The Americas

post Presents: Curating Multiple Modernities

As museums move to put more geographically inclusive displays on view, a tension in emphasis–between cross-geographic correspondences and local particularities–is necessarily at stake. We convened a conversation between art historian, Alexander Alberro; curator, Doryun Chong; and museum director, Edit Sasvári, each with their own regional focus, to discuss the possibility of “the global museum,” what…

Enigmas: The Works of Regina Silveira

In the shadow of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Regina Silveira pursued an elusive art, by necessity and by design. Absence and isolation, illusion and distortion were not only promising artistic strategies, but also richly meaningful metaphors in an era of severe political repression. Trained as a painter and printmaker in her native Porto Alegre, Silveira…

Anna Maria Maiolino’s Book Object

Anna Maria Maiolino (Brazilian, born Italy, 1942) refers to Trajetória I (1976) as a “Book Object,” a term that aptly describes the way it combines aspects of a book with those of a sculpture. Although comprised of eleven folios of black, white, and red papers bound into a black paper cover, it does not include text or…

Thinking Back on Global Conceptualism

Rachel Weiss, curator, writer, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Jane Farver (who also came to talk on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor,…

Global Conceptualism: Reflections

Jane Farver, curator and former Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Rachel Weiss (who also came to present on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor, Reiko Tomii &…

The Crisis of Planetary Urbanization

David Harvey’s essay for the exhibition catalog of Uneven Growth Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities is published here on post to mark the opening of the exhibition. On the night of June 20, 2013, more than a million people in some 388 Brazilian cities took to the streets in a massive protest movement. The largest of these protests, comprising…

Urban Art in Megacities: São Paulo

In this seminar Nelson Brissac reviews artists’ interventions into the city of São Paulo as part of his Arte/Cidade project, and reveals some of the issues that characterize its inhabitants’ everyday experiences and perception. Touching upon the 2014 World Cup and Brazil’s widespread urban protests, Brissac introduces extraordinary artist projects by Vito Acconci, Rubens Mano,…