THE EXHIBITION HISPANIC ART IN THE UNITED STATES: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors was conceived in 1983 and organized by the authors over a three-year period, from 1984 to 1987. Its premise was that there exists a concentration of talent and stylistic affinity among contemporary artists in the United States who are of Hispanic descent and who express in their art a political and cultural self-awareness derived from their origins in or links to Latin America.
The large exhibition that resulted from this premise was organized by and premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; it toured various United States cities, including Washington, D.C., Miami, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and New York. The exhibition was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and ARCO; the national tour was supported by AT&T. It was the most comprehensive and nationally visible exhibition of its kind yet undertaken—and, not unexpectedly, it has stimulated a wide range of responses from the public and from the special community it addresses.
The following remarks are made in a spirit of reflection on the show’s inception and execution—and on some of the reactions that have so far been elicited by its presence in the world. An exhibition is not unlike a photograph: it may be assumed to be a relatively accurate representation of reality. Yet, like a photograph, an exhibition freezes time; it can only express the state of art or the state of scholarship at any given moment. Moreover, it can only represent so much. In photography, it is generally true that the larger the aperture, the shorter the depth of field; in an exhibition, too, breadth of gaze comes at the expense of sharp focus.
It is widely acknowledged that in photography, much depends on who is holding the camera. The choice of subject, the type of lens, the angle of vision, the moment chosen for looking—all determine the character of the image. We know the same to be true of exhibitions. The utterly objective exhibition, like the completely unmediated photograph, is a phantasm. What strikes us as critical in this analogous construct is to recognize the point of view of the hypothetical curator behind the lens. Sometimes that viewpoint succeeds best the more it empathizes with the subject matter; sometimes it requires a mixture of empathy and objectivity.
Such considerations are relatively unimportant, however, in the monographic exhibition. One curator’s view of one artist’s production—though necessarily partial in every sense of the word—is adequate if competently presented. But when the subject is as large and complex as the art of an entire culture or, more accurately in the case of the exhibition we curated, an entire group of cultures, one curator’s point of view cannot possibly represent all of the distinct images that different viewers would create, even though all would appear to be looking at the same subject. Thus the various publics of an exhibition such as Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors presented a challenge to us as its curators: how to include many of those publics’ points of view without sacrificing two fundamental requirements of any exhibition, coherence and a strong underlying assertion of aesthetic will.
In the main, when we embarked upon the exploratory phase of an exhibition involving Hispanic artists all over the United States, we were without specific stylistic preconceptions. Such biases as we had favored the possibility that pleasant surprises might lie in store, rather than disappointments. We were aware that a handful of Hispanic artists had begun to make their presence felt in the mainstream art world, some in a fairly universalized style, others in a more particularized one. We knew of a few self-taught, seemingly isolated Hispanic artists, and knew their work was beginning to have an effect on that of more schooled painters and sculptors. But aside from a gut-level suspicion of a larger phenomenon, we brought few prior assumptions and no predetermined agenda. We thought this might actually be our chief strength, for it would allow the kind of open-minded exploration that could result in both the most empathic approach and the most evenhanded one.
At the outset, we were guided by two intuitions, both of which proved to be confirmed. The first was demographic. We assumed that the regions of the country with the highest and longest-standing concentrations of the various Hispanic populations would be where we would find the largest number of Hispanic artists. Thus we began our search in the obvious places: San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Southwest, Texas, southern Florida, New York, Puerto Rico, and later Denver, Chicago, and San Diego. Our other intuition was that our best leads in locating artists and movements would come from artists themselves and from the institutional network that supports them within their respective communities. Beginning with the handful of recognized Hispanic artists, we sought advice on which studios to visit, which exhibitions to see, and which curators and critics to consult. Surprisingly, little skepticism greeted our inquiries. Although one noted artist declined, after lengthy (and friendly) discussions, to be considered for the exhibition, most artists, curators, and arts administrators seemed to agree that it was time the larger American institutions took note of Hispanic art. Indeed, we could hardly have begun, much less pressed on, without the full cooperation of the artists with whom we communicated, whether or not they were in serious contention for the exhibition itself.
In many places, we found a highly organized, preexisting cultural network that made our exploration quite straightforward. This was especially true in the more homogeneous communities—as among the Chicanos in Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco respectively, for example, or the Cubans in Miami. It was even somewhat true in more heterogeneous places such as the various boroughs of New York, where the many Hispanic organizations have developed effective links with established communities and even with new immigrants. And always we found it essential to scratch beneath the surface, to keep our antennae out, to find the artist who had elected not to make contact with the Hispanic organization or had otherwise escaped the notice of organizations or even fellow artists.
