the 2021-22 exhibition. She has received numerous awards in support of her scholarship on American art, including a residential fellowship at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., a CASVA travel fellowship, and the prestigious Terra Foundation Research Fellowship. Her areas of specialization include portraiture and politics, the history of collecting, and the role of art in cultural diplomacy.