Latin American Art Takes Over New York: A Look at Exhibitions in Major Museums and Galleries

May 7, 202300:10

“Living in New York is different”says the young woman in Spanish, while talking on the phone and walking hurriedly down a sidewalk in Manhattan. Right on the border where they cross Chinatown y Little Italy, a true symbol of the variety of cultures that coexist on this island: the restaurants serve typical Italian pasta in front of the shops with an abundant supply of products imported from Asia. We won’t know why living here is different for her, as she speeds toward the Buddhist temple on Canal Street. Although it is obvious that, wherever they come from, they all seem to feel at home.

A sunny Sunday in the Central Park it is possible to come across a newlywed couple with oriental features posing for a photographer, a few meters from the bridge where a bride dressed in white receives instructions in a language that sounds like Russian: with black glasses and a big smile, she stands still so that the camera can record her together with her new husband. Two other women with their heads covered by veils talk while looking at their cell phones, and a blonde lady asks her partner in Spanish which of the tree-lined paths they will continue their walk on.

It should come as no surprise, in this context, that Several of the main New York institutions host exhibitions of Latin American artists these days. But yes, it is a milestone: the visual arts seem to be causing otro “boom” regionalsimilar to the one provoked more than half a century ago by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar.

“It’s a dream come true,” admits the Spanish curator Gabriel Perez-Barreiroadviser to the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, directed by him for more than a decade until 2019. He is standing next to a painting by the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres Garcia donated to the museum by the Venezuelan collector, among more than 250 created by artists from the region. It is now on display in a room at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, together with what this expert defines as “the last masterpiece” of Piet Mondrian. According to him, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) also came to integrate one of the most important collections on the planet thanks to the generous management of another Latin American: the multifaceted Brazilian artist Maria Martins, Marcel Duchamp’s muse.

“Works of Latin American art are integrated into the museum’s collection on a daily basis; It is something that fifteen or twenty years ago nobody would have thought”, explains Pérez-Barreiro enthusiastically. And he adds that the two mentioned coexist in turn with a sculpture by Yente, a pioneer of abstraction in Argentina, purchased in 2020 by MoMA thanks to a fund also promoted by Phelps de Cisneros. “It was a key decision not to have made our own museum –says the curator–, and instead to work with other institutions; This makes it possible to reach a larger audience, generate a dialogue with artists from all over the world, and put resources at the service of knowledge, with scholarship programs.”

At MoMA, one of the most visited museums on the planet, an exhibition of contemporary Latin American art was also inaugurated a few days ago, made up mainly of the pieces that she donated: chosen memories is the continuation of modern south –opened in 2019 and focused on abstract art–, both by the Argentine Inés Katzenstein. “This allows us to show works by many artists that are not usually seen in New York, in a transgenerational and transgeographic way,” says the curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, where she also directs the Cisneros Institute for Latin American Art Research.

“Sometimes I think ‘mission accomplished’, in the sense that today any museum, biennial, fair or cultural event inevitably has to consider Latin America as a cultural area Phelps de Cisneros told LA NACION. It was not always like this, and achieving that change has been possible thanks to the efforts of many people. Right now in New York there are great exhibitions like Gego at the Guggenheim, Bispo de Rosario at the Americas Society, Daniel Lind-Ramos at MoMA PS 1, and any number of other projects. That has become commonplace, and MoMA has been a key player in this change.”

Fifteen of the two hundred works by Gego that the Guggenheim included in measuring infinity. “This is his first show in a New York museum,” Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, the Peruvian-American curator who is responsible for this exhibition together with the Mexican Pablo León de la Barra, comments with pride. And she immediately remembers the story of Gertrud Goldschmidt, immigrant who arrived in Venezuela escaping from the Nazis without knowing the local culture or language. He brought with him an engineering degree, which served as the basis for building complex and subtle abstract structures with wire, aluminum and steel.

A reduced version of this exhibition will open at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in November. That same month, three blocks from the New York headquarters, The Jewish Museum will inaugurate an anthology of Marta Minujín. “I’ve never exhibited alone in a museum in New York, it’s the best!”, the artist who came to perform a performance with Andy Warhol in that city celebrated enthusiastically months ago; in 1985 she simulated the payment of the Argentine foreign debt with corn, the “Latin American gold”. Meanwhile, his work Concurrency in Simultaneity (1966) participates until July in the MoMA of the group exhibition Signs: How Video Transformed the World.

Halfway between both institutions is the Americas Society, a key space in the promotion of Latin American art in the United States. Directed by Argentina Aimé Iglesias Lukinpresents until the 20th of this month the first individual exhibition in the United States of the Afro-Brazilian artist Bishop of the Rosary. There are exhibited many of the more than a thousand objects that he created during his confinement in a psychiatric institution in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived most of his life.

The African roots also feed the facilities of the Puerto Rican Daniel Lind-Ramosexhibited until September in MoMA PS1. MoMA’s experimental space is so named because it housed the first public school in Queens, when it was a working-class immigrant neighborhood. “In this courtyard we have parties with a DJ for 1,500 people, who are called Warm Up. I would say we are cool, ”she adds humorously.

Just as cool was the sample that he dedicated to Tomas Saraceno last year the cultural center The Shed, located next to the luxurious Hudson Yards real estate complex and the High Line. Also those organized by the Argentinian galleries Barro and Praxis y Silencio, a current exhibition of photographs by Edo Costantini in Chinatown Soup, a space dedicated to emerging artists. “At the opening came Jesse Paris Smith, Patti’s daughter; Danny Bennet, producer of his father Tony, and Jonathan Becker, ”says the son of the founder of Malba. Determined to follow his own path, he settled in New York and founded Kolapse, a platform that brings together artists, musicians and filmmakers to “reinvent our world”. Nothing less.