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…
Chilean artists from the past three decades discuss their work, influences, and concerns working as Chileans in a post-Pinochet context. MoMA Program Manager Jason Dubs interviews Natalia Babarovic, Francisca Benítez, Felipe Mujica, and Johanna Unzueta about the context of their practices today.
Jorge Schwartz discusses the prominence of the urban in Joaquín Torres-García’s visual and literary works. A major retrospective at MoMA, The Arcadian Modern, reveals a totalizing and structural vision of Joaquín Torres-García’s thinking, mainly through his painting, sculpture, objects, and, of particular interest to me, bibliographic production: his theoretical texts about Constructivism, autobiographical texts, manifestos,…
The artists’ book movement in Mexico evolved as a “direct consequence of many complex circumstances in keeping with the mood of the times,” according to Felipe Ehrenberg, an artist, writer, and neologist. Upon Ehrenberg’s return from…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