If within most cities or states we found more or less organized subcultures, the same was not true everywhere. For example, in Texas and the Southwest geographic spread has worked against organizational effectiveness. And it was certainly not true on a national scale. When our exhibition opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, we discovered that no artist in it was familiar with all, or even half, of the other artists in the show. This again reflects the fact that we were exploring not a single culture, but a set of related ones. Similarly, the Hispanic community arts organizations in various cities tended to know their own scene thoroughly, but not to have a national focus. While a lack of resources that would allow outreach certainly accounts in part for this striking localism, some organizations deliberately maintain a focus on a particular region or national group.
The first phase of our project, then, consisted of amassing as much information as we could on the many Hispanic visual artists in the United States. The second and more difficult task was to shape this information into a coherent exhibition. We had seen in one context or another the work of over six hundred artists, and knew that we could show only a small percentage of them. To begin the challenging process of selection, we established several organizational guidelines.
The first was that this would be an exhibition of contemporary art, as we knew we could not do justice both to the history of Hispanic art and to its contemporary state. Learning that more historical surveys were under discussion at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and at the University of California, Los Angeles, we were even more drawn to limiting our scope to more contemporary work. This meant that some of the more important historical figures might not be included in our exhibition if they were no longer as active as they had been. It also precluded an examination of some of the most familiar manifestations of Hispanic art, urban murals and political posters. These seemed to be, at least to outsiders, the primary focus of Hispanic artistic activity—especially among Chicanos— in the late sixties and into the seventies, and a thorough familiarity with these kinds of works was important to us in developing an understanding of present-day Hispanic art. But, again, we found what we had originally suspected: that though some of the subject matter and style of these works has been carried over into more recent painting and sculpture, the mural and the poster are no longer the dominant forms of expression among the best Hispanic artists.
Moreover, from the outset we saw no reason not to focus purely on painting and sculpture. That is, we saw no reason to depart from the format one would ordinarily use in introducing any large body of unfamiliar new art. This admittedly excluded some powerful art forms, including photography, video, and performance art. As worthy as Hispanic art in these media may be of exhibitions in their own right, though, we were certain that a clear focus on the rich activity in painting and sculpture was the logical first step in bringing an awareness of Hispanic art to a mainstream audience.
Third, we decided to show the work of each artist selected for the exhibition in some depth. We knew the potential limitations of the kind of survey exhibition in which each artist is represented by a single work, or two works: there is no way to judge whether the individual painting or sculpture is anomalous, or an indication of mature and sustained accomplishment. In a groundbreaking exhibition such as ours that was a particularly critical issue, for a superficial survey could easily result in questions about the depth and the staying power of Hispanic artists. If we could show the mainstream audience that thirty Hispanic artists were producing substantial bodies of accomplished painting and sculpture, we felt viewers would be more inclined to look beyond our exhibition for further demonstrations of achievement in the larger community of Hispanic artists.
Organizational guidelines are relatively easy to define. The aesthetic realities that ultimately prove most important in shaping an exhibition are less so. We knew we wanted the underlying spirit of this exhibition to be artistic, not sociological, though of course we knew that, especially in this case, art and social context are inseparable. Within Hispanic art, one cannot be unaware of a constant tension that often is connected with a split between work that draws its impetus and meaning from the community (and that often takes the form of the mural, the publicly commemorative sculpture, or the mass produced poster) and simple painting or sculpture of a more private character, produced in the studio. However, the art museum is still widely defined in our society as the arena for the more purely artistic and poetic impulses of the individual. We largely concur with this definition, and we saw no reason not to conform to the usual museum practice of concentrating on painting and sculpture. By definition, we thought, the museum exhibition provides a context for artists to express their more personal artistic natures.
All this is not to say that we were either unaware of or predisposed against the more community-based forms of Hispanic art. Indeed, the popular and didactic symbols and vocabulary of Hispanic culture—the complex values of family and religion, both worshiped and rebelled against; the myths from the pre-Columbian and African pasts; the obsession with patterns of conquest and totalitarianism were everywhere in the exhibition. They may have tended to be more subtle than they would be in works intended for mass edification, but they were there. When in the studio, artists often tend to leave behind the overtly political or didactic agendas they may pursue as a matter of conscience in order to communicate something more subjective and private.
