IN THE 1980s, ARTISTS, ACTIVISTS AND SCHOLARS in U.S. Latino communities consolidated the social and cultural agendas from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The settled populations of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans were augmented by immigrants from throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America to form the largest ethnic groups in the United States. The forty million plus Latinos in the U.S. at that time comprised a community larger than Spain and many countries in Latin America. This surge in the Latino population coincided with the rise of a parallel pan-Latino consciousness that evolved in the artistic and cultural production in the United States. Issues of representation and commodification of culture that had concerned previous generations remained paramount; at the same time, new issues of gender, sexuality, and cultural hybridism, as well as more nuanced analyses of race and class, increasingly informed Latino cultural and artistic practices. Hence, there emerged a major political effort to destabilize and reshape the official canons, taxonomies, and traditions of mainstream Anglocentric American culture.
In the conservative climate of the Ronald Reagan era (1980–88), the counter-cultural values of the political Left—including ethnic minorities—clashed with the culturally conservative political Right in the so-called Culture Wars. Controversies over national identity, educational norms, religious principles, museum exhibitions, and popular culture polarized the country. The national culture was therefore re-envisioned as a dynamic, multicultural mosaic drawing meaning and unity from all of its constituent cultures. As the Culture Wars waned, mainstream cultural institutions responded to pressures to attend to the educational and social agendas promoting diversity and the inclusion of minority groups into all spheres of American life. Major museums began to collect and exhibit U.S. Latino art, wielding curatorial strategies focused on identity, politics, and multiculturalism.
V.1 Several essays gathered in this first section, “Exhibiting Entrenched Representations," describe the process of selecting, interpreting, and presenting work by Latino artists in the landmark exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors [SEE DOCUMENTS V.1.3–V.1.7], held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1987. This was indeed among the first Latino exhibitions in a major museum.1 Nevertheless, the exhibition’s prestige was in some respects impacted by the perception that its Houston venue was located on the artistic periphery or, more specifically, outside of New York, seen by many as the center of the U.S. art world. The exhibition also marked the increasing role of museums in the Latino/Latin American identity debate; prior to this moment, museums had not really participated in this particular discourse. In the catalogue for the show, curators John Beardsley and Jane Livingston state: “we came to realize that there was a great richness and variety of visual art in the Hispanic worlds everywhere in the United States. Painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture, design, photography, film and video were among the many areas we explored.” And they stress: “In all, the true depth and range of Hispanic art in the United States remains an uncelebrated phenomenon, an unacknowledged chapter in the history of recent American art” [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.3]. A very significant outcome of the Houston exhibition was to insert into national consciousness the artistic heritage of a distinct Latino culture that had historically enriched American society for more than 500 years.
The main essay included in the Hispanic Art in the United States catalogue is by Octavio Paz [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.4.], the renowned Mexican intellectual. His perspective is undeniably that of an elite writer, far removed, one might argue, from the everyday lived experience of U.S. Latinos. Yet, he does reflect on the persecutions, inequalities, humiliations, and daily injustices that have been decisive factors in strengthening and facilitating the cohesion of Hispanic communities in the United States. However, Paz’s broad poetic–philosophical intervention provides U.S. Latino cultural production with a long historical lineage. His core conceptual tropes of “participation and separation” are rooted in primordial quests to belong and to be acknowledged, whether as a person, a community, or a nation. All societies are engaged in a perpetual search for connection and reconciliation, and, in Latin American cultures, this search is even more complicated and pronounced because it involves a tradition of negotiating the cultural differences between themselves and the colossus of the North. Paz affirms that the Anglo American and the Hispanic worlds in the United States have irreconcilable and incommensurate differences in their sensibilities, visions of time, and relationships to history and to their cultures of origin. He then sketches out the historical basis for those cultural differences, noting that the Euro-American, a product of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, asserts the sanctity of the individual and the primacy of reason. In contrast, U.S. Hispanic culture is still rooted in the Catholic ideas and values of the Counter Reformation and includes the other heritage—black and Indian—in a syncretic, cultural melting pot. The Counter Reformation, according to Paz as well as to historians, failed as an enterprise: “We, Latin Americans, are the descendants of a petrified dream.” It must be underscored that, among themselves, U.S. Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Central Americans have differences relating to geography, race, class, and historical experiences. Nonetheless, together they have created a true cultural community with shared traditions and, to a certain extent, communal cohesion, in spite of experiences of discrimination and continued but distant ties with their cultures of origin. For Paz, U.S. Hispanic artists are the mediators between the poles of fusion and dismemberment, between the worlds of here (United States) and the worlds of there (Latin America).
