Inverted Utopias” — the blockbuster exhibition that, in the summer of 2004, filled much of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston with Latin American art — startled viewers as much with its omissions as with its contents. Where were the Social Realist tableaus ofDiego Rivera, the flamboyant self-dramatizations ofFrida Kahlo, the Surrealist visions of Wifredo Lam? Instead of those landmarks, Mari Carmen Ramírez, the museum’s curator of Latin American art, beamed a spotlight on the less-familiar alleyways of the South American avant-garde, especially the artists working in Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela during the quarter-centuries on either side of the end of the Second World War. Visitors to the museum gazed on striated panels that seemed to move when a spectator moved, made by the “kinetic” artists Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Díez in Venezuela; the sinuously calligraphic drawings and vehemently left-wing sculptures of the Argentine Léon Ferrari; the mysterious steel-wire hangings, like sun-warped or moth-eaten Bauhaus grids, by Gertrude Goldschmidt, a wartime German refugee to Venezuela who was known professionally as Gego; and the many-faceted work of the Rio de Janeiro artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, close colleagues whose protominimalist and precociously interactive work in the ’60s (like his capes to be danced in and her hinged sculptures to be reconfigured at will) exert a powerful influence today. And those are the famous ones: about a third of the artists in “Inverted Utopias” were rarely, if ever, exhibited in the United States before. “We wanted to introduce these new values into North America, since they had been overlooked,” Ramírez, who is 52, said recently. “My objection to Frida Kahlo is the phenomenon of Frida Kahlo and the way it obscures Latin American art. She was a woman with an exceptional capacity to present her own suffering through an amazing and rather unique style. But she didn’t have many followers. You can’t use her as an emblem for an entire continent. It’s absurd.” Then she flashed a mischievous, gap-toothed grin. “And of course, she wasn’t such a great painter either.”
Led by curators and scholars like Ramírez, along with a few astute collectors, the field of Latin American art has been redefined and revitalized in the United States, with the results visible on museum walls and auction-house tally sheets. “There can be watershed moments, and for me, ‘Inverted Utopias’ signaled a shift in perceptions within the field,” Olga Viso, an American of Cuban descent who is director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, told me. “It aggressively attacked many stereotypes of Latin American art. It was eye-opening for those who don’t know and affirming for those of us who always believed these artists should get a voice.” Until recently, with few exceptions, the art of every Latin American country was recognized and collected mainly within that individual country. Now the achievements of Latin Americans are entering the universal history of 20th-century art.
Consider the world’s two leading museums devoted to modern and contemporary work. Next year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will hold a joint show of Ferrari and the Brazilian modernist Mira Schendel, and a midcareer retrospective of the Mexican Conceptualist Gabriel Orozco; while the Tate Modern in London (which currently features a jagged floor crack by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in the Turbine Hall) will present its own midcareer retrospective of a contemporary Latin American Conceptualist, Cildo Meireles of Brazil, that will then travel to Houston. “In this country, the history of modern art clearly needs to be rewritten,” says Luis Pérez-Oramas, curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Modern Art. And, everywhere you look, it is being rewritten. Geometric abstraction, minimalism, postminimalism, Conceptualism — art movements that Americans thought unfolded solely in North America and Europe are now recognized also to have proceeded (in some cases, preceded) in Latin America. The process of inclusion is even more striking in the field of contemporary art, where Latin American artists like Guillermo Kuitca, Jorge Macchi andVik Munizhave achieved what is retroactively desired for the modernists: acclaim unqualified by a geographical asterisk.
“THIS IS AN INTERESTINGsituation where passionate curators, passionate collectors and museums begin to understand there is a whole rich area that they have overlooked,” says Robert Storr, dean of theYaleSchool of Art and curator of last year’sVenice Biennale. “Mari Carmen is part of a larger field, but in this country she is pre-eminent. And in terms of museums that are active, Houston is absolutely out front.” There are many reasons that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, became a center for elevating the profile of Latin American art. The most obvious is geographical. “We have a huge Latino community here, and Mexico is just across the border — there are about 50 flights a day, more than to Los Angeles or Miami,” says Richard W. Wortham III, a museum life-trustee. (The Wortham Foundation endowed the Latin American curatorship.) As part of the identity politics and cultural-identity movements that have been gathering force in this country since the ’70s, other cities with large Latino populations have also expressed this rationale for amassing significant Latin American art collections, especially the Los Angeles County Museum, the conjoined Miami Art Museum and Miami Art Central and the private Diane and Bruce Halle Collection in Phoenix. Yet the connection between the Latino community and Latin American art may be more of a notion than a fact. “The Latino agenda and the Latin American agenda are different things,” saysMoMA’s Pérez-Oramas. “The Latino agenda is a specifically American issue that has to be understood within the question of diversity in this country.” It is a point that Peter Marzio, the director of the Houston museum, readily concedes. “Our geographical situation has something to do with our getting involved, but that’s oversold,” he told me. “Mostly it’s her. I could have been in Minnesota and I would have wanted her to come.”
Although the spiky-haired Ramírez and the debonair Marzio make vividly different first impressions, they share an important trait. Both are struggling to win respect — Marzio for his institution and Ramírez for her Latin American heritage and artists. Marzio is a nationally renowned museum director at the helm of a museum that is better known for its former directors (Philippe de Montebelloof the Metropolitan Museum is one) than for its collection. “When I put on my selfish hat, I thought, This could give this institution a special role,” he told me. The only large U.S. museum with a long tradition of acquiring Latin American art is the Museum of Modern Art, which began buying it in the 1930s under its founding director, Alfred Barr, and today has the most extensive collection of it in the world. “The Museum of Modern Art, if Alfred Barr had stayed in charge of it, would have just conquered the field,” Marzio said. But Barr’s successors, especially William Rubin, considered the art of Latin America a sideshow to the linear progression of modernism, which admitted virtually no applicants from south of the Rio Grande.