V.1.3 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065215
Hispanic-American visual art is at once too familiar and utterly unknown. Largely overlooked by our major museums and art magazines, it is regularly championed only by smaller organizations with limited constituencies. Very few artists whose work is of an assertively Hispanic character, whose subject matter or style reveals an affinity for their Latin roots, have received a measure of recognition at least partially equivalent to their accomplishments. A few other Hispanic Americans, although unacknowledged as such, have come to the fore in a more mainstream style. At the same time, certain limited aspects of Hispanic visual culture have been seized upon—both by a majority of the art establishment and of the interested public—as the sum total and limit of Hispanic achievement in the fine arts. The Chicano mural movement, in particular—while it boasts a distinguished tradition and while it is still capable of summoning excellent work from a number of artists—has lately become something of a stereotype in the perception of Hispanic artistic expression. 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.
Such were our intuitions in 1982 when this project originated in conversations among us and Peter Marzio [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.7]—then Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Having worked together before on an exhibition of self-taught American artists, we had been particularly struck by Felipe Archuleta, Martín Ramírez, and the tradition of Hispanic religious carving in the Southwest. Jane Livingston had also been haunted by her experience in Los Angeles in 1973–74, working with the artists in Los Four—Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Luján, Frank Romero, and Beto de la Rocha—on an exhibition that occurred at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art shortly before she left there to become Chief Curator at the Corcoran. That show became for her an issue of unfinished business. It was so good, so open-ended, and so prescient of what was to come in mainstream art everywhere that it seemed to call for resuscitation and elaboration. In addition, we had each independently followed the emergence of certain important artists on the American scene, such as Rafael Ferrer, Robert Graham, Luis Jimenez, and Manuel Neri, who, whether or not they were primarily identified with a Latino sensibility were blazing a trail into the mainstream American art world for other Hispanic artists working—but working invisibly.
However our suspicion of a larger and deeper phenomenon of contemporary Hispanic art in the United States wasn’t sufficiently substantiated by 1983 to justify a firm commitment to a large exhibition based on it. We felt strongly impelled to explore the field, but were also firm in postponing any announcement of a show and book until we had consulted further with our colleagues, especially those in the various Hispanic art organizations.
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Planning for this project, 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; literature, poetry and theater were beyond our purview, but our increasing familiarity with their depth and vitality became important in our early research. Early on we felt the necessity to narrow our field of view. Somehow, to concentrate on painting and sculpture seemed to us the natural first step in revealing both the scope and the particularity of the achievements of Hispanic artists in the United States. Still photography, video, and performance might have been equally compelling fields to explore, but they would simply have opened up too much territory to survey in a single book and exhibition. We trust that these important areas of endeavor among Hispanic artists will be treated in due course.
. . . Although it was always understood that the show would open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, there is an important sense in which the exhibition has been a collaborative effort between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was as Director of the Corcoran that Peter Marzio had first expressed interest in the possibility of such an exhibition; it was as Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, that he committed the time and the resources to make it possible.
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In reviewing the sum and substance of what is here, we think it will be apparent to all but the most prejudiced observer that the predominating values in this book and exhibition are artistic, not sociological. What we have cared about above all else is the strength of an artist’s work, not conformity to some preconceived notion of what constitutes a Hispanic “style” or “school.” Such generalizations as each of us draws follow from our observations of what is good about Hispanic art; the broader cultural implications we detect reflect artistic goals determined by the painters and sculptors themselves. At the same time, certain issues have emerged, almost unconsciously, or at least in spite of our stated intentions. We did not set out to define a generation, and yet we see a fascinating generational gap. What we have included perforce is mature work—which means most of our artists are over thirty-five (one, Martín Ramírez, died long ago and serves as a special case). Were this book written and the exhibition mounted ten or fifteen years in the future, it would include a rather different roster and content.
First, more women would be represented. Our overwhelming reaction to the many young women whose work we saw—from, among numerous others, Elsa Flores and Diane Gamboa in Los Angeles to Candida Alvarez and Marina Gutierrez in New York and Marta Sanchez in Philadelphia (still a student at Tyler School of Art when we saw her work)—was a sense of promise, a feeling that their work would fully flower soon. We have a strong conviction that in the near future the clear talent of these women will prevail over whatever particular cultural forces might still tend to limit them.
Second, a project of the year 2000 would certainly include much greater monumentality of execution. The impetus to large, public art is rife among Hispanic artists—but the economic means of supporting such art is for the present rising. Several of the large-scale pieces here would not exist were it not for the direct subsidy this undertaking provided. And others could have been added given yet more time and additional resources. In short, the Hispanic aesthetic we are addressing thinks monumentally. We associate this tendency with the long tradition of city murals, but it has many other potential outlets. Hispanic and Hispanic-derived art may well surround and define the American public landscape of the near future.
Third, in the next generation, Hispanic artists in the United States will be far more readily recognized as deeply influential for American mainstream art. We hope the present effort is only the first suggestive episode in a sequence of events that will stretch both backward and forward, helping us to understand some previously unappreciated realities about the development of American art— and to prepare the way for what is to come.