In selecting work for the exhibition, we struggled for a balance among the widely differing styles practiced by contemporary Hispanic artists. The matter of diversity within Hispanic culture seemed to us especially important to convey. It led us, for example, to juxtapose the gestural abstractions of Ibsen Espada with the geometric abstractions of Jesús Bautista Moroles, or the devotional sculptures of Félix López with the parodic paintings and sculptures of Pedro Pérez. We interpreted diversity to mean the inclusion of both self-taught and highly trained artists. We even allowed this inclusiveness to embrace the extraordinarily sophisticated classical figure sculptures of Robert Graham, an artist securely placed in the mainstream establishment and seldom identified as Hispanic.
At the same time, we wanted the exhibition to express some underlying coherence. To the rare person highly familiar with Hispanic art, it may be understood as a phenomenon with far more range in subject matter and style than we were able to convey. Yet we felt a responsibility to that great majority of our audience, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic, for whom the works in this exhibition would be largely if not completely unfamiliar. Any audience is likely to be alienated if the presentation is either too narrowly didactic or too encyclopedic. So we certainly did, if sometimes half-consciously, allow certain images or themes to recur throughout the exhibition, in works of widely differing characters. The image of the Madonna, the icon of the outlaw or the dispossessed, the mask, the figure that is half-human, half-animal—these and other subjects became a kind of echoing, layered refrain throughout the exhibition and catalogue. These themes were not arbitrarily imposed: they reflect the concerns of Hispanic artists as we found them.
Finally, within our organizational guidelines and within our quest to somehow reconcile coherence and diversity, selections for this exhibition, as for any other, expressed the personal aesthetic judgments of the curators. The processes by which these are made is perhaps the most complex aspect to define of any in the crafting of an exhibition. For these judgments are in some measure intuitive, based on years of familiarity with many forms of art, both historical and contemporary. No experienced curator should consider these judgments to be absolute: we are all too well aware that prevailing standards are subject to change. Nor can they be considered universal: different cultures value different things in a work of art. And different individuals gravitate to special subjects and particular moments in history. Yet we believe that there are enough shared forms and concerns in art to permit us to look across cultural frontiers with confidence that we would eventually comprehend and empathize with our subject. And it seems to us far more unfortunate, in art as in political diplomacy, that this inter-cultural communication should not occur than that it should fail to be perfect.
It happens, in the case of this particular subject—Hispanic visual culture within the United States—that for us, its interpreters, certain personal experiences sensitized us to the language of the art. For example, a childhood in southern California and, consequently, exposure to Mexican American culture may have triggered an initial curiosity about and gravitation toward this aesthetic. But once we were fully engaged in a systematic exploration of the subject in all its complexity and fluidity, whatever early imprints in our consciousnesses that initially may have led us to deal with it were soon superseded by the realities we encountered.
The fact is that our subject was essentially American art, albeit American art of a somewhat distinct sort. Though it is created in its own hybridized language, it is a language fraught with mythic and popular Americanisms. Much of the work that was in the exhibition is done in a spontaneously expressionistic style, with formally or parodically exaggerated compositional elements, jarring chromatic juxtapositions, disjunctive linearism, and distorted space—all the “new expressionisms” now prevalent in mainstream American art. It was one of the premises of the exhibition that Hispanic artists anticipated, even helped establish, the hegemony of this recent and still-current style.
Even were it not the case, however, that the work of Hispanic artists overlaps at every turn with that of their mainstream compatriots, the exhibition still would have addressed a fundamentally American phenomenon. It affirmed a classic pattern in American history of distinct cultures colliding with the mainstream and attempting somehow to reconcile the competing claims of resistance and assimilation. Thus we were not merely representing Hispanic art to the mainstream: we were representing American art to itself, and arguing (as we have in other exhibitions) for a more fluid, more heterodox vision of American culture.
In sum, we were confident that our aesthetic would be fundamentally in agreement with, first, that of the artists we were exhibiting, and, second, that of the wider art world. Moreover, we were certain that the disagreements that would arise over our aesthetic judgments would be in some ways identical to those that surround all contemporary exhibitions, which by nature introduce rather than resolve qualitative debate. Any survey exhibition invites questions as to why one artist and not another was included, why this work and not that work; ours would be no exception. But we were proven correct in our assumption that if we trusted our aesthetic inclinations, we could shape an exhibition that would establish Hispanic art as a phenomenon specific not only to a culture but to a historical moment, and as an artistic movement of a high order of achievement. Indeed, insofar as there was criticism of our exhibition, it almost categorically was on other than aesthetic grounds. Even the most severe critics agreed on the high caliber of Hispanic art, as demonstrated by the works selected for the exhibition. None argued about its timeliness.
