The Americas

Curator Laura Hoptman comments on the importance of Raúl Lozza’s work Invention no. 150, which connects Concretism, Neo-Concretism, and Conceptual art movements.

Physichromie 21 by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez is another highlight of the Cisneros’ gift to the Museum. Anne Umland, traces this work back to the artist’s studio in Paris in the 1960s and explores the ways Cruz-Diez’s Physichromie series is dependent on active viewer participation and contingencies of lighting.

In 1973, critic and theorist Juan Acha published the text Por una nueva problemática artística en Latinoamérica in Artes Visuales. The critical essay is available here in the original Spanish as well as translated into English for the first time.

Samantha Friedman comments on the importance of the work in the development of Brazilian modern art.

Acha established himself as a vigorous critical voice in Peru at a time when Conceptualist artistic approaches and political events such as the riots and military coup of 1968 strongly inflected the local art scene.

Twenty images of artworks and related materials by the Slovene group OHO from the MoMA Archives have been digitized and made accessible here.

In 2016, The Museum of Modern Art received a major gift from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, which added more than 100 works of modern art by major artists from Latin America to the Museum’s collection and established the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America.

Miguel A. López, curador y escritor, da una mirada a los textos tempranos de Juan Acha, quien se consolidó como una voz crítica y vigorosa en Perú, en tiempos en que la escena artística local estaba siendo fuertemente influenciada por las prácticas conceptualistas, los disturbios politicos y el golpe military de 1968. Read the essay…

Renowned Chilean critic Adriana Valdés talks about the Chilean art scene during the dictatorship and about the work of Eugenio Dittborn.

In this essay, art historian Rita Eder reviews, from a personal and first-hand point of view, the breadth and impact of Juan Acha’s critical contribution to Latin American art from the 1970s to the 1990s. She locates Acha’s theory of no-objetualismo (non-objectualism) within his wider production and considers his preoccupations with materiality, artistic hierarchies and the circulation…

En este ensayo, Rita Eder revisa, desde su experiencia de primera mano, el profundo impacto del legado de Juan Acha. Su contribución al arte latinoamericano de los 70s, 80s y 90s es presentada por Eder en este texto que sitúa el desarrollo de la teoría del no-objetualismo en el amplio corpus de la producción de Acha que…

2016 is the centenary of the birth of Juan Acha (1916–1995), the Peruvian-born, Mexican-naturalized Latin American art critic. Recent developments in the field of Latin American art history have led to a resurgence of interest in Acha’s critical contributions, and post here presents commissioned essays as well as primary documents translated into English for the first time.