Participant exhibition descriptions

LACMA

Playing with Fire: The Art of Carlos Almaraz

Playing with Fire: The Art of Carlos Almaraz is the first major retrospective of one of the most influential Los Angeles artists of the 1970s and 1980s. Arguably the first of the many Chicano artists whose artistic, cultural, and political motivations catalyzed the Chicano Art movement in the 1970s, Almaraz began his career with political works for the farm workers’ Causa and co-founded the important artist collective Los Four. Although he saw himself as a cultural activist, Almaraz straddled multiple—and often contradictory—identities that drew from divergent cultures and mores, and his art became less political in focus and more personal, psychological, dreamlike, even mythic and mystical as he evolved artistically. The first to focus predominantly on Almaraz’s large-scale paintings, the exhibition features more than 60 works and includes pastels, ephemera, and notebooks, mostly from 1967 through 1989, the year of the artist’s untimely death at age 48.

Caption: Carlos Almaraz, Crash in Phthalo Green (detail), 1984, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of the 1992 Collectors Committee © The Carlos Almaraz Estate.

LACMA

A Universal History of Infamy

Referencing the title of a genre-bending collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy uses multiple venues across Los Angeles, including the LACMA campus, to present new works by more than 15 boundary-defying artists and collectives. Developed for the most part through residencies, the works represent artists who live and practice in several countries; adopt methods from disciplines such as anthropology, theater, and linguistics; mingle research with visual art; and work across a range of media, from installation and sculpture to performance and video. A Universal History of Infamy embraces the collaborative spirit of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, bringing together one of the largest partners, LACMA, with one of the smallest, the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, which organized the residencies.

Caption: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala, 2010–13. Single channel video installation. © Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa.

Total exhibition research support: $335,000 (2013 and 2014); exhibition and publication support: $490,000 (2016)

LACMA

Home—So Different, So Appealing

Home—So Different, So Appealing, organized by the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, features U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the late 1950s to the present who have used the idea of "home" as a powerful lens through which to view the profound socioeconomic and political transformations in the hemisphere. Spanning seven decades and covering art styles from Pop Art and Conceptualism to “anarchitecture” and “autoconstrucción,” the artists featured in this show explore one of the most basic social concepts by which individuals, families, nations, and regions understand themselves in relation to others. In the process, their work also offers an alternative narrative of postwar and contemporary art. The show will include works by internationally known figures such as Daniel Joseph Martinez, Gordon Matta-Clark, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Guillermo Kuitca, and Doris Salcedo, as well as younger emerging artists such as Carmen Argote and Camilo Ontiveros. Including a wide range of media that often incorporate material from actual homes, the exhibition also features several large-scale installations and an outdoor sculpture. This project is done in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the exhibit will be on view November 2017-January 2018.

Exhibition research support: $210,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $325,000 (2015)

Carmen Argote, 720 Sq. Ft. Household Mutations, Part B, 2010, Carpet, paint, and Velcro (carpet from the artist's childhood home). Installation view at g727. Photo credit: Carmen Argote.

Laguna Art Museum

Mexico/LA: History into Art, 1820–1930

Mexico/LA: History into Art, 1820–1930 explores how Mexico became California. Following the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), lands that had belonged for centuries to New Spain, and later Mexico, were transformed into the 31st state of the U.S. The visual arts played a strong role in this transformation, creating distinct pictorial motifs and symbols that helped define the new California while establishing dialogues and intersections with the land’s previous identity as Mexico. Juxtaposing paintings with popular posters, prints, and some of the earliest movies made in Los Angeles, the exhibition reveals how this image of California spread worldwide. Objects range from picturesque landscapes of Alta California and still life paintings featuring fruits, flowers, and other plants that celebrated the state's agricultural growth, to works by early modernists such as the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Mexico/LA: History into Art, 1820–1930 demonstrates how a unique amalgam of Mexican and Anglo visual traditions created a profile for California distinct from any other U.S. state.

Exhibition research support: $92,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $230,000 (2015)

Caption: Ferdinand Deppe, San Gabriel Mission, Oil on canvas, c. 1832, 27 x 37 inches, Laguna Art Museum Collection, gift of Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, 1994.083.