Writing in response to the Houston exhibition, Shifra M. Goldman [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.5] discusses the struggle over nomenclature, self-representation, and the absence of sociohistorical context. Self-representation in artistic production was a key principle of the Latino cultural project and seen as analogous to self-determination in a specific social sphere. The self-selected name of “Latino/a” was amply favored over the official governmental and media imposition of “Hispanic,” which was deemed Eurocentric, thus leaving out the indigenous and African elements of Latino culture. Goldman critiques this kind of “homogenizing” approach reflected by such exhibitions where the curatorial focus is on a “shallow even ‘primitivistic,’” kind of ethnicity—while deracinating the artwork from any social or political context. In her words, ethnicity “is composed of what is folkloric, naïve, popular, exotic, religious and traditional.” Implicit in the ethnic/primitivism duality is the idea that Latino artists are “emotive and visceral to the exclusion of more cerebral art forms like geometric abstraction or conceptualism.” For Goldman, it is not ethnicity that binds Latino artists together but their historical resistance to economic colonization and cultural homogenization both within the United States and in Latin America.
In 1991, more than three years after their controversial exhibition, Livingston and Beardsley reflected on the conception, the process for selection of work, the curatorial strategy, and the critical response to Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors [SEE DOCUMENT V.I.6]. According to their curatorial practice, the show was based on a year of research and organized over a three-year period, during which the curators traveled throughout the country assessing and selecting pieces from a broad, highly organized preexisting network of artists referred to them by professionals in the art milieu. Artists of mature and sustained accomplishment were selected, while, conscious that “Hispanic” art drew its impetus and meaning from the community, the curators chose works investigating the more “purely artistic and poetic impulses of the individual.” As the exhibition traveled around the country, discussion and debate was heated and centered on a group of key issues: among them, a perceived lack of political content; scant inclusion of women artists; an “aestheticizing” tendency focused on form over content; and a primitivistic bias contained within modernist aesthetic parameters. From the curators’ viewpoint, they “were not merely representing Hispanic art to the mainstream: [they] were representing American art to itself, and arguing . . . for a more fluid, more heterodox vision of American culture.”
Peter C. Marzio, then director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the exhibition under discussion was inaugurated, suggests that: “apathy and disregard among museum professionals and the general public toward minority art, particularly, when that art is placed in the general museum environment, must be changed to cooperation and understanding” [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.7]. In other words, the marginalizing approach toward such art must be challenged as mainstream audiences become increasingly diverse. Marzio also introduces certain economic issues that will necessarily influence the successes or limitations of mounting such challenges or pursuing new paths. Hispanic Art in the United States went against the tide in various ways. Many museums take the position that new kinds of exhibitions confuse institutional identity and divert funds from their established, dedicated purpose. Moreover, museums are undercapitalized and few have funds for research or even to expand in new program areas. Museums, then, must find ways to make “minority art [exhibitions] a vital part of” normal operations. Marzio’s words affirm that “minority” exhibitions in major museums make important statements about quality and lead new audiences to experience a broad range of fine art providing it is made understandable and accessible. As a skilled and experienced cultural broker interested in making sure that the programming in mainstream museums reflects the interests and experiences of the diverse populations they serve, Marzio states that art museums “must provide educational and community service to all constituents.” In an effort to reach out to its various potential audiences, the MFAH also offered major symposia, film festivals, concerts, and tours in English and Spanish led by Hispanic docents as part of its educational initiatives relating to the aforementioned exhibition.
The artistic production of contemporary U.S. Latino artists continues and expands a long-standing participation of Latin American artists in the cultural life of the United States. The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970 [SEE DOCUMENT V.I.8] examines selected artists who had a prolonged and substantial professional career in the United States. Previous analyses of their work by North American art historians, curators, and critics involved the construction of and their incorporation within a monolithic aesthetic composed of “bright colors,” violent or energetic brushstrokes, and Native or folkloric elements. Moving beyond notions of a unified style, this 1988 exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts—organized and curated by its director, Luis R. Cancel—examines the production of the selected artists within six art historical categories—constructivism and geometric art, socially concerned art, New World surrealism, abstraction, figuration, and realism and the multi-faceted art of the 1960s.
Especially noteworthy was The Latin American Spirit’s inclusion of Mexican American and Puerto Rican artists to show cultural continuity across borders and across time. It is well known that Puerto Rican artists in the United States occupy an indeterminate space: North American art historians classify their work as Latin American art, while South American scholars group them within United States culture. The result of such divergent approaches is that Puerto Rican artists receive less exposure and scholarly attention than artists from Latin America. Furthermore, U.S. Latino artists are often marginalized into “ethnic” art categories. Their Latin American counterparts, however, have a history of recognition in mainstream North American museums that began in the 1930s [SEE DOCUMENTS III.4.1, III.4.2, III.4.3, III.4.4, III.4.5, III.4.6, III.4.7, III.4.8, III.4.9, III.4.10]. For some curators, Latino art is seen as derivative if compared to the “authentic” art produced in southern geographies. Ironically, the growing presence and stature of Latino art in U.S. museums often paves the way for the inclusion and recognition of Latin American artists.
