I Want to Dance with You focuses on five contemporary Mexican women artists—Gina Arizpe, Melissa García, Nuria Montiel, Brenda Anayatzin Ortiz, and Laura Valencia—analyzing their artistic projects since the early 2000s as a response to escalations in the Mexican drug war, feminicide, state-sanctioned violence, and globalization. Employing the Red de Feminismos Descoloniales's concept of descolonización to examine the delegitimization of subjective knowledges as a means to uphold colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, Alberto McKelligan Hernández analyzes the work of these artists as a form of resistance against the state's authoritarian policies. He shows how these artists confront these social and state problems through innovative art projects that foster resistance and solidarity among Mexico's diverse communities and how their works collectively reimagine a more hopeful and egalitarian future for Mexico.
Alberto McKelligan Hernández is Associate Professor of Art History at the Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design, Portland State University.
"I Want to Dance with You brings attention to artists working outside the art market, who are doing the important job of engaging communities and creating diverse forms of resistance. By foregrounding a new generation of feminist artists, Alberto McKelligan Hernández calls attention to feminismos descoloniales, environmental care, and feminicide while centering non-museum visitors and public spaces in Oaxaca, Monterrey, Ciudad Juárez, and Los Angeles."—Adriana Miramontes Olivas, Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon"A highly timely, original take on contemporary Mexican artwork."—Mya Dosch, Associate Professor of Art of the Americas, California State University, Sacramento"I Want to Dance with You is a deeply researched study of contemporary Mexican women artists that expands and reshapes the frameworks through which socially engaged and participatory practices are understood within art history. Through careful, human-centered analysis that foregrounds lived experiences and artistic practices often rendered invisible, McKelligan Hernández offers a timely and generative model for writing art's histories otherwise."—Erin L. McCutcheon, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Rhode Island
224 pp.7 x 10Illus: 55 b/w images, 32 color images
9780520422384$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Aug 2026