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…
Inherent to sound recording and distribution technology is not only the possibility of storing and reproducing any given acoustic event, but also a correlating tendency to make incidental and accidental elements—those which are not considered part of the music recorded—constitutive elements in the sound of a recording. This paradoxically essential surplus, as David Grubbs observed…
Luis Pérez-Oramas, the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, talks with artist Natalia Babarovic about the meaning of painting and its ominous and constant ‘returning.’ Barbarovic also commented on the peculiarities of being a painter in Chile, both in contemporary times and during the years of the dictatorship, and spoke about what…
Once in the XX Century, an eight-minute film by Deimantas Narkevičius shows a larger-than-life statue of Vladimir Lenin being erected in Vilnius’s main square to the cheers of a large crowd. MoMA acquired the film in 2011, and in 2013, it was included in the Museum’s Performing Histories (1), an exhibition of recent time-based art…
After presenting during a C-MAP Latin America session at MoMA, artist Catalina Parra joined independent critic and curator Julia Herzberg for a conversation about her work. Herzberg, long-time researcher of Parra’s production, conducted an interview that went from politics to education and from Chile to Germany, with occasional stops in New York and Buenos Aires.…
