Tag Archives: Mexico

Featured Exhibition: The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s, Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Madrid, until 27 May 2019

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José Sabogal, Cover of the journal Amauta, n. 26 (September – October), 1929, Journal, Museo de Arte de Lima

Founded and directed by José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian magazine Amauta was one of the most influential cultural and political periodicals of the early 20th century. The exhibition of more than 250 works follows Amauta’s development as a platform to explore the diversity of the avant-garde artistic production in Peru, Argentina, and Mexico and the debates that shaped the art of Latin America during the 1920s. This exhibition, organised by Beverly Adams, Curator of Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art, and Natalia Majluf, Director and Chief Curator, Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru addresses the avant-garde production of a vast network of artists and writers connected with Amauta. and includes works in a variety of forms ranging from paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs through to popular ceramics, many by lesser known artists as well as pieces by Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera. A large network of correspondents in Latin America and Europe fed the magazine, which had a print run of 3-4,000, and gave Amauta an international impact.

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The exhibition will travel from Madrid to the Museo de Arte de Lima (20 June – 22 September 2019); the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (17 October 2019 – 12 January 2020); and finally to Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, Texas (February 16, 2020 – 17 May, 2020).

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News: ‘Dallas Museum of Art boosts Latin American focus with new curator and acquisitions’

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A carpet fragment with double-headed bird, probably made in Peru in the 17th century. Gifted to the DMA from the de Unger family

As reported by The Art Newspaper, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is looking to enlarge its Latin American art collection. The museum has created a new endowed curatorial post, the Jorge Baldor Curator of Latin American Art, currently open for applications. It has also made significant new acquisitions of art from the region, from a 17th-century Peruvian carpet to artworks by Mexican artists Miguel Covarrubias, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, and Chilean artist Roberto Matta.

Featured Exhibition: Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular, MFA Boston, until 16 June 2019

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Exhibition of more than 70 works that focuses on the relationship between Kahlo’s paintings and the traditional Mexican ‘folk art’ by unknown artists that she collected and championed as part of her celebration of Mexican nationalist culture. On loan to the exhibition are some 40 pieces of folk art from the San Antonio Museum of Art, which are similar to the ceramics, textiles, toys and figurines which Kahlo collected. These are displayed alongside eight paintings by Kahlo on loan to Boston, including her Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940), and her early Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia), recently acquired by the  MFA. A section of the exhibition will explore how the small painted ex-voto ‘retablos’, of which Kahlo collected some 400 examples, inspired her own work such as The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, which she painted in 1938. The exhibition is supported by the Darwin Cordoba Fund for Latin American Art.

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Opens Today: Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, until 12 May 2019

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Nickolas Muray (American, born Hungary, 1892–1965). Frida in New York, 1946; printed 2006. Carbon pigment print, image: 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2010.80. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s unique and immediately recognizable style was an integral part of her identity. Kahlo came to define herself through her ethnicity, disability, and politics, all of which were at the heart of her work. Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving is the largest U.S. exhibition in ten years devoted to the iconic painter and the first in the United States to display a collection of her clothing and other personal possessions, which were rediscovered and inventoried in 2004 after being locked away since Kahlo’s death, in 1954. They are displayed alongside important paintings, drawings, and photographs from the celebrated Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art, as well as related historical film and ephemera. To highlight the collecting interests of Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, works from the museum’s extensive holdings of Mesoamerican art are also included.

 

Kahlo’s personal artifacts—which range from noteworthy examples of Kahlo’s Tehuana clothing, contemporary and pre-Colonial jewelry, and some of the many hand-painted corsets and prosthetics used by the artist during her lifetime—had been stored in the Casa Azul (Blue House), the longtime Mexico City home of Kahlo and Rivera, who had stipulated that their possessions not be disclosed until 15 years after Rivera’s death. The objects shed new light on how Kahlo crafted her appearance and shaped her personal and public identity to reflect her cultural heritage and political beliefs, while also addressing and incorporating her physical disabilities.