While popular and critical reaction to the exhibition was generally positive, often jubilantly so, a number of writers dissented. To some degree, the criticism tended to be an extension of long-established debates about the position of Hispanic culture relative to the American mainstream. Moreover, it expressed the preexisting wide range of opinion and attitude among the various groups of Hispanics. Peter Applebome summarized the debate this way for the New York Times:
[Much] of the reaction to the show has reflected the differences in Hispanic culture at least as much as the common elements. Within the Hispanic world, it has been criticized in Los Angeles for leaving out the angry, political Chicano art, and in New York for not including enough art by Puerto Ricans. It has been accused of favoring stereotyped folkloric art and, conversely, of offering too much of an academic, art-for-art’s sake response to a visceral, ethnically rooted art form.1
As Applebome went on to observe, some of the bitterest criticism attending the exhibition’s debut in the spring of 1987 related to a perceived lack of political content. We acknowledge that the overt politics of revolution or dissent did not play the strong role in this exhibition that they sometimes have historically in Hispanic art. Likewise, we recognize that public murals and some temporary installation art with an almost exclusively political focus are still being made in the United States and Latin America alike; some of these works are of great quality and interest. But murals are not transportable and installations are generally so site-specific or ephemeral as to preclude their inclusion in a three-year traveling exhibition.
In the main, however, we would argue strongly with the imputed lack of political content in our show. As discussed above, the exhibition was saturated with images of social alienation, dispossession, and even confrontation, though they were usually more subtle, and certainly more complex, than the slogans one encounters on the street. Moreover, given the general nature of institutions, the fact of the exhibition itself—and therefore its content—cannot fail to make a political and sociological point, no matter how pure the aesthetic intent. Indeed, it seemed to us a greater risk that the exhibition would be dismissed as purely political, and therefore become artistically invisible, than that it should distort the true character of Hispanic art by stressing artistic values over political ones.
A related criticism holds that the exhibition tore Hispanic art from its community roots and thus transmuted or somehow distorted its character. This view was advanced by, among others, Jane Addams Allen in the Washington Times, who spoke with Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Criticism, she wrote, centers on the elimination of what many call the core of Hispanic art in the United States, its communal base and content.
“European art is usually art based on technical matters, while Latin American art is based on social content,” says Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Stanford University Professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese Literature. “Hispanic art is an art which has an outward thrust to the social arena, a linkage of the imagination with society, and that linkage is what is fundamental about Hispanic art,” continues Mr. Ybarra-Frausto. . . . “I think the show is a magnificent introduction to Hispanic art in the United States. But it does not present the basis for the expression which is community-based and politically grounded.”2
In various guises, this debate has swirled around Hispanic art for a number of years now, especially as the art has begun to be acknowledged by mainstream institutions. In the review of an exhibition of mural paintings on canvas by Chicano artists held at Los Angeles’s Craft and Folk Art Museum in the early 1980s, for example, art historian and critic Shifra M. Goldman [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.5] charged that the exhibition “placed a framework around East Los Angeles muralism which decontextualizes it and violates its function.” For Goldman, the issue for Chicano artists was whether they should remain true to “the same matrix of social change and community service that brought their movement into existence” or join the mainstream, “perhaps shedding in the process their cultural identity and political militancy.”3
One of the artists in the exhibition, Judithe Hernández de Neikrug, took exception to the idea that growing stature in the mainstream would compromise her self-identification or commitment as a Chicano. She asked, “Are Chicano artists so shallow and corruptible that at their first chance at mainstream success they’ll forget who they are?” Answering her own question, she wrote that although their work would no doubt change, “Chicano art and Chicano artists, I am sure, will always pay homage to the traditions of the Mexicano Chicano culture.”4
In statements such as this we came to understand that many Hispanic artists themselves do not see their inclusion in a mainstream artistic context as an abandonment of their community roots. Our exhibition, like that at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, both expressed and intensified this recognition and inclusion of “ethnic” art as part of the mainstream culture. No museum exhibition, even if it wanted to, could present work in the same way it is seen in its original context. . . .
