Artists from Latin America Reimagine Their Histories

The United States has always been skeptical about borders, concerning who enters or stays out of the country. At present, this has resulted in enormous political tension. This tension has been evident culturally in the art that has been allowed in our museums.

The Museum of Modern Art has had a pattern of collecting 20th-century Latin American art that has varied but has been positive. Early on, it favored art that it viewed as exotica: folkloric, surreal, signaling that south of the border was a wild, barely-modern terrain. After World War II, with cultural exchange seen as a diplomatic tool, MoMA wanted more interaction with Latin American art, but it had to be work that appeared to carry clear evidence of European DNA, like geometric abstraction.

Then, in the 1970s, came the global recession and a shake-up called multiculturalism—pro-diversity and anti-essentialist—arrived. Multiculturalism has led to a notable reshaping of how Latin American art is viewed in the United States, and “Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond,” one of the most moving exhibitions of art in a New York museum, proves that.

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a MoMA trustee from Venezuela, was interested in all aspects of Latin American art, including Indigenous cultures, 19th-century art made by Europeans traveling to the region, hybrid colonial artifacts, and modernist painting and sculpture. In 2016, she donated over 100 modernist works, and MoMA had a show. However, by 2019, she was interested in new art and donated even more, which includes video and photography.

The exhibit consists mostly of three dozen contemporary works, including loans, from the recent past. Together, they reflect all the categories of Latin American art that interested her from the start.

Leandro Katz’s “The Catherwood Project” is an example of the complex history of colonialism, which is typically omitted from modernist abstraction. Frederick Catherwood traveled twice to Central America in the 1840s and made drawings of Maya ruins. His prints gave the European public a first look at these ancient monuments and established a romanticized vision of the “New World.” Katz photographs himself holding up images of Catherwood’s illustrations in front of the Maya monuments they depict. Katz notes Catherwood’s manipulations, but also adds that he is inevitably adding his own 20th-century viewpoint to a layered perceptional history.

Indigenous cultures, vital to European modernism but generally unrecognized by it, are repeatedly addressed in the show. Laura Anderson Barbata, a Mexican-born artist, spent time with the Yanomami people in the Venezuelan Amazon rainforest, where she learned how they made graceful canoes. In exchange, she taught them paper-making. We see the results of their cultural sharing in a photograph by Barbata, called “Self-portrait,” of a hand-carved boat standing upright, as if with a personality of its own; drawings of Amazonian fauna and flora by the Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, all made on handmade fiber paper, are also on display.

Some of the artists use tradition in a clever, playful way. Gabriel Kuri of Mexico toys with the concept of value, labor, and consumer culture in his loom-woven image of a supermarket receipt. Additionally, the Puerto Rican collective called “Las Nietas de Nonó,” made up of two sisters (Mulowayi Iyaye Nonó and Mapenzi Chibale Nonó), turned their everyday life into a back-to-basics hunter-gatherer picnic when they became isolated during the pandemic.

The exhibition gives weight to that which most mainstream Western artwork does not understand anymore, but which multiculturism respects: spirituality. In a 2020 painting by Firelei Báez, a Dominican-born artist, a powerful Afro-Caribbean female deity dances across and dominates a 16th-century European map of the Atlantic Ocean.

Gala Porras-Kim, a Colombian-Korean artist, documented hundreds of temple offerings to the Mayan rain god in pencil drawings made centuries ago on pieces of fabric. They are now preserved in an ethnological museum at Harvard University. Included in the exhibit is a letter Porras-Kim wrote to the director of the museum asking her to release the offerings from their archival prison so they can turn to dust as originally intended. She argues that their perishability is what made them powerful.

One of the exhibit’s binding threads, and a complicated one, is the theme of change and instability, often framed as loss. A severe work by Regina José Galindo, a Guatemalan performance artist, references the violent nature of loss. She had a dentist in Guatemala fit eight of her teeth with fillings made of locally-mined gold and then had another dentist in Europe remove the fillings, which are displayed as art in a vitrine.