Artist and critic Luis Camnitzer discusses his personal relationship to the work and legacy of Joaquín Torres-García with special attention to his influential Taller and the recent exhibition at MoMA. I am at a point in my life when I have made complete peace with Joaquín Torres-García. It took a long time. Growing up in…
Art historian Klara Kemp-Welch draws parallels between artists of disparate avant-gardes whose claims over spaces in the 1960s and 1970s were political gestures. How are we to navigate the historical fields of experimental art in state socialist Eastern Europe and under Latin American military dictatorships? What happens when pedagogy, poetry, sculpture, and sociability bleed into…
Curator Juliet Kinchin addresses graphic images that spurred revolution in Budapest in 1919. Many avant-garde movements in Europe around the time of World War I were linked to radical politics, and in those stormy years, a generation of artists in Budapest created provocative newspaper illustrations, banners, and public posters in a new genre of graphic…
Curator Luis Pérez-Oramas reflects on bringing these important contemporary Colombian drawings into MoMA’s collection. Colombian contemporary art has been notably characterized since the beginning of the twenty-first century by a renewal of the practice of drawing, that is, by an expansion of drawing, which has coincided with the exhaustion of a major civic and military…
Assistant Curator Lilian Tone reflects on the origin of Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s Corners series. Virtual Spaces: Corner 1 (1967–68) simulates, with a twist, the corner of a domestic room, complete with parquet flooring, a painted baseboard, and canvas-covered walls. It is the first of a series of works that marked a breakthrough in Cildo…
Art historian Daniel Quiles focuses on examples from the Transmissions exhibition to show how Argentine conceptualists of the late 60s converted information from one medium to another. This phenomenon shifted to the transmission of social and political information, causing artistic practices to leave national borders and connect beyond the region. One of the earliest Argentine…
The Iberê Camargo Foundation, a museum in Porto Alegre designed by Álvaro Siza Vieira (Portuguese, 1933–) and devoted to one of Brazil’s most renowned artists, features nine galleries stacked in a vertical volume from which undulating passages in white concrete cantilever to connect the building’s different public levels. The building’s form reveals a multiplicity of…
In Fall 2014, the Library at The Museum of Modern Art was very lucky to have acquired this pamphlet of Kantor’s Happening from 1967. It is now catalogued and available for public researchers, who may request to see and (gently) handle this vibrant illustration of early Polish performance art.
Justino Serralta (Uruguayan, 1919–2011) initially studied under the master of Uruguayan modernist architecture, Julio Vilamajó, but left for Paris upon graduating in 1947 to work with Le Corbusier on two of the Swiss architect’s signature projects: the Unité d’Habitation (1952) housing complex in Marseille and the famous Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (1955). Along…
“A Conversation with Yang Jiechang” is available in Chinese and English. Yang talks about his “art education” during the Cultural Revolution, when he served as a Red Guard in a small village, and describes how the study of calligraphy extinguished his enthusiasm for revolution and political propaganda. Read the English translation here. 巴黎楊詰蒼工作室 24 June 2014…
For the artist Yang Jiechang (b. 1956, Foshan), there is a certain similarity betweencontemporary artists and China’s Red Guards of the 1970s: namely, their performance of arbitrary tasks. In this conversation, Yang talks about his “art education” during the Cultural Revolution, when he served as a Red Guard in a small village, and describes how…
Luis Pérez-Oramas, MoMA curator and leader of the C-MAP Latin America group, discusses the challenges of collecting art from a region that complicates the art historical narratives by presenting a dynamic archipelago of modernities. I would like to start this essay with a picture of the current Painting and Sculpture Galleries on the fourth floor…