It is perhaps inevitable in any survey exhibition, especially one that attempts to examine as large a phenomenon as Hispanic art in the United States, that one will be faulted for failing to present the subject in all its complexity. The most explicit charge of this nature against our show came from Shifra M. Goldman in an article entitled “Homogenizing Hispanic Art.” . . . The principal rationale for charging us with homogenization, however, seems to relate to our use of the designation Hispanic. In an introductory note to her essay, Goldman wrote that the term came into use in the late 1970s “for government and marketing purposes to ‘package’ a heterogeneous population.”5
By implication, therefore, our use of the term Hispanic is inherently homogenizing. By using it we do concur that it is “convenient, comprehensive, and universally acceptable.” However, we state again, as we have on other occasions that we did not particularly like the term ourselves, and wrestled endlessly with alternatives. No other term seemed any better. To use Latin American seemed to suggest that the artists were not North American; in fact, nearly two-thirds of them were born in the United States. Latino seemed to exclude the Spanish Americans of the Southwest. Chicano excluded those not of Mexican origin. Compelled by necessity to include some descriptive term in the title of the exhibition, we decided “Hispanic” was the least incorrect (it is also used by organizations such as the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art in New York). Moreover, we think it reflects fairly the fact that there are legitimate shared characteristics, both in terms of subject matter and style, among artists in the North American environment who share New World Spanish—Native American roots. That is, there are ways in which “Hispanic culture,” no matter how diverse internally, is distinct from mainstream European American or African American culture, a point to which Octavio Paz [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.4] addressed himself at great length in our catalogue.
Goldman found homogenization also in a supposed emphasis on “primitivism” within the exhibition. She wrote, “The curators’ view of ethnicity is shallow and even primitivistic: it is composed of what is folkloric, naïve, popular, exotic, religious, and traditional.”6 Leaving aside the issue of whether or not generally visible elements of folkloric, religious, or traditional imagery are “shallow and primitive” expressions of culture, much in the exhibition disputed this claim. The artists in the show, after all, are individuals whose hard-won achievements are as much the product of European and Latin American modernism as of popular or traditional culture. Moreover, their own feelings for which of their works would most truly and advantageously represent them figured importantly in what was selected for this show. It is difficult to impute a tendentious motive to anyone dealing with these artists when the subjects of their efforts are not only alive and kicking, but effectively vigilant about their best political and artistic self-interests. In any case, a dose reading of Ms. Goldman’s text reveals that her primary objection to our notion of ethnicity is that we failed to equate it simply with economic and political colonization.7
. . .
Finally, whatever the precise terms of the debate about our exhibition, we recognize two things about it. First, it was motivated by a sincere interest in the way Hispanic art is perceived by the mainstream and thus by a concern for what position this distinctive culture ultimately will achieve with respect to the dominant one. Second, the debate was similar to that which surrounds any large survey exhibition of contemporary art. Thus we are certain that the debate will continue to have a productive life well beyond that of our exhibition, at least among those who are directly touched by it.
We view the most damaging criticism instead to have been of a less-accessible kind: that of indifference to or disdain for, not the work itself, but the very notion of our project. Much of the direct or implied criticism of this sort, always off the record, came from our mainstream professional colleagues. This was perhaps to be expected: the exhibition posed a challenge to customary ways of looking at art. The avant-garde is no less an academy than anything else. Our exhibition suggested that curators can and should look for demonstrations of achievement outside the establishment to which they are bound and which they help sustain. Apparently, many people still view this kind of enterprise as inherently more compromised by political or sociological concerns than other exhibitions.
The articulate criticisms from one large part of our audience those deeply invested in our subject—and the skepticism of some of our institutional colleagues suggest that there is a great deal of negativity about this kind of exhibition, perhaps so much as to extinguish the motivation for doing future exhibitions of this sort. Yet we hope others will not be deterred from projects of a similar nature. . . .
1
Peter Applebome, “The Varied Palette of Hispanic Art in America,” New York Times 21 June 1987, sec. 2.
2
Jane Addams Alien, “Hispanic Artists, Scholars Condemn Show,” Washington Times 9 October 1987, sec. E.
3
Shifra M. Goldman, “Chicano Art: Looking Backward,” Artweek 12 (20 June 1981), 3–4.
4
Judithe Hernández de Neikrug, letter in “Reader’s Forum,” Artweek 12 (1 August 1981), 16.
5
Shifra M. Goldman, “Homogenizing Hispanic Art,” New Art Examiner 15, no. 1 (September 1987), 31. [SEE DOCUMENT V.1.5]
6
lbid., 31.
7
The pertinent passage here is as follows: “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.” Ibid., 32.