The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) latest major exhibition features around 65 works by Latin American artists. Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond focuses on late-20th and early 21st century artworks and will be on display from April 30 to September 9, 2023.
Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond
39 artists from different generations working across Latin America will be represented at the Chosen Memories exhibition at MoMA.
Artists who have their works displayed include Alejandro Cesarco (Uruguay), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Mario García Torres (Mexico), Leandro Katz (Argentina), Suwon Lee (Venezuela), Gilda Mantilla (Peru) and Raimond Chaves (Colombia), Cildo Meireles (Brazil), Rosângela Rennó (Brazil), Mauro Restiffe (Brazil), José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia), and others.
Videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are presented in dialogue with MoMA’s extensive Latin American collection, recent acquisitions, a new commission, and select loans.
What to Expect at the Chosen Memories MoMA Exhibition
The Chosen Memories is divided into three sections: Returns, Reverberations and Kinships.
Visitors are welcomed into the exhibition with a sound piece based on the the imagined-calls of extinct birds. Wedding Landscape (1996) address the mnemonic and material challenges of collective memory, a prelude to the rest of the exhibition.
Returns
In Returns, artists reexamine and reframe visuals of the Latin American landscape, as seen in works such as José Alejandro Restrepo’s Paso del Quindío I (1992) and Leandro Katz’s photographic series The Catherwood Project (1985–95).
Another collection of artworks in Returns includes Regina José Galindo’s Looting (2010). These depict how colonial views of the Latin American landscape and its natural resources continue to shape economies, even to the present day.
Reverberations
The next section, Reverberations, brings together works by artists who revisit undervalued or forgotten cultural heritages.
This section of Chosen Memories at MoMA features a recent video by Las Nietas de Nonó titled FOODTOPIA: Después de todo territorio (2020), as well as Je ne sais si c’en est la cause (2009–02), Mario García Torres’s investigation of lost chapters of art history among the ruins of a Caribbean resort.
Exhibition-goers will also be able to admire drawings by artist Sheroanawë Hakihiiwë depicting traditional symbols used by his Yanomami community.
These drawings are presented alongside a selection of photographs by his longtime friend Laura Anderson Barbata that document her experiences in the Amazon region.
Kinships
Focusing on inherited and chosen family histories, the final section, Kinships, includes works that examine processes of mourning and memorialization.
This section features two video works: Alejandro Cesarco’s video portrait Present Memory (2009), which captures an intimate view of the artist’s father during his final days; and Paulo Nazareth’s Antropologia do negro II (2014), which performs a ritual to exorcise the violence of slavery in Brazil.
The exhibition closes with En Passant, a newly commissioned mural by Iran do Espírito Santo that uses a degradé of vertical stripes in shades of gray as a metaphor for the effects of time and the fading of memories.
Diving Deeper into Chosen Memories
Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that brings together a diverse array of artworks whose mobilization of Latin America’s varied histories animates both their politics and their poetics.
Exhibition Details
April 30 to September 9, 2023 Floor 3, The Robert B. Menschel Galleries, The Museum of Modern Art
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