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division)

Jose Dávila

LAND is organizing a mid-career survey of Guadalajara-based artist Jose Dávila (b. 1974). Trained as an architect, Dávila creates sculptural installations and photographic works that use reproduction, homage, and imitation to explore and dismantle the legacies of 20th century avant-garde art and architecture. Referencing artists and architects from Luis Barragán to Donald Judd, Dávila explores how the modernist movement has been translated, appropriated, and reinvented in Mexican art. The exhibition will include the artist's sculptural installations, photographs, drawings, and models, as well as a new interactive public sculpture that reveals Dávila’s interest in ideas of play, urbanism, and social interaction. The sculpture will begin as a 20-square-foot grid made out of modular components, installed at West Hollywood Park, but will be dismantled and reconfigured at other sites across Los Angeles during the span of the exhibition, taking on different functional shapes.

Exhibition research support: $70,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $90,000 (2015)

Caption: Jose Dávila, Untitled, 2015, cardboard boxes and bottle caps, 168.5 x 24 x 18.9 in (428 x 61 x 48 cm. Courtesy of Jose Dávila.

Library Foundation of Los Angeles
Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview

The Library Foundation of Los Angeles (LFLA) will present Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview, an exhibition and associated public programs celebrating the Zapotec language as a key lifeline sustaining shared cultural experience in Mexico, Los Angeles, and beyond. Zapotec is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, and Los Angeles is home to the largest population of indigenous Oaxacans outside of Mexico. Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview will recognize the importance of the Oaxacan presence in Southern California and explore contemporary realities of indigenous culture. The project will include an installation in the Los Angeles Central Library’s Rotunda by Oaxacan artist collective Tlacolulokos, a short documentary by Oaxacan filmmaker Yolanda Cruz, and a series of 60 public programs across Los Angeles with visual artists, scholars, poets and writers. Programs, many of which will be multi-lingual, will be presented as part of LFLA’s acclaimed ALOUD literary and performance series and as community workshops in select locations of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Exhibition research support: $42,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $275,000 (2016)

Caption: Tlacolulokos mural, Tehuana 13/Woman from Tehuantepec 13, 2013. Fotografía/Photography: Oliver Santana. Cortesía de/Courtesy of MUAC.

Los Angeles Filmforum
Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Film in Latin America

The film series Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Film in Latin America, organized by Los Angeles Filmforum, spotlights experimental time-based media made by Latin American artists and in Latin America during the 20th century, including small-gauge films, recorded performances, ethnographic works, and rigorous formal experiments. Ism, Ism, Ism is intended to expand the understanding of Latin American experimental cinema to include key works from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, and movements including the social documentaries of El Centro Experimental de la Universidad de Chile and the punk films of Mexico’s Superocheros. Presented at theaters, partner museums, and community spaces throughout Los Angeles, the programs will offer a unique opportunity for audiences to learn about the history, aesthetics, and circulation of independent and experimental filmmaking in the Americas and to see works largely unknown in the United States.

Research support: $150,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Caption: Claudio Caldini, Argentina, Un enano en el Jardin, 1981, Super-8. © Claudio Caldini 1981.

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Learning from Latin America: Art, Architecture, and Visions of Modernism

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery will bring together the work of 30 contemporary artists from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and beyond who have responded critically to the history of modernism and, more specifically, modernist architecture in Latin America. In work produced during the last two decades, these artists explore the effects, contradictions, and contested legacies of modernism as expressed through ambitious construction of government buildings, public housing, schools, universities, and even new cities during moments of radical political and social change. The architecture and urban planning of these moments continue to serve as critical reference points for artists including Jonathas de Andrade (Brazil), Leonor Antunes (Portugal/Germany), Alexander Apostol (Venezuela/Spain), Felipe Dulzaides (Cuba) and Melanie Smith (Mexico). Together, these artists provide an anthropological exploration that connects architecture with political ideologies, social values and contemporary reality, while engendering dialogue about the role of government and public policy on the development, preservation and use of the built environment.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $220,000 (2016)

