Browsing by Subject "Latin American art"
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Item Pan-American dreams : art, politics, and museum-making at the OAS, 1948-1976(2012-12) Wellen, Michael Gordon; Giunta, Andrea; Barnitz, Jacqueline; Guridy, Frank; Reynolds, Ann; Smith, CheriseIn the 1950s and 1960s, the Organization of American States (OAS), a multinational political organization headquartered in Washington, DC, attempted to mediate U.S.-Latin American political and cultural relations. This dissertation traces how, in the United States, Latin American art emerged as a field of art historical study and exhibition via the activities of the OAS. I center my analysis on José Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru, two prominent curators who influenced the circulation of Latin American art during the Cold War. Part I focuses on Gómez Sicre, who served as head curator at the OAS from 1946 to 1981 and who founded the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976. I offer an analysis of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes, contextualizing them in relation to his contemporaries Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, and Jorge Romero Brest. I also discuss his efforts to build a network of art centers across the Americas, indicating how his activities fed into a Cold War struggle around notions of the “intellectual.” Part II examines the activities of poet and art critic Rafael Squirru, who served as Director of Cultural Affairs of the OAS from 1963 to 1970 and who theorized Latin American art in terms of the “new man.” I reconstruct how the phrase “new man” became a point of ideological conflict in the 1960s in a battle between Squirru and his political rival, Ernesto Ché Guevara. Throughout this dissertation, I indicate how Gómez Sicre and Squirru framed modern art within different Pan-American dreams of future world prosperity, equality, and cooperation. By examining the socio-political implications behind those dreams, I reveal the structures and limits of power shaping their influence during the Cold War. My study concentrates on the period from the founding of the OAS in 1948 to the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976, and I contend that the legacies of Pan-Americanism continue to affect the field of Latin American art today.Item Reframing Latin America : curatorial practice and Latin American art since 1992(2015-05) Winograd, Abigail Gena; Chambers, Eddie; Giunta, Andrea; Flaherty, George; Leoshko, Janice; Tejada, RobertoThis dissertation presents a comparative analysis of institutional policy towards Latin American art after 1992. Specifically, this study examines several concurrent phenomena: the increased visibility of Latin American artists in institutions, a rise in academic and scholarly attention, growing numbers of collectors, and an extraordinary growth in the overall art market in the 1990s that dramatically increased the value of Latin American art. Though the expanded interest in Latin American art was wide- spread, four institutions – The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), the Tate Modern, London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid – invested heavily in acquisitions and widely exhibited cultural production from the region. Though the impulse for strengthening institutional commitment to Latin America in Europe and North America resulted from factors arising from similar geopolitical and theoretical circumstances, these four museums approached developing their stake in Latin American art quite differently in a debate which was often contentious. Their rivalry emerged in an increasingly globalized art world, yet each institution remained committed to a notion of Latin America as a discrete cultural entity, the research and exhibition of which would allow each museum to assert its dominance as a leader in the field. In order to do so, each institution charted a different course marked by distinct aesthetic and curatorial choices that resulted in the establishment of competing maps (temporal, historical, and geographic) of Latin America. This involved a redrawing of the cultural maps which privileged a horizontal, transatlantic exchange over transcontinental or diagonal transatlantic dialogue. It also involved attempts to renovate or erase previously held notions of Latin American art as primitive, fantastic, or both. By emphasizing particular eras and styles, each case study institution created architectures of knowledge based on a particular idea of Latin American identity and culture. In doing so, they attempted to capture the symbolic capital inherent in defining a regional identity. The institutional and curatorial practice of these museums was emblematic of the confrontational and increasingly contentious debate regarding the relationship of Latin American art to modernity.