Latin Art Takes Over The Moma

From April 30th (2023) until September 9th of the running year, the exhibit ‘Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond’ will be open to the public at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the words of the MoMA itself, “Chosen Memories brings together contemporary works by Latin American artists who have been investigating history as source material for their work. Bringing together videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures made over the past four decades, the exhibition reveals how some of today’s most relevant art is conceived through investigating and retelling history in new ways… From reframing long histories of colonialism in the region and exploring the different ways in which artists revisit undervalued cultural heritages, to looking at the ways in which kinship and belonging are strengthened, the exhibition offers us new ways of looking at the past to better understand, and shape, our current moment”.

“History is a living organism”, says Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó, one of the 40 artists featured in the exhibit. This quote is pretty on point when it comes to summarizing what ‘Chosen Memories’ is all about, as it shows how the selected artists have investigated and reimagined the region’s legacies, with the good, the bad and the ugly. Our history is made by our past and our present, and acknowledging both of them is key for all of us to move forward into a brighter future.

The curation of the expo was made by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a Venezuelan philanthropist and art collector, who has been interested in bringing Latin art to the center stage since the 1970s, focusing mostly on indigenous art, colonial artifacts, and modernist paintings and sculptures. Patricia is a longtime MoMA trustee, having curated large scale collections of modern Latin art in 2016 and 2019 for the museum, so she knows what she’s doing here with ‘Chosen Memories’.

The selection made by Phelps takes on a wild artistic and historic ride that goes as far as the 1840s with “The Catherwood Project” by the Argentine artist Leandro Katz, whose photographic work centers about the complex history of colonialism in Latin America and questions the legacy of English artist Frederick Catherwood, who traveled twice to Central America and made drawings of Maya ruins there that established a romanticized vision of the “New World” that persists even today.

Indigenous culture is also referred to repeatedly in ‘Chosen Memories’, especially in the work of the Mexican-born artist Laura Anderson Barbata, who spent some time with the Yanomami people in the Venezuelan Amazon rainforest in 1996. She asked the Yanomami to teach her how they created their canoes and in exchange, she taught them papermaking. This collaboration is beautifully captured in pictures and drawings, all present in the exhibit. Overall, ‘Chosen Memories’ is a must for everyone with a Latin background, as it pays homage to the pluralism of our cultures, the beauty of our traditions as a region, and the talent of our artists.

Sources:

www.moma.org

www.nytimes.com

www.wizardgallery.com