Mário Pedrosa is widely considered Brazil’s preeminent critic of art, culture, and politics and is one of Latin America’s most frequently cited public intellectuals. Three selections from his writings included here (“The Vital Need for Art”; “Environmental Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica”; “The New MAM Will Consist of Five Museums”) come from the anthology Mário Pedrosa:…
Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães discusses the disillusionment that led Modernist painter Joaquín Torres-García to leave New York as well as the city’s lasting influence on his artmaking and his continued ties to North America in this biographical essay. Second part of two. Despite these exhibitions, his circle of prosperous friends, and his significant connections to artists and…
Photography provided a guaranteed witness to the burgeoning genre of performance art in the 1960s, when restrictions in Socialist societies sometimes created a far different relationship between performance and documentation than in the West. Art historian Amy Bryzgel highlights several key works of Central and Eastern Europeanperformance art from the MoMA Collection. Artists have been…
Professor Edward Sullivan reminds us that the Caribbean is a cultural space that exceeds its geographic borders and that has been global well before our current understanding of globality.
Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães recounts Modernist painter Joaquín Torres-García’s years in New York, the strong influence of the metropolis on the development of his style, and his connections and successes in the American art scene in this biographical essay. First part of two. Each era has its own art. All of the classics have been contemporary in…
During the last week of September, members of the C-MAP Latin America group traveled to Chile. This trip was part of a research focus on that country which, over the past year, has brought a number of artists, scholars, critics and curators to MoMA–all this in an effort to better understand the complexities of the…
In this essay, Jennifer Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, MoMA Library looks at the history of MoMA through the direct engagement of the artist. This research was presented in her exhibition Messing With MoMA: Critical Interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, 1939–Now (July 1–November 29, 2015), which documented seven decades of interventions by artists, the general public,…
Juliet Kinchin, Curator of Architecture and Design, in consultation with Alexandra Sankova, Director of the Moscow Design Museum, looks into the Cold War transnational connections in Raymond Loewy’s work. “Scallops St. Tropez” was Raymond Loewy’s contribution to a book of celebrity recipes published in 1958. The book’s editor, Helen Dunn, introduced Loewy, as “perhaps the…
Curator Emiliano Valdés shares some thoughts on Central American art and ideas about how to better understand it.
In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Xu Bing relocated to the countryside for two years. The 1987-8 woodcuts in MoMA’s collection reflect this pastoral atmosphere while anticipating the artist’s later turn to Conceptual art. The set of woodcuts by Xu Bing (Chinese, born 1955) in MoMA’s collection depicts rural…
In this video, Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator in the Department of Photography, interviews artist Olga Chernysheva at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow during the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group trip in June 2015. Olga Chernysehva is a mid-career artist based in Moscow who works across media. Born in the Soviet Union…
This 1966 essay is renowned for its early use of the term “postmodern.” Unlike later theorizations, the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa deploys the concept to discuss how immersive environments replace distanced visual perception in the artworks of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. New attention to the essay—where the text is interpreted as an alternate theoretical…