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving is based on an exhibition at the V&A London curated by Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa, with Gannit Ankori as curatorial advisor. Their continued participation has been essential to presenting the Brooklyn exhibition, which is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Lisa Small, Senior Curator, European Art, Brooklyn Museum, in collaboration with the Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, and The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation.

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Opens Today: Raúl de Nieves: Fina, Cleveland Museum of Art @ Transformer Station, Cleveland, until 28 April 2018

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stacks-image-f3e15d7Raúl de Nieves: Fina, the first solo museum exhibition by Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983, Michoacán, Mexico), will feature new work in a site-specific installation developed for the Cleveland Museum of Art at the Transformer Station. Narrative facets of the installation will be informed by de Nieves’s experience of Mexican cultural traditions, considered through the lens of this moment in history. These will unfold in relation to the particular architecture of the Transformer Station. As a whole, the installation will be characterized by the artist’s ongoing interest in transforming humble materials into spectacular objects that alter the spaces around them.

De Nieves, who lives in New York, traces his artistic practice back to his childhood in Mexico: at school and alongside family members, he learned traditional Latin American sewing and beadwork that now permeate his art in multiple ways. At the age of nine de Nieves migrated to San Diego with his mother and two brothers. Later he moved to San Francisco and finally to New York, where his multimedia practice, including painting, sculpture, and performance, has taken shape. De Nieves has presented solo projects and performances at The Kitchen and the Watermill Center, New York (both 2017), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2016). He has participated in major contemporary art surveys, including Documenta 14 (2018), the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and Greater New York at MoMA/PS1 (2015). His work is part of the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art’s inaugural exhibition in its new building that opened in New York in summer 2018.

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Featured Exhibition: Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, MFA Boston, until 12 May 2019

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iturbide-publication-coverThe photographs of Graciela Iturbide not only bear witness to Mexican society but express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native country. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Iturbide captures everyday life and its cultures, rituals, and religions, while also raising questions about paradoxes and social injustice in Mexican society. Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s—a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich amalgamation of cultures. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, challenges, and contradictions.

This is the first major East Coast presentation of Iturbide’s work, featuring approximately 125 photographs that span her five-decade-long career. Organised into nine sections, the exhibition opens with early photographs, followed by three series focused on three of Mexico’s many indigenous cultures: Juchitán captures the essential role of women in Zapotec culture; Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand) concentrates on the Seri people living in the Sonoran Desert; and La Mixteca documents elaborate goat-slaughtering rituals in Oaxaca, serving as critical commentary on the exploitation of workers. Thematic groupings highlight Iturbide’s explorations of various aspects of Mexican culture, including fiestas, death and mortality, and birds and their symbolism. Her more recent work is presented in two series related to Mexico’s cultural and artistic heritage, featuring plants—mainly cacti—in “intensive care” at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens, as well as El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), a selection of photographs in Gallery 335 depicting personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul that had been locked away for 50 years after the artist’s death.

Iturbide’s powerful and provocative photographs are anti-picturesque, anti-folkloric. Her work embodies her empathetic approach to photography and her deep connection with her subjects, asking questions through its capacity for imaginary associations. Drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection, Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico also includes the Museum’s recent acquisition of 37 works by the artist, as well as loans from museums and private collections throughout the US and Mexico. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications.

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Featured Exhibition: ‘Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia’, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, until February 24, 2019

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CartierThe exhibition Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia celebrates the wealth of color and diversity of styles in the geometric art of Latin America, bringing together 250 artworks made by over 70 artists from the Pre-Columbian period to present. Including modernist abstract art, sculpture and architecture as well as ceramics, weaving, and body painting, the exhibition explores the wide range of approaches to geometric abstraction in Latin America, whether influenced by Pre-Columbian art, the European avant-garde or Amerindian cultures. Southern Geometries weaves visual relationships among diverse cultures and regions across time, inviting visitors to discover the vibrant patterns and designs of Latin American art.

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