To blend (diverse elements) into a uniform mixture; to make homogeneous.
—Webster’s Dictionary
I think it’s a very handsome, very attractive show. The one criticism I would level is that many Hispanics have been involved politically, and any social or political context has been edited out of the work.
—Luis Jiménez
CHICANO ARTIST
I am angry because a show such as this does not recognize the Hispanic experience which began as a "grassroots movement." Once again our resources are being appropriated and North American aesthetic tastes are determining what Latin American art is.
—Nilda Peraza
PUERTO RICAN, DIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY HISPANIC ART, NEW YORK
I heard from the artists that the curators were looking for specific imagery: something very ethnic, very exotic, expressionistic, representational, funky looking.
—Inverna Lockpez
CUBAN, DIRECTOR OF INTAR LATIN AMERICAN GALLERY, NEW YORK
Co-organized by Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH) and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors lays to rest whatever skepticism might surround the assertion that Latin American artists in the United States can match the work of any other group. Accompanied by an Octavio Paz lecture, a symposium with six speakers, and a panel discussion, the exhibit opened at the MFAH the weekend of May 1, 1987, and will be at the Corcoran from October 10 to January 17, 1988. There is no question as to the excellence, the splendid outpouring of high energy, and the high quality of the artistic productions represented by this exhibition. However, the curatorial premise, with its focus on the identifying term “Hispanic,” and its “primitivistic” emphasis, is problematic.
As recently as ten years ago there was no nationally recognized category known as “Hispanic art” unless one was referring to the art of Spain or its Hispanic-American colonies in the New World. In the late 1970s, “Hispanic” became a term used for government and marketing purposes “to package” a heterogeneous population1 composed of recently resident Latin Americans from many nations, as well as Mexicans (or Chicanos), Puerto Ricans (or Nuyoricans in New York), and Cuban Americans. Lost in the “Hispanic” usage were national and racial/cultural signifiers (particularly Indian and African) employed as proud reaffirmations of identity during the 1960s and 1970s in face of prevailing and rampant racial, cultural, and political—not to mention economic—discrimination. “Hispanic,” then, was the first signifier of homogenization; it is now defended as convenient, comprehensive, and universally acceptable. Many Latin Americans, however, admit that they use the term only for governmental and funding sources; among themselves they prefer their own designations.
The curators Jane Livingston and John Beardsley of the Corcoran generally focused on large works, some of them commissioned for the show, with a fairly good balance of painting and sculpture, and the inclusion of a series of very interesting drawings by Mexican Martín Ramírez (1885–1960), a self-taught institutionalized schizophrenic, which formed a linchpin of their concept.
Under the rubric of sculpture were such varied works as Chicano Gilbert Luján’s customized low-rider located in the lobby, Jesús Moroles’s sophisticated architectonic stone carvings, Cuban Pedro Perez’s elaborately gold-leafed and cut glass structures with a satirical twist, figurative works in painted bronze and classical acrobatic bronze figures by California Chicanos Manuel Neri and Robert Graham, and beautifully carved and painted saints and an altar screen by New Mexican woodcarvers Félix López and Luis Tapia. Two installations by Texas-born artists were also included: a finely crafted traditional altar dedicated to Frida Kahlo by Carmen Lomas Garza; and Luis Jimenez’s exciting celebration of Southwestern working-class culture, Honky Tonk, featuring some fifteen life-size figures.
Paintings were also very varied. Particularly outstanding were Chilean Ismael Frigerio’s huge epic canvases dealing with the Spanish Conquest, Cuban Paul Sierra’s luminous dark impasto landscapes with figures, Puerto Rican Arnaldo Roche’s large and obsessive figural images, and, among the Chicanos, Carlos Almaraz’s car wrecks and coyotes, John Valadez’s stunning realistic triptych, Gronk’s explosive works from the Titanic series, Rolando Briseño’s cutout paintings, and César Martinez’s neighborhood personalities.
