James Oles

James Oles is an assistant professor of art at Wellesley College, where he teaches Latin American Art, focusing on the history of Mexican art from the ancient through modern eras. He also lectures on Pre-Columbian art of Mexico and Peru, mural painting in Mexico and the United States, and the image of Mexico and the U.S./Mexico border in film. Professor Oles teaches at Wellesley in the spring semesters and resides in Mexico City for the remainder of the year, where he works as an independent art historian and curator. In Mexico he is a member of the Academic Council at the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) and writes art reviews for the magazine dF.

Professor Oles also serves as adjunct curator of Latin American Art at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center. He organized the long-term reinstallation of pre-Columbian art (Art of the Ancient Americas) for the Davis Museum (opened in 2000) and served as co-curator (with Rebecca Bedell, also of the Art Department) of Bridging the Border: Shared Themes in U.S. and Mexican Art, 1900–1950 (2003). He also advises the museum on acquisitions of works of ancient and modern Latin American art.

A part-time member of the Wellesley faculty since 1996, Professor Oles received a B.A. in Latin American studies from Yale University in 1984 and a Ph.D. in history of art from Yale University in 1995. He was also awarded a J.D. degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1988.

Professor Oles' research focuses on the intersections of Mexican and American artists in the 1930s, on modern Mexican art and on photography. In addition to faculty awards from Wellesley College, he has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, administered through Curare: Espacio Crítico para las Artes (1996), from the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture (1995, 2001) and from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2003).

Oles is author and curator of South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914–1947 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993) and Helen Levitt: Mexico City (W.W. Norton, 1997); and author of essays on José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Isamu Noguchi, Rufino Tamayo, Marion and Grace Greenwood, Pedro Friedeberg and the Gelman Collection of Mexican Art, among other topics. In 2000 he reinstalled the permanent collection of modern Mexican art for Mexico City's Museo Carrillo Gil, and in 2001–02 he organized Casa Mañana: The Morrow Collection of Mexican Popular Arts for Amherst College's Mead Art Museum.

More recent projects include a show and book on contemporary color photography in Mexico (Ministry of Foreign Relations, Mexico, 2002) and an exhibition of the photographs of Lola Alvarez Bravo (Huesca, Spain, 2004). In 2005 he was curator and author of Of Artisans and Harlequins: Forging a Collection of Mexican Art (MUNAL), and was general editor of and lead essayist for Arte Moderno en México: Colección Andrés Blaisten, a major catalogue published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

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Profile last updated: 12/06

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Last Modified: December 13, 2006