Miriam Margarita Basilio Gaztambide (born 1967 in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an American art historian and Associate Professor of Museum Studies and Art History[1] at New York University.
[2] Basilio's book Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Surrey, UK and Burlington, NY: Ashgate, 2013) offers a look at how art and exhibitions were used as tools of propaganda during the Spanish Civil War period.
In her lecture on the topic at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, she mentions that "visual propaganda played an important role as an index of the rebel occupation of Spain, intimating the defeated and serving as a backdrop as the general 1939 victory.
"[3] In his review of the book, Yves Laberge writes "In her impressive corpus, Basilio has chosen a wide array of vintage images, posters, cartoons, and various advertisements, either pro or against the advent of a new republic in Spain.
The author studies how various exhibitions of these images have been conceptualized, conceived, and perceived by audiences, as in the unforgettable Paris World Fair of 1937, for example, when 'the Spanish republican government presented a remarkable modernist pavilion,' which included Pablo Picasso’s latest masterpiece Guernica.