The handsome catalogue contains essays by curators Livingston and Beardsley [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.6] and by Mexican poet Octavio Paz [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.4]. In it, the two curators make the following claim: “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.’” Their concerns, they state, derive from “our observations of what is good about Hispanic art.” Having said this, Livingston and Beardsley set about to establish precisely what is disclaimed: their own “sociology” of what constitutes Latin American art in the United States, and their own aesthetic standards. In the process, they jettison the history and resulting particularities of the heterogeneous populations they have undertaken not only to explain, albeit to unify according to their own vision. In the process, the cultural manifestations that are part and parcel of that history are obscured.
According to the catalogue essays, “ethnicity”—as the glue that holds together artists of diverse populations and marks them out from the dominant society—is the major characteristic they wish to explore. However, the curators’ view of ethnicity is shallow and even “primitivistic.” It is composed of what is folkloric, naïve, popular, exotic, religious, and traditional.
Another characteristic pertaining to some of the artists is that of “style.” This is a strange hybrid invented by Livingston called “Latino/Hispanic Modernism.” This style comprises influences from “Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and the Mexicans, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo” as well “latter day Latino/Hispanic Modernists Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, André Masson and Joaquín Torres-García,” and even Henri Rousseau (apparently French Surrealists and Naïves are also “Latino”). This combination results in “chromatic and compositional lushness” and “a kind of timeless, mythic, often primitive imagery.” Thus, almost in one fell swoop Livingston has explained the “style” of most Chicanos and Cubans in the exhibit, one of the Puerto Ricans, and the single Uruguayan. I believe these categorizations are intended to account for surrealist, social realist, and constructivist influences on the artists. The rest of Livingston’s essay is an attempt to either cram “Hispanics” into this Procrustean bed or to qualify the numerous exceptions. The result is so murky that it defies analysis. The only antidote would be a good course in the history of Latin American art—a commodity unfortunately in short supply in most U.S. universities—or a meaningful working association with curators and art historians who are familiar with this history.
There is a common cement that binds Latin Americans together, and it is the cement of two conquests: that of Europe over the New World, in which Spain was a primary participant; and the later conquest by the United States, which, under the rubric of Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden, took over the remnants of Spanish empire in the late nineteenth century, absorbing the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, to add to its earlier conquest of independent Mexican territory which now forms the U.S. Southwest. Latin American culture today is the result of a historical process of rich synthesis between the indigenous Indian cultures, those of imported labor forces (African and Asian), and of Euro-Americans. [Moreover, a culture as such] is also marked by resistance—from both independent nations and national groups, to further economic colonization and cultural homogenization. Any consideration of Latin American culture in Latin America and in the U.S. must start from this base. Affirmation of ethnicity is only one aspect of a political and social whole, and is relevant primarily to populations of long-standing residence who have had to resist attacks against their national cultural attributes as part of a pattern of economic, political, and social domination.
Even within its own terms, the exhibit is not representative of work being done in Latino communities across the country, or even of its own participants. Despite Beardsley’s brief dip into Chicano movement history (he obviously did not investigate the Puerto Rican political movement or the affinities of artists from Latin American nations), painters and sculptors who have consistently focused on community or political issues, or social criticism, were noticeably missing from the exhibit. Such important Chicano artists as Rupert García, Yolanda López, and Mel Casas; as Puerto Ricans Juan Sánchez (who was asked to collect slides of artists, but not invited despite his national reputation) and prize-winning Marina Gutiérrez; and as Chilean Alfredo Jaar—to mention only a tiny fraction of possibilities—were left out.
Even among the participating artists, the curators seemed to have been motivated more by “sociological” rather than aesthetic principles. Luis Jiménez said he was puzzled by their choices, which by-passed the great number of his fiberglass sculptures containing his most trenchant social satire. In the case of Cuban Luis Cruz Azaceta, the emphasis is on his latest, more introverted and cool-hued paintings rather than on those disturbing and passionate autobiographical works that have been his responses to urban violence and alienation during the last decade. Ismael Frigerio commented on the fact that the curators were particularly interested in a huge serpent painted on untrimmed burlap. According to the artist, it was the “primitive” quality of the ground that excited interest. Word has it that well-known Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer declined to participate in an exhibition focused on “folklore and ethnicity.”
