Americas Society Presents
Beyond Geography, an Archival Exhibition
Celebrating 40 Years at the Vanguard of Visual Arts in the Americas
(United States-New York) The exhibition
highlights groundbreaking works by artists from across the hemisphere, and documents a chapter
of the establishment of Latin American art in the U.S.
Organized in three non-chronological sections, Beyond Geography reexamines the ideas, projects, and cultural agencies that emerged during the Cold War and were decisive in making visible art from Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in New York. The section Points of Origin reflects the pivotal position of the Rockefeller family -most especially Nelson-- as pioneer collectors of Latin American art in the U.S. It includes works such as the prints by Diego Rivera, Omar Rayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros purchased through the endowment instituted by the Rockefellers as the Inter-American Purchase Fund at the MoMA. An Inca mask and Maya polychrome vase refer to past exhibitions, as well as new developments in scholarship and shifting notions of these objects from ethnographic material to art object. The Pieta by Potosi master Melchor Perez Holguin marks the Americas Society's outstanding exhibitions of Colonial Art that helped to set precedents for this field in the U.S. Wilfredo Lam's 1945 Ceux de la Porte Battante, was displayed in the gallery in 1979 as part of the first Latin American Art auction in New York, proposed and co-organized by collector Barbara Duncan at the Americas Society's gallery for Sotheby Parke Bernet Inc.
Beginning with Kim Dingle's Maps of the U.S. Drawn from Memory by Las Vegas Teenagers (1990), the section called Beyond Geography brings together artists and works from the Americas Society's past that highlight the intersections of and departures from geography, identity, and nationality. A striking Casta painting from the Hispanic Society of America invites re-consideration of notions of race and identity, explored in depth in the Americas Society's 1996 exhibition "New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America." The works of Yoshua Okon and Julio Galan offer contemporary positions on identity. Works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Martin Chambi and Genevieve Cadieux invoke past exhibitions that explored photography as related to social structures, nationality, class and gender relations. From the Visual Arts archival files, an early unrealized proposal by Felix Gonzalez Torres concerning telenovelas reveals changing approaches in the trajectory of the artist's work from issues of cultural identity to abstract works like Untitled [Aparición] (1991), a stack of paper that disrupted the neutral shapes of Minimalism, creating a participatory interaction with the viewer that negates traditional notions of authenticity and ownership. Artists Willys de Castro, Cesar Paternosto and Jo Baer, were grouped once before in Literally Lateral, a project that never took place and that would have placed geography in a purely conceptual realm.
The section titled Insertions is a condensed cluster of experimental works now considered crucial for the expansion of the notion of art. A site-specific work, Gego's 1969 Reticularea incorporated the viewer's phenomenological response to the installation space. Gego continued to cultivate the conceptual framework for the Reticularea in her later work The same year, The Fashion Show Poetry Event, a performative event organized by Eduardo Costa, John Perreault and Hannah Weiner, brought artists from Latin America and the United States together on a truly collaborative and innovative enterprise that incorporated conceptual art, design, poetry and performance. Michael Snow's acoustic piece Win the D, Marta Minujin's groundbreaking performance Minucode, Juan Downey's Map of Chile, Domingo Alvarez' mirrored installation catalogue, and Liliana Porter's Wrinkle, are included in Insertions, a concept borrowed from Brazi lian artist Cildo Meireles' proposal for the circulation and exchange of information outside of a centralized entity. These notoriously unconventional works presented at the Americas Society were crucial for the dematerialization of the artwork and contributed to a reconsideration of space and architecture through the practice of site specificity. Additional catalogues, correspondence, photographs and videos document the presence of neo-avantgarde experimentation at the Americas Society.