Josh Rios

Profile picture of Dilettante Army Author Josh Rios

Josh Rios is faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses in visual and critical studies, political science fiction, and institutional critique. As a media artist and scholar, his projects deal with the intersection of globalization, modernity, postmodernity, and neocoloniality along the US-Mexico border. Recent projects and presentations have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the University of Houston (Houston), Andrea Meislin Gallery (NYC), and Sector 2337 (Chicago). Recent writing includes the essay, “A Possible Future Return to the Past,” published in the journal Somatechnics (Edinburgh University Press). Upcoming public activities include a performance for the Mountain Standard Time Performance Festival (Calgary, Canada), the group exhibition, A Debt of Times, at Konstall C (Stockholm), the Truth and Reconciliation Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe), and a long-term sound project made possible by a Boston Live Arts Grant (Boston). Additionally, Rios will chair a College Art Association (CAA) session titled, “Latinx Sounds: Auditory Technologies of Resistance and Aural Practices of Social Transformation,” which investigates how the sonic imaginary is mobilized to maintain authority over communities of color and how practices of noise and sound might formulate oppositional publics and engender methods of social transformation.

Sandwich Board Artist

A veritable parade of sandwich boards

Banana Consciousness

The banana as a marker of former oppression and government destabilization: American advertising, retail imagination, and colonial empire.

The Exclusion Games: Olympic Exceptionalism in Rio de Janeiro

displacement, real estate, and Rio’s “Games of Inclusion”

Race to the Periphery

photography at the Olympics

Ambiguous Maps and Border Shadows: Towards a Gradient Divide

The nuanced intensity of the gradient border lets us know that these contentious boundaries were more than a series of sterile strokes.

Installing the Surface into Space

a floating eye observing distanced objects

On Context, Despair, and Interface

more and more of its meaning eroded away with every click

Absence of Wires

“Your vision in disguised cell towers is our mission,” the Larson Camouflage website declares.

Menacing the Mediation

We notice there is a picture most when it breaks.

Dilettante Mail

Get updates from us a few times a year.

* indicates required