Numbers even enter into the discourse. It takes careful reading of the catalogue to identify exhibition participants by that important national background which often determines pictorial and sculptural ideas and forms. No argument is being made here for quotas; however, when an enterprise bills itself as “Hispanic Art in the United States” (the “Thirty Painters and Sculptors” was a very late addition to the title in response to considerable criticism from the Latin American arts communities), it is to be expected that given equal or higher quality, the choices would allow for gender considerations and a broad spectrum of nationalities as well as style and content. The numbers break down as follows: four Latin Americans from Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay; four Cubans; three Puerto Ricans; and nineteen Chicanos, including one who is half Puerto Rican. Of the thirty, three are women. Given that the largest Spanish speaking groups in the United States within a total population of about twenty-five million are the Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans; and that the Eastern seaboard, particularly New York, has one of the largest populations of Latin American artists in the Northern hemisphere, outside Mexico, the minimal representation of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latin Americans is surprising, to say the least.
The Houston show was marked at its entrance by a large colorful banner emblazoned with the word “Hispanic,” which guaranteed the flow of traffic in a single direction. Walking through, the viewer becomes aware of ideological disposition in the very arrangement of the rooms and how they are viewed. Work by a “primitive” such as Martín Ramírez—neither Chicano nor contemporary—is associated with the sophisticated abstract sculpture of Jesús Moroles, which echoes pre-Columbian art. If one starts with the mistaken notion—held by so many and so categorized in art history texts—that pre-Columbian art is “primitive,” then the above equation can perhaps be justified by an appeal to “affinities” (a misused concept at the controversial Museum of Modern Art show “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art held in 1984).2
The first several rooms develop this tendency, not as a historical progression but as an historical fusing into one denominator of self-taught artists (including an elderly Puerto Rican toymaker and a New Mexican animal carver), traditional folk artists, and academy-trained contemporaries. All but one of the self-taught and traditional artists are of Mexican descent, yet they lay a primitivistic “floor” under the entire exhibit. Thus, for example, a secular altar by Carmen Lomas Garza and several neoexpressionist paintings on Afro-Cuban themes by Paul Sierra link the opening rooms with the main portion of the exhibit, the naïve and folkloric with “the primitivism in modern art,” so to speak, as if Latino art in the United States (with the exception of those who entered the mainstream by avoiding “ethnicity”) is automatically identified by its ethnic/primitive characteristics. Implicit in this equation is the inference that Latin Americans are emotive and visceral to the exclusion of more cerebral art forms such as geometric abstraction or conceptualism.
The second major theme is “Hispanic” neo-expressionism and new image painting. Livingston, who came to the Corcoran from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), claims in the catalogue that a 1974 LACMA show of Los Four (Luján, Almaraz, and Frank Romero of Los Four are in the present exhibit) 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 other words, Latino artists who had been expressionists long before it became fashionable were now in vogue.
Spatially, the core of the exhibit at Houston is devoted to figurative and semi-abstract, neo-expressionism—not tragic neoexpressionists such as the international trans-avant-garde, but ethnic neoexpressionists. The last room and exit corridor feature the “mainstream” artists Neri and Graham. They represent “success” and acceptance by the art market, and what the curators promise is the same success to all the Latino artists in the exhibit. There is no question that most of them richly deserve it; and I for one wish them every success and access to major museums and galleries. For the artists, “Hispanic Art” is an important breakthrough: a merited recognition of their talent, persistence, and hard work, and the promise of recognition and some financial security.
The big question still remains: what is the nature and contribution of Latin American art in the United States? This question has not been answered by this well-funded (about a million dollars), and well-publicized event.
1
According to historian Rodolfo F. Acuña, the Nixon administration consolidated Latin Americans into a national minority called “Hispanic” in order to manage them more easily. See Acuña, A Community under Siege (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984), 180. In 1978, José Gómez-Sicre, director of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America (OAS), referred in a catalogue to Cubans billed as Latin Americans of the southeastern United States by the Lowe Art Museum of Miami as “Hispanic American artists.”
2
See Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” Artforum (November 1984): 54–60, for a trenchant discussion on the relationship between modernity and “primitivism,” a hotly debated issue.