Americas Society Heralds Fortieth Anniversary with a Retrospective Art Exhibition
By Val Castronovo
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Enter the tiny gallery rooms at the Americas Society on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City and witness a parade of works from past exhibitions, some 30 paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and avant-garde installations by artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The display is a virtual Who’s Who of artists from the Western Hemisphere, showcasing such masters as Diego Rivera, Fernando Botero, Wilfredo Lam and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and culling representative works from the Society’s 40 years of cutting-edge exhibits of pre-Columbian, colonial, modern and contemporary art. During the cold-war era, the Americas Society was instrumental in introducing Latin American art to United States audiences and continues its mission today of presenting art from abroad with the launch of this small but intriguing show.
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| “Valle de México” José Velasco. Image courtesy of the Americas Society |
As Gabriela Rangel, curator of Beyond Geography: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, explains to the UN Chronicle: “The exhibit goes beyond revisiting the last 40 years of visual arts at the Americas Society. It elaborates as well as complicates the discourse on the exhibition, collection and promotion of Latin American, Caribbean and Canadian art in the United States.”
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| “Ceux de la Porte Battante” by Wilfredo Lam. Image courtesy of the Americas Society |
David Rockefeller, the great American banker, philanthropist and art connoisseur, founded the Americas Society in 1965 to foster better understanding and dialogue about the hemisphere’s political, economic and cultural riches. In his 2002 book Memoirs, he ruminates upon the Society’s influence, noting that it played host to Fernando Botero’s first one-man show in New York and “sponsored the first New York auction of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, which inspired both Sotheby’s and Christie’s to begin their own auctions of Latin American art”. That 1979 Sotheby’s auction, at which Wilfredo Lam’s Ceux de la Porte Battante (1945) was sold, was deemed the birth of a new market. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s responded by establishing Latin American art departments.
“The exhibit illustrates how the Americas Society created the Latin American art market”, Tess O’Dwyer, Vice President for Cultural Affairs and Development, says during a recent tour. “Latin American art had not been an international commodity before.” On view in the gallery are “our greatest hits and misses”, she continues, a pointed reference to Juan Downey’s mixed-media sculpture Anaconda, Map of Chile (1975), which was withdrawn from the gallery on opening day “due to its strong political critique”. Inspired by Canto General, a poem by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda about the multinational North American Anaconda Copper Mining Company, this controversial piece boasts a live boa constrictor sitting atop a coloured map of Chile—“a hostile symbol ... referencing the economic force that contributed to the 1973 downfall of President Salvador Allende through a military coup”, the exhibit label explains.
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| “Piedad” by Melchor Pérez Holguín. Image courtesy of the Americas Society |
The outrageous and the experimental mix easily with more traditional fare in the form of a Pietà (Melchor Pérez Holguín’s Piedad, c.1720), an Incan mask (Sicán, North Coast, Peru, A.D. 850-1050), a Botero still life (Oranges, 1973) and a powerful Diego Rivera lithograph (Self-Portrait, 1930) that David Rockefeller’s mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, purchased from the artist. A co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. Rockefeller helped create the Museum’s permanent collection of Latin American art in 1935 and donated Rivera’s portrait five years later. It was “one of the first Latin American pieces in MoMA’s collection”, curator Rangel recalls. Mrs. Rockefeller’s pioneering efforts paved the way for the collecting habits of her sons, David and Nelson, both notable aficionados of Latin American art.
Beyond Geography, with its focus on the theme of identity and rich display of the neo-avant-garde, is a tribute to the Society’s visionary arts programme and a prelude to a host of events in the fall of 2005 celebrating its fortieth anniversary as a showcase for “the latest and greatest artistic achievements of the Western Hemisphere”, organizers boast. Those achievements extend well beyond the fine arts to music, film and literature. A fascinating photo retrospective of writers who have appeared at the Society, who have been published in its literary journal, Review, and whose works have been translated into English is currently on view on the second floor of the Society’s palatial 1910 neo-federal-style building. Concerts and literary readings by the likes of Paquito D’Rivera, Sérgio and Odair Assad, and Luisa Valenzuela will fill the halls of this grand site in the coming weeks, reminding visitors of the remarkable cultural wealth and diversity of this vast region.
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Val Castronovo, a former Senior Reporter at Time Magazine, where she worked for 21 years, is a freelance journalist specializing in art exhibitions coverage and arts-related stories. Her articles have appeared in the United Nations Secretariat News and www.seniorwomen.com. |
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