Radical Latin American women artists. Latinos and science fiction. A survey of contemporary artists that covers a territory from Tierra del Fuego to the Mexican border. The fall of 2017 will see the launch of 46 exhibitions and events around Southern California devoted to artists and designers of Latin American descent. The initiative, funded in part by $5 million in research grants from the Getty Foundation, is a follow-up to that organization’s successful “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980” series of exhibitions from 2011–12, which focused on documenting and exhibiting the art of Southern California. The new wave of shows—collectively titled “Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A. (Los Angeles/Latin America)”—will draw an unprecedented level of attention to art from a region that has been spottily covered in the United States.
James Cuno, president and CEO of the Getty Trust, says the Getty turned its focus to Latin America instead of Asia or elsewhere for a couple of reasons. “One, there is the historic connection Los Angeles has to Latin America,” he explains. “The other is the demographics of this soon-to-be Hispanic city.” According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2012, Latinos make up more than 48 percent of Los Angeles County’s total population. At the national level, Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the country, comprising almost 17 percent of the total population.
The Getty-funded shows join a spate of exhibitions in various stages of execution that also deal with U.S. Latino or Latin American themes. Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) unveiled “Under the Mexican Sky,” the beguiling retrospective of influential Mexican cinematographerGabriel Figueroa. Currently, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has the first comprehensive North American exhibition devoted to the work of Brazilian painter and installation artist Lygia Clark, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts is showing “Beyond the Supersquare,” a broad survey that examines the ways in which Latin American artists have dealt with the influences of Modernist design. In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts provides an overview in the ways that Latin American artists have been in dialogue with their contemporaries around the world. Other exhibitions are also in the works: This week, the International Center of Photography opens an exhibition on six decades of Latin American photographic movements. In June, the Guggenheim Museum debuts “Under the Same Sun,” a survey of more than three dozen Latin American contemporary artists from 16 different countries; and next spring MoMA will unveil a major show devoted to the development of architecture in Latin America from 1955 to 1980.
Barry Bergdoll, who is curating MoMA’s architecture survey, believes it’s a show that is long overdue. “We’re incredibly ignorant of it, yet it’s an incredibly rich period,” he says. “There are names that should be up there with Mies van der Rohe.” More significantly, Bergdoll aims to demonstrate the ways in which Latin American architects were innovative and influential. “We have this notion in the north that ideas are generated here and that they then trickle down. That is simply not true.” As an example, Bergdoll points to Argentine architect Clorindo Testa’s radical, mechanical-looking exterior design for the Banco de Londres y América del Sur in Buenos Aires. “People look at it and might say that you can see the influences of the Centre Pompidou in Paris,” he explains. “Well, they’re wrong. Testa came first.” (Banco de Londres was built in 1960; the Centre Pompidou didn’t arrive until the 1970s.)