Toward a Museum of Incommensurables
How does art history deal with the radical diversity of objects it encompasses?
Luis Pérez-Oramas
The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art for the Department of Drawing and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art
Luis Pérez-Oramas was appointed The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art for the Department of Drawing at The Museum of Modern Art. He received his PhD in art history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in 1994. He has taught art history at the Université de Haute Bretagne-Rennes 2, Rennes; Ecole Régionale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes; and the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, Caracas. Prior to joining MoMA, he was the Curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas. Among the exhibitions Pérez-Oramas has organized during his tenure at MoMA are: Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings (2006); New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930–2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions (2007); Latin American and Caribbean Art: Selections from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (2008), for The New York State Museum, Albany; and Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel (2009), a traveling exhibition with venues at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009–10) and Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2010). He has also published six books based on his poetry, including Prisionero del Aire (2008).
Part 3: Lygia Clark: If You Hold a Stone
Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. The third and final section of this essay connects the sculptural nature of Clark’s paintings and the human body’s activation in her later works.
Part 2: Lygia Clark: If You Hold a Stone
Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. Part two of this essay positions Clark’s paintings as architectural explorations and living organisms.
Part 1: Lygia Clark: If You Hold a Stone
Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. Part one of this essay examines Clark’s early works as form-based and the underlying performative aspects of their construction.
Part 2: Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal
In this essay, curator Luis Pérez-Oramas considers the work of Tarsila do Amaral, the subject of the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil on view February 11 through June 3, 2018 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Part 1: Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal
In this essay, curator Luis Pérez-Oramas considers the work of Tarsila do Amaral, the subject of the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil on view February 11 through June 3, 2018 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gego’s Stream No. 7
Gego (1912–1994, Gertrud Goldschmidt), arguably the most influential Venezuelan artist of the twentieth century, was the critical counter-figure of Venezuelan Kineticism.
Alejandro Otero’s Colorhythms
Colorhythms, a group of works by Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero made in the 1940s and 1950s, are vertical or horizontal rectangular paintings that unfold in countless serial compositional variations.
Singing for the Absent
The very first scene of the video Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia, by the art collective La Decanatura, depicts a mother cow slowly, even lovingly, stroking with her tongue a newborn calf.