A country of the brave and home of the free, it has always been timid about its borders and about who gets in and who goes out. Politically we are feeling a lot of that tension right now. And that is always evident culturally, for example in the kind of art that museums bring.
New York Museum of Modern Art A long-term but sporadic pattern of collecting 20th-century Latin American art Provides a constructive gauge. The early years favored art that they regarded as a kind of exoticism, folkloric and surreal, evidence that south of the border was a wild, barely modern terrain.
After World War II, as cultural exchanges became increasingly used as a diplomatic tool, MoMA hoped to be more involved in the new Latin American arts, but now works by “people like us”. There is clear evidence of European DNA in the kind of art that appears to have been created: geometric abstraction.
Then in the 1970s there was a global recession. The art market has collapsed. And amidst the turmoil, the walls began to crumble with the advent of the enabling transformation called multiculturalism: pro-diversity, anti-essentialism.
As its beginning episodes, sometimes called postmodernism, recede further and further into history, it appears to be one of the greatest and most budding periods of 20th century art. MoMA has taken a long time (decades) to tackle this, but judging by the following, it is on track. “Chosen Memories: The Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Beyond Contemporary Latin American Art” This was the most moving museum collection I’ve seen in New York in a while.
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a Venezuelan native and long-time MoMA board member, was already interested in Latin American art in the 1970s. Her 19th century work made by Europeans who traveled there. A hybrid colonial relic. and modernist painting and sculpture. In 2016, she donated over 100 modernist works to the museum for an exhibition. But by then she had already turned her attention to new art, and in 2019 she had an even bigger gift, which was her contemporary work, including photography and video.
The current program consists of about 30 examples, most of them going back 30 years and supplemented by financing. And together they reflect and critically reflect all the categories of Latin American art that interested her from the beginning.
The complex history of colonialism, for example, is largely excluded from the modernist abstraction, but is brought into play in one of the exhibition’s early entries. “The Catherwood Project” by Argentinian artist Leandro Katz.
In the 1840s, British artist Frederick Catherwood made two trips to Central America, where he painted Mayan ruins. Published as a print His photographs gave Europeans their first look at these ancient sites and established a romantic vision of the “New World” of tour buses that continues to this day. his “Catherwood” series. Katz reviews the accuracy of these images by comparing them on the fly. He takes a picture of himself holding up the illustrator’s image in front of a Mayan ruin with the illustrator’s image on it. Katz focuses on Catherwood’s manipulation, but also understands that he necessarily adds his own distorted 20th-century view to the multilayered history of perception.
Aboriginal cultures, which are important to European modernism but are not widely recognized, are repeatedly mentioned in the show. Mexican artist born in 1996 Laura Anderson Barbata spent time with The Yanomami of the Venezuela Amazon We learned about the rainforest and how they actually built their elegant canoes. In exchange for her guidance, she taught them how to make paper. We can see the fruits of reciprocity in the show. Her photograph, which Barbata titled Her Self-Portrait, depicts a hand-carved boat standing upright as if it had a life of its own. And there are also sinuous drawings depicting the flora and fauna of the Amazon. Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, All finished with handmade fiber paper.
Some artists make traditions deft and playful.of Mexican artist Gabriel Curi A toy that incorporates the concepts of value, labor, and consumer culture in the image of a supermarket receipt woven on a loom. Puerto Rican collectives are no different. “Las Nietas de Nono” Consisting of two sisters (Mulroway Iyaye Nono and Mapenji Cibale Nono) who have isolated themselves during the pandemic, turning their daily lives into a sort of back-to-basics hunter-gatherer picnic.
What is taken seriously is something that most mainstream Western art no longer knows how to deal with, but which multiculturalism especially values: spirituality. In her 2020 painting by Dominican-born artist Fireley Baez, a powerful Afro-Caribbean female deity dances and dominates across a 16th-century map of Atlantic Europe.
And in the pencil drawing, a Colombian-Korean artist Gala Porras-Kim Hundreds of fragments of textiles left as temple offerings to the Mayan rain god centuries ago have been documented and are now preserved in the Museum of Ethnology at Harvard University. The exhibition also includes a letter from the artist to the director of the museum asking for permission to release the offering from its custodial prison and reduce it to dust as intended by the giver. Their perishability, she argues, is what makes them powerful.
The theme of change and instability, often framed here as loss, is one of the threads that bind the show together and is complex. Historically loss can be violent, as suggested by the intense work of Regina José Galindo, the always astonishing and unbeatable Guatemalan performance artist. In her 2010 work Loot, about the exploitative looting of a mineral-rich homeland by European colonialism, she asked a Guatemalan dentist to replace eight of her teeth with locally mined gold. I had a filling put in, and then asked a second dentist: In Europe, the stuffing is removed and displayed as a work of art in a glass bottle.
Some of her paintings of loss are politically charged, as is her work.a short video titled Black Anthropology II by Paul Nazareth, 2014 is 1. In it, the artist is half-buried under a pile of human skulls and bones, the remains of Afro-Brazilian prisoners kept in the police museum in Bahia.
In a 1989 photo entitled “The Two Fridas,” a Chilean gay activist Francisco Casas Silva and Pedro Maldonez Lumebel (1952-2015), an AIDS-era riff on Kahlo’s famous double self-portrait, posing bare-chested, in a skirt, and with an IV tube attached to her body.
Their paintings can be read as a tribute to partnership, art, love, or both. So, would a graceful little sculpture assembled from a music stand, a garden clip and a single rose be dedicated to a friend, a lover? — by the elusive Venezuelan polymath Claudio Perna (1938-1997).
The work has a mourning feel to it, similar to the 2009 video that the Uruguayan artist actually conceived as a pre-memorial gesture. Alejandro Cesarco. Entitled Present Memory (2010), this work is a silent portrait of Cesarco’s father, a doctor, taken shortly after he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. An elderly man in an elegant suit and extravagant mustache sits expressionless in his office and is seen repeatedly being watched from different angles. It’s as if his traits have taken root in our minds. The camera then tours the empty room. he’s gone
Distilled here are some of the basic tones of the exhibition, curated by Ines Katzenstein, MoMA’s Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Cisneros Institute, and Julia Dechon, Curator’s Assistant. It’s a kind of disturbing and ironic reality check. This melancholy feels very different from the utopianism attributed to Latin American art based on geometric abstract paintings, which until recently was defined in many North American museum collections.
In fact, Chosen Memories has a vague geometric abstraction in the form of a site-specific mural by a Brazilian artist. Iran do Espirito Santo. It consists only of gray vertical lines that change subtly, The painting, like passing shadows and dark smudges, is hard to see at first. It seems to me that either smudging the white walls of the gallery or dissolving them is either helpful for meditation or wrong. Entitled “En Passant” and produced for the occasion, it physically disappears when the show ends, but like the others here, the idea remains vivid. .
Chosen Memories: The Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Contemporary Latin American Art Beyond
Until September 9, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 11 East 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400. moma.org.