Caption: Mauro Restiffe, (b. 1970 São José do Rio Pardo, Brazil), Empossamento #9 [Inauguration #9] (2003), silver gelatin print, 110 x 166 cm, © Mauro Restiffe. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney

In 1941, Walt Disney and a group of 18 artists, musicians and screenwriters traveled to South America looking for inspiration and content for The Three Caballeros and other animated features produced as part of the U.S. government’s “Good Neighbor” policy during the Second World War. These films initiated a long and complex history in which Latin Americans frequently criticized Disney as a representative of North American imperialism. Joint exhibitions at the MAK Center and the Luckman Gallery at California State University Los Angeles will explore the history of Disney’s engagement with Latin American imagery and the ways in which Latin American artists responded to, played with, re-appropriated and misappropriated Disney’s iconography.

Exhibition research support: $140,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $250,000 (2016)

Caption: Liliana Porter, Minnie/Che, 2003. Archival Digital Print, 4’ x 3’ x 4’, 2011. Courtesy of Liliana Porter.

MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
Anna Maria Maiolino

The Museum of Contemporary Art will present the first major survey exhibition in the U.S. of Anna Maria Maiolino, one of the most influential Brazilian artists of her generation. Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and emigrated with her family to Venezuela as a teenager. In 1960 she moved to Brazil to attend the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, where she began to develop a body of work in dialogue with abstraction, minimalism, and conceptualism. Her work was profoundly influenced by the aftermath of the Second World War, the military dictatorship in Brazil, and her experience as an artist during the period when what could be called art changed dramatically. The exhibition will cover Maiolino’s entire career, from the 1960s until the present, bringing together early experimental prints, drawings, films, performances, and installations, including her recent large-scale ephemeral installations made with unfired, hand-rolled clay. Maiolino’s work is uniquely capable of tracing the course of the movements that define Brazilian art history, channeled via a personal, psychologically charged practice that charts her own introspective path as much as it opens on to large philosophical questions of repetition and difference, the transient and the permanent, and aesthetic problems such as solid and void and the intimate relationship between drawing and sculpture.

Exhibition research support: $225,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2016)

Caption: Anna Maria Maiolino, Glu, Glu, Glu, 1966. Acrylic ink on wood. 110 x 60 x 12 ½ cm. Collection Gilberto Chateaubriand, MAM Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. © Anna Maria Maiolino.

MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art)
Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago

Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago will call attention to a region of the Americas that is difficult to categorize and often overlooked: the island nations of the Caribbean. The exhibition proposes an “archipelagic model”—defining the Caribbean from the perspective of its archipelago of islands, as distinct from the continental experience—to study issues around race, history, the legacy of colonialism, and the environment. The exhibition features artists from the Hispanophone, Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch Caribbean. Relational Undercurrents will emphasize the thematic continuities of art made throughout the archipelago and its diasporas, challenging conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America. This approach draws particular attention to issues arising from the colonial legacy that are relevant to Latin America as a whole, but which emerge as central to the work of 21st-century Caribbean artists, including Janine Antoni (Bahamas), Humberto Diáz (Cuba), Jorge Pineda (Dominican Republic), and Allora & Calzadilla (Puerto Rico).

Exhibition research support: $95,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $225,000 (2016)

Caption: Tony Capellán, Mar Invadido / Invaded Sea, Found objects from the Caribbean Sea, 2015. Installation view: Poetics of Relaltion, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015. Collection of the Artist. Photo courtesy of Oriol Tarridas Photography.

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD)

Memories of Underdevelopment

In collaboration with Museo Jumex in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte de Lima, MCASD will present an exhibition examining the ways in which Latin American artists from the 1960s to the 1980s responded to the unraveling of the utopian promise of modernization after World War II, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. In the immediate postwar period, artists had eagerly embraced the “transition to modernity,” creating a new abstract geometric language meant to capture its idealistic possibilities. As modernization failed, and political oppression and brutal military dictatorships followed, avant-garde artists increasingly abandoned abstraction and sought new ways to connect with the public, engaging directly with communities and often incorporating popular strategies from film, theater, and architecture into their work. Memories of Underdevelopment will be the first significant survey exhibition of these crucial decades and will highlight the work not only of well-known artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape but also lesser-known artists from Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay.