The prologue and introduction to the Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibition Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.9] propose that the idea of the fantastic is “one of the most powerful modes of expression in Latin American culture.” The fantastic in Latin America is not rooted in intellectual doctrine like Surrealism but arises from the layered racial and cultural syncretisms of the social reality. Fantastic imagery—like hybrid figures together with distortions and dislocations in time and space—extend our experience by contradicting our normal expectations either formally or iconographically. Beginning with The Art of the Fantastic exhibition, the fantastic became a ubiquitous trope in exhibitions of Latino/Latin American art, and, in the process, the arguably overused paradigm led to profound critique and new conceptual and theoretical discourses about Latino/Latin American visual culture.
In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century [SEE DOCUMENT V.I.10], Walter Rasmussen, a curator and director of International Programs at New York’s Museum of Modern Art since 1969, reflects on the fact that MoMA was the first institution outside Latin America to exhibit and collect art of that region. Starting in 1931 with a retrospective funded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller featuring the works of Diego Rivera, MoMA began to collect Latin American art that often related in some way to the business interests of its major trustees, especially the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers’ commitment to Latin American art and culture was allied to their business interests in Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, as well as other countries. When Nelson Rockefeller became coordinator of the Office of Inter American Affairs—as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy—MoMA presented exhibitions that paralleled and extended United States efforts to build goodwill and influence in Latin American countries in support of the Allies at the start of World War II. Inside MoMA, Alfred H Barr, Lincoln Kirsten, and René d’Harnoncourt were the three key leading figures who collected Latin American art for the museum’s permanent collections, negotiated loans for the major exhibitions, and interpreted the works in catalogues published and disseminated by the museum. Their collaborations helped to establish, define, and validate the field of Latin American art for American museums in general. The search for an operative concept of Latino/Latin American art was sedimented and shaped through the exhibitions, scholarly symposia, and publications pioneered by MoMA as it explored the international contours of modern art. Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (1993) was integral to the quincentennial commemoration of the “discovery” of America. Rasmussen’s description of MoMA’s relationship with Latin American art begins in 1914 with the first generations of Latin American modernists and extends to contemporary Latino artists working in the U.S. The aim of this important exhibition and its accompanying publication was to simulate further research in the field, namely scholarly studies of neglected individual artists and specific periods and movements in Latin American art.
V.2 The United States—the fifth Spanish speaking enclave after Mexico, Spain, Colombia, and Argentina and projected to be the third or fourth within a few decades—is a significant Latin American cultural space. Today, the U.S. Latino population exceeds 50 million, and Latinos have been active components of American society since before the Anglo republic was created. Nevertheless, they still reside in a phantom culture within the United States, especially in the field of the visual arts. This section, “Questioning Stereotypes,” includes essays from North and South America that explore the construction of U.S. Latino and Latin Americans as peripheral “others” in cultural practices and discourses.
Five artists in dialogue with art historian Jacinto Quirarte [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.1] discuss the multiple ideological and aesthetic issues involved in contextualizing the art production of artists of Mexican descent who were born in the United States and who worked there during the 1970s. Coming from different regions of the country, the artists reflect on questions of identity, belonging, and cultural citizenship. As professionals trained in university art departments and art schools, they see themselves creating contemporary art that intersects with local, regional, and international forms and content. More specifically, they create an art of fusion and negotiation between artistic norms and traditions of Anglo American and Mexican modern and contemporary art. Within this spectrum, two viewpoints prevail. Identifying themselves as “Chicano,” one group of artists sees its visual production integrated with the social political goals of the Chicano civil rights “Cultural Project.” For them, murals, posters, and other forms of engaged art become collective representations of the imaginations and social aspirations of the largely working class Chicano communities. A second group comprised of Mexican American artists believes that aesthetic value is linked—but not determined by—social concerns. For them, the artist must remain true to a personal inner world, letting his/her art respond to and express this internal vision in the form and content of their creations. Both groups see themselves as being a part of contemporary American art.