Exhibition research support: $275,000 (2013 and 2014); Implementation and publication support: $310,000 (2016)

Caption: Eugenio Espinoza, Untitled (Circumstantial [12 coconuts]), 1971, acrylic on canvas, coconuts, and rope, 59 x 59 x 10 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Eugenio Espinoza. Photo: Sid Hoeltzell - Miami 2015.

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB)
Guatemala from 33,000 Kilometers: Contemporary Art from 1960-Present

Guatemala from 33,000 Kilometers: Contemporary Art from 1960–Present is the first survey of modern and contemporary art from Guatemala, much of which is little known outside the country. The exhibition explores a rich period of artistic production that began during the “long civil war” of the late 1950s and extends to the present day. It demonstrates the surprising extent to which artists in Guatemala participated in the broader movements and practices of Latin American art, such as geometric abstraction, performance and conceptual art, and new media. Even during the worst years of war and political repression, artists such as Grupo Vértebra members Roberto Cabrera, Marco Augusto Quiroa, and Elmar Rojas produced work, sometimes covertly, that directly engaged the country's socio-political realities. The exhibition will also include a younger generation of Guatemalan artists who came to international prominence following the 1996 peace accords, revealing an artistic history still largely unknown, and showcasing the country's vibrant contemporary art scene today. The two-part exhibition will be presented at MCASB’s galleries and at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art at Westmont College in nearby Montecito.

Exhibition research support: $65,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Caption: Alejandro Paz, Migración, 2009. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Artist’s collection.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at University of Southern California (USC) Libraries

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.

Organized by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. maps the intersections and collaborations among a network of queer Chicano artists and their artistic collaborators from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. This period was bookended on one side by the Chicano Moratorium and the gay liberation and feminist movements and on the other by the AIDS crisis. Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. marks the first historical consideration of these artists in the context of broader artistic and cultural movements: mail art, the rise of alternative print media, fashion culture, punk music, and artists’ responses to the AIDS epidemic. The exhibition will be presented at the ONE Archives’ gallery in West Hollywood and the nearby MOCA Pacific Design Center gallery.

Exhibition research support: $95,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2015)

Caption: Anthony Friedkin, Jim and Mundo, Montebello, East Los Angeles, 1972, Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches, Morris Kight Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Courtesy of Anthony Friedkin.

Otis College of Art and Design, Ben Maltz Gallery
Talking to Action

Presented at the Ben Maltz Gallery of Otis College of Art and Design, Talking to Action investigates contemporary community-based social art practices in Latin America and Los Angeles. The exhibition will feature a range of practices that blur the lines between object making, political and environmental activism, community organizing, and performance art, through the work of contemporary artists and collectives from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the U.S. The social practice artists included in Talking to Action address critical issues such as migration and memory, mapping, environmental problems and policies, gender rights and legislation, indigenous culture, and violence. The exhibition will feature a diverse array of projects, such as an exchange of correspondence between Buenos Aires-based artist Eduardo Molinari and Los Angeles artist Sandra de la Loza about social activism in their respective cities, and the work of the Mexican collective SEFT (Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada), which created a playfully futuristic vehicle to explore disused railroads. Talking to Action builds upon the scholarship of Otis's Graduate Public Practice MFA program.

Exhibition research support: $160,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2015)

Caption: Frente 3 de Fevereiro (Achiles Luciano, André Montenegro, Cássio Martins, Cibele Lucena, Daniel Lima, Daniel Oliva, Eugênio Lima, Felipe Texeira, Felipe Brait, Fernando Alabê, Fernando Coster, Fernando Sato, João Nascimento, Julio Dojcsar, Maia Gongora, Majoí Gongora, Marina Novaes, Maurinete Lima, Pedro Guimarães, Roberta Estrela D’Alva and Will Robson)

Arquitetura da Exclusão, Photo Digital, 2010.

Palm Springs Art Museum

Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969

Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969 will examine the influential and visually stunning work of South American kinetic artists. While Southern California was becoming the North American epicenter for Light and Space art in the 1960s, separate yet closely related technical experiments had been unfolding in a handful of major cities of South America, as well as in Paris, the European center for kinetic art. Kinesthesia will highlight the broad differences that emerged among the two principal South American centers of activity: Argentina, where kinetic art grew out of local debates about painting; and Venezuela, where pioneering notions of modern architecture stimulated a synthesis of art and design. Kinesthesia will tell this story through 50 works—primarily kinetic sculptures and sculptural installations—by Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Martha Boto, and others.

Exhibition research support: $170,000 (for Kinesthesia—to the Orange County Museum of Art, 2013); Implementation and publication support: $250,000 (2016)

Caption: Julio LeParc, Kinncchromatic Object, 1969/1986, metal, wood, motor, gears. Copyright by Abraham Palatnik.

Palm Springs Art Museum

Living Architecture: Lina Bo Bardi and Albert Frey

Living Architecture: Lina Bo Bardi and Albert Frey is an unprecedented exploration of two visionary architects who critically expanded the meaning and practice of modern architecture. Bo Bardi (1914–1992) emigrated from Italy to Brazil in 1946 and Frey (1903–1998) from Switzerland to the United States in 1930. Though the two did not meet, Bo Bardi translated Frey’s treatise Living Architecture for Domus, and their personal and professional odysseys are representative of the emergence of São Paulo and Southern California as architectural and cultural laboratories in the middle of the 20th century. They each created modernist houses, furniture, public buildings, and approaches to urban design that move beyond strict rationalism to embrace the social and environmental contexts specific to their adoptive homes in Brazil and Southern California. Bo Bardi and Frey shared a belief in architecture as a way to connect people, nature, building, and living. As they embraced modern technologies, they responded to the climate and terrain of the local environment and the people whose personal and social experiences were touched by those conditions.

Exhibition research support: $75,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2016)

Caption: Interior of Glass House (Casa de Vidro) by Lina Bo Bardi, with Veronika Kellndorfer, transparent silkscreen print on glass, installation view, 2014, courtesy of Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Pomona College Museum of Art

Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco

In 1930, José Clemente Orozco completed his Prometheus fresco at Pomona College, the first mural painted in the United States by one of Los Tres Grandes of Mexican muralism. Drawing on the Greek myth of the Titan Prometheus bringing fire to humanity, Orozco's mural goes beyond the story's traditional symbolism to present a complex political work that questions the very idea of enlightenment in a modern world steeped in conflict. The exhibition Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco will reexamine Orozco's mural through the lens of four contemporary women artists from Mexico—Isa Carrillo, Adela Goldbard, Rita Ponce de León, and Naomi Rincón-Gallardo—who are producing a variety of socially-engaged artworks. These four contemporary Mexican artists share Orozco’s interest in the relationships among history, storytelling, and power, but navigate their own 21st-century approach to political causes and personal mythologies. In turn, these artists activate Orozco’s mural by reinvigorating Prometheus for a diverse, contemporary audience.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2015)

Caption: José Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930. Fresco, 240 x 342 inches (610 x 869 cm), Pomona College, Claremont, CA, Photo Courtesy: Schenck & Schenck, Claremont, CA.

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)
The Words of Others (Palabras Ajenas)

REDCAT will explore the work of acclaimed Argentine artist León Ferrari, who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two. The voice of a generation, Ferrari is best known for his politically charged work that challenged authoritarianism of all types, from the Argentinian dictatorship and the Catholic Church to the U.S. war in Vietnam. REDCAT will focus on Ferrari's literary collages using appropriated texts, which represent a kind of experimental writing at the intersection of visual arts, performance, theater, literature, and activism. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be a series of restagings of Ferrari’s landmark 1966 work Palabras Ajenas (The Words of Others). Previously staged only twice, in 1968 and 1972, this literary collage is an imaginary dialogue among 160 historic figures, composed of fragments from contemporary news-wires and historical texts. For its staging of The Words of Others, REDCAT has produced a new English translation based on intensive research in Ferrari’s archives.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $140,000 (2015)

Caption: León Ferrari, Palabras Ajenas, Falbo Editor, Buenos Aires, 1967. First Edition. (Front cover), Courtesy of FALFAA. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Arte y Acervo, © Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari Arte y Acervo.