Continuing the dialogue articulating the content and context of Chicano art, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and visual artist Rupert Garcia [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.2] denounce the simplistic assessment of Chicano art as a minoritized art solely focused on cultural identity. Looking back to the politically charged art of the 1960s and 70s, they make clear that it was “unnecessarily” nationalistic, morally self-righteous, and aesthetically conservative. The Chicano cultural project—according to Gomez-Peña and Garcia—was more than “a mere strategy of critique and resistance. We didn’t make art to be just ‘intellectually interesting’ or ‘aesthetically fashionable.’ Our concerns—though at times essentialist and unfulfilled—were genuine. It was a popular and populist form of post-modernism. . . .” Moving beyond rigid binary thinking, together they explore questions of “identity, ethnicity, and the theorization of otherness” as a strategy of separation and offer a critique of post-modernity rooted in advanced capitalism. Multiculturalism in the United States revealed culturally specific visions and revisions of postmodern cultural practices. Through their theoretical insights arising from their artistic practice, Gomez Peña and Garcia reevaluate and dismantle essentialist paradigms that minimize Chicano art and re-center it as a foundational component of North American contemporary art and culture.
With a social history of art focus, Shifra M. Goldman’s essay [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.4] is a “suggested outline considering the relationship between the phenomenal increase in the number of Latin American art shows and the electoral politics, foreign policy and international economics of the United States” during the 1980s. Historical antecedents of this correlation of art and politics can be located in the 1930s when large exhibitions of Mexican art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were triggered by U.S. needs for Mexican petroleum, an issue that has remained a vital plank of U.S. foreign policy from 1919 until the 1970 oil crisis; even today, Mexico is the third largest exporter of oil to the United States. The 1940 exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at MoMA was related to gaining Latin American support for the allied forces as the U.S. prepared for World War II, a strategy that sought to counter the fact that the Nazis were also courting Latin America during this same period. In 1978, “Mexico Today” a yearlong project of symposia, exhibitions, and cultural exchange occurred during a time of high stakes negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico regarding petroleum and natural gas.
The art market for Latin American art is a recent phenomenon that emerged in 1977 when Sotheby’s held the first auction of Mexican art. Its success led to the continuation of modern Latin American art auctions every six months. It is widely known that collectors, investors, and entrepreneurs are all involved in expanded market speculation for Latin American art. As Goldman argues, the current “boom” in Latin American art is embedded in webs of extra-artistic contexts including U.S. foreign policy, the rise of a Latino electorate in United States politics, and the emergence of a global art market.
The 1990s saw the ascending role of curators and the declining role of art critics in the Latino/Latin American art debates. The curator became, at that time, the new agent (or “art broker”) and the museum functioned as the crucible for deciding issues of representation. Art historian and curator Mari Carmen Ramírez [SEE DOCUMENT V.2.6] examines the identity-defining role “of Latin American art exhibitions organized and funded by U.S. cultural institutions” at the moment when Latino communities in the United States comprised the largest ethnic minority group in the country. According to Ramírez, the denunciation of cultural stereotypes presented in these exhibitions “has brought the issue of the representation of this marginal culture directly into the heart of the U.S. mainstream” museums and cultural institutions. In the historical continuum, exhibitions of Latin American art in American museums reflect the uneven “axis of exchange” between both continents and exemplify the neo-colonial legacy shaping U.S./Latin American relations since the nineteenth century.
Exhibitions of Latin American art in North American institutions have been mainly organized by curators of European art with little specialized knowledge of the historical, cultural, and aesthetic traditions of Latin American art. Nonetheless, these curators have created a discourse formulating specific narratives and definitions of Latin American art. In her essay, Ramírez explores the ideological and conceptual premises underlying the framing of identity issues through three much-debated exhibitions of Latino/Latin American art presented in the 1990s. Her analysis is underscored by a central question she raises regarding the validity of the term “Latin American art” itself, noting that in reality no single identity for the cultures south of the U.S./Mexico border exists. As a “heterogeneous ensemble” of more than twenty countries, Latin American culture is inscribed in the Western tradition and has always functioned within its strict parameters. This line of thought could also be extended to U.S. Latino populations, as they cannot be grouped straightforwardly within a single race or ethnicity and, instead, “represent an amalgam of races, classes, and national heritages that elude any attempt at easy classification.” Ramírez explains that there is “no Latino/Latin American art per se,” but a “broad gamut” of politically and socially dependent modes of expression and styles.
The vast majority of Latin American/Latino art organized in the 1980s and 1990s followed the survey model looking at the art with an ethnographic gaze inherited from colonialism. Within this framework, alternative projections of modernity were ensnared in a primal, ahistorical, and instinctual “fantastic” essence presumed to convey the peculiarities of the Latin American/Latino character expressed through art. Museum practices on both continents were and continue to be governed by a neo-colonial mindset that perpetuates the ethnocentric discourse of the West.
1
Jane Livingston, one of the organizers of the Houston exhibition, had previously curated Los Four at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, February–March, 1974.