Riverside Art Museum
Spanish Colonial Revival of the Inland Empire

The Spanish Colonial Revival has been part of the aesthetic fabric of Southern California for 100 years. While claiming ties to Colonial Spain and Mexico via their cultural and design traditions, the style was based largely on myth and invention. Influenced by such diverse sources as the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and the popular Ramona novel and pageants, Californian architects and designers adapted Spanish Colonial, Mission, ecclesiastical, and native elements to create romanticized perceptions of California for a burgeoning tourism industry. The Riverside Art Museum will present the first survey of the Spanish Colonial Revival style in the architecture and the decorative arts of the Inland Empire, where this style flourished. Landmarks such as Myron Hunt's First Congregational Church of Riverside (1912–1914) and the historic Mission Inn Hotel are spectacular amalgamations of the historic and the imagined. The exhibition will use architectural and archival materials, decorative arts, paintings, and photographs to explore the style's origins and continuing popularity.

Exhibition research support: $75,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2015)

Caption: Douglas McCulloh, Santa Fe Depot, San Bernardino, 2015. Digital Photograph, Designed by W.A. Mohr, Opened 15 July, 1918, Collection of the Riverside Art Museum.

San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA)
The Making of the Modern: Indigenismos, 1800—2015

Indigenismos—the representation of indigenous people and cultures for social and political aims—has primarily been studied as a defining characteristic of Mexican modernism. SDMA will expand this definition by investigating the multiple ways in which indigenismos was a persistent force across Latin American art over more than two centuries. From the first appearances of indigenismos in 19th-century figurative painting, to early 20th-century representations of the Indian as a symbol of national identity, to the Surrealists' fascination with Indian imaginaries, artists have linked indigenismos to political and social concerns and, above all, to what it means to be Latin American. The exhibition will examine these and later avant-garde practices of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the re-appearance of indigenismos in the second half of the 20th century in such forms as land art, early performance art, and video. The varied works of art presented in The Making of the Modern— from large academic paintings and sculptures to contemporary installations—will trace indigenism as a “hidden path” of political and cultural imagination over the past two centuries and the catalyst for modern Latin American art.

Exhibition research support: $175,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $350,000 (2016)

Caption: Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946) La Madre India / Indian Mother, ca. 1936 Crayon. The San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, © The Alfredo Ramos Martinez Research Project, reproduced by permission.

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Valeska Soares

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will organize a major mid-career survey of the New York-based Brazilian artist Valeska Soares. Trained as an architect, Soares creates unique environmental installations based on sensorial effects of reflection, light, entropy, and even scent. Valeska Soares will represent a more than 25-year span in the artist’s career, combining installations, sculptures, photography, video, and performances integrating notions of memory, time, and the senses. Soares’s work expands upon the languages of post-minimalist and conceptual art. She was profoundly influenced by an earlier generation of Brazilian artists, including Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who turned their attention from the physical properties of the work of art to the perceptions and actions experienced by the viewer. This mid-career survey will include early works such as Sinners (1995), along with later works not yet presented in the U.S., such as the sound installation (Shhhh…), prelude (2009), and marble sculptures from her series Et Aprés (2011). The programming will also include Soares’s interactive public performance work Push Pull (2013).

Exhibition research support: $95,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Caption: Valeska Soares, Un-rest, 2010, 128 foot stools, 1 glass chair, 2 ft. 10 in. x 39 ft. 4 in. x 14 ft. 6 in.; Chair dimensions: 33 x 18 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA)
Martín Ramírez: His Life in Pictures, Another Interpretation

SMMoA will examine the work of acclaimed outsider artist, Mexican-born immigrant Martín Ramírez, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1930s and confined to California state hospitals most of his adult life. During the three decades he spent institutionalized, Ramírez produced a monumental body of work consisting of intricate drawings and collages whose linear rhythm and spatial tension have been compared to the techniques of Wassily Kandinsky, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt. His subject matter included horses and riders, Madonnas, saints, trains, and tunnels. This first presentation of Ramírez's work in Southern California will focus on the artist’s iconography and mark-making, his formal connections to mainstream modern art, and the significance of his cultural identity as a Mexican-American. It will also present, for the first time, a 17-foot scroll that comprises a glossary of the artist’s singular imagery and a complete visual narrative of his journey from Mexico to California in the 1920s. Recent examinations of Ramírez’s psychiatric evaluations have called his diagnosis into question, allowing an opportunity to recontextualize his life and work and navigate the unsettled territory between outsider and mainstream art.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2016)

Caption: Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Large Cowboy and Rider), c. 1950-53. Wax crayon, graphite, and artist-made black ink on pieced papers. Sheet: 42 1/2 × 35 3/4 inches (108 × 90.8 cm). 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Partial and promised gift of Jill and Sheldon. Bonovitz.

Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero

Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero brings together works by representative figures of three generations of photographers in Mexico, their careers spanning 100 years. Castrejón, the least known of the three, was one of the few female photographers who documented the Mexican Revolution. Iturbide is known best for her photographs of the daily lives of Mexico's indigenous cultures, while Parcero, a contemporary photographer, splices images of her own body with cosmological maps and pre-Columbian Aztec codices. By bringing their work into conversation, Revolution and Ritual will invite visitors to consider how photography has been transformed over the past century in Mexico and how it continues to respond to artists’ interest in representing present and past, self and other. The exhibition draws on Scripps College’s academic strength in feminist and gender studies and the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery’s expanding photography collection, with its special emphasis on women who have shaped the photographic field.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $90,000 (2015)

Caption: Tatiana Parcero, Cartografia Interior #43, 1996, Lambda print and acetate, 43 x 31 in., Scripps College, Photo credit: jdc Fine Art

Self Help Graphics & Art

Día de los Muertos, A Cultural Legacy: Past, Present, and Future

Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is an integral part of the cultural and artistic landscape of Los Angeles. Today’s interpretation of the sacred indigenous tradition has been remixed and recycled into a commercial holiday blending Mexican, Latino, and American pop culture iconography with the spiritual aesthetics of the event’s indigenous and Catholic influences. Self Help Graphics (SHG) will trace the evolution of Día de los Muertos in Los Angeles and beyond through an exhibition and publication documenting its four-decade history of art, ritual, and celebration. Since 1972, when SHG organized its first public ritual for Día de los Muertos, its annual commemoration has developed into a complex and unique public observance. Día de los Muertos, A Cultural Legacy: Past, Present, and Future will include historical prints, photographs, and ephemera representing each decade of SHG’s commemorations, as well as three newly commissioned altars from artists Ofelia Esparza (Los Angeles), Gerardo “Acamonchi” Yépiz (Tijuana), and Marco Vera (Mexicali).

Implementation and publication support: $36,000 (2016)

Caption: Alfredo de Batuc, Día de los Muertos, 1979. Copyright: Self Help Graphics & Art, Alfredo de Batuc.

Skirball Cultural Center
Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico

Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico at the Skirball Cultural Center offers a new perspective on the art and visual culture of Mexico and its relationship to the United States as seen through the life and work of the Mexican-born, Jewish-American writer Anita Brenner (1905–1974). Brenner was an integral part of the circle of Mexican modernists in the 1920s and played an important role in promoting and translating Mexican art, culture, and history for audiences in the U.S. Brenner was close to the leading intellectuals and artists active in Mexico, including José Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti. An influential and prolific writer on Mexican culture, Brenner is best known for her book Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (1929). The Skirball’s exhibition will provide an immersive experience of historic discovery and underscore Brenner’s importance as a Jewish woman in Mexico who inspired artists and was instrumental in introducing the North American public to Mexican history and culture.

Exhibition research support: $125,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $230,000 (2015)

Caption: Tina Modotti, Anita Brenner, 1926. Courtesy of The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University.

UCI, University Art Galleries

Aztlán to Magulandia: the Journey of Chicano Artist Gilbert 'Magu' Luján

UC Irvine’s University Art Galleries (UAG) will present the first survey of one of the most iconic figures of the Chicano Art Movement, Gilbert “Magu” Luján (1940–2011) and an accompanying publication. One of the founding members of the Chicano artists collective Los Four, Luján is known for his colorful and visually complex explorations of Chicano culture and community that drew upon and brought to life various historic and contemporary visual sources with startling results: Pyramid-mounted low riders driven by anthropomorphic dogs traversing a newly defined and mythologized L.A. He was part of a small group of dedicated artists and intellectuals who set about defining a Chicano identity and culture as part of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The UAG’s retrospective will focus on creativity and invention in Luján's work in a myriad of sketches and drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Luján combined two world-making concepts, Aztlán, the mythic northern ancestral home of the indigenous Mexican Aztecs that became a charged symbol of Chicano activism; and Magulandia, the term Luján coined for the space in which he lived and produced his work, and for his work as a whole. Together, Aztlán and Magulandia represented both physical spaces and the complex cultural, geographic, and conceptual relationships that exist between Los Angeles and Mexico and served as dual landscapes for Luján’s artistic philosophy and cultural creativity.

Exhibition research support: $75,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2015)

Caption: Gilbert "Magu" Luján, Mingo and Fireboy, ca 1988. Lithograph with hand-marking in prismacolor, 44 1/4 x 30 inches, © The Estate of Gilbert "Magu" Luján.

UCLA Film & Television Archive
Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960

Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960 will recreate the Spanish-language film culture of downtown Los Angeles with an extensive program of film screenings. Between 1930 and 1960, Los Angeles played host to a vibrant Latin American cinema culture centered on North Main Street’s Mexican-American neighborhoods, where nearby venues such as the Teatro Eléctrico, the California Theatre, and the Million Dollar Theater showed films originating from Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba. Los Angeles was also a center of production and distribution for Spanish language films. Not only have a number of the downtown cinemas been destroyed or fallen out of use, but virtually all of the films have also fallen out of history, often unpreserved or tragically lost. With Recuerdos de un cine en español, audiences and film historians will rediscover Los Angeles as one of the most important hubs in the Western hemisphere for the production, distribution, and exhibition of films made in Spanish for Latin American audiences.

Research support: $80,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Caption: Pictured left to right: David Silva and Xonia Benguria in CASTA DE ROBLE, 1954, Cuba, directed by Manolo Alonso; Credit: Permenencia Voluntaria.

University of California, Riverside ARTSblock

Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas

In a wide-ranging survey exhibition, UCR ARTSblock will bring together contemporary artists from across the Americas who have tapped into science fiction’s capacity to imagine new realities, both utopian and dystopian. Science fiction offers a unique artistic landscape in which to explore the colonial enterprise that shaped the Americas and to present alternative perspectives speculating on the past and the future. In the works featured in the exhibition, most created in the last two decades, artists employ the imagery of science fiction to suggest diverse modes of existence and represent “alienating” ways of being in “other” worlds. Mundos Alternos brings into dialogue the work of international artists from across Latin America with Latino artists from throughout the U.S., including local Chicano and Chicana artists. Drawing on the University’s strong faculty and collections in this area, UCR ARTSblock will offer a groundbreaking account of the intersections among science fiction, techno-culture, and the visual arts.

Exhibition research support: $125,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $225,000 (2015)

Caption: Hector Hernandez, Bulca, 2015. 20x30 inches. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of the artist and UCR ARTSblock.

University of San Diego, University Galleries
Copyart: Experimental Printmaking in Brazil, 1970-1990s

Copyart: Experimental Printmaking in Brazil, 1970–1990s will reveal the innovative uses of ordinary commercial copying practices by artists working in Brazil across two politically fraught decades. The exhibition will introduce Southern California audiences to this unfamiliar and often overlooked work, including not only the innumerable images made on standard copy paper but also works machine-printed on unconventional materials such as metal, wood, and glass. The low cost of production and unique formal qualities of photocopies, including imperfections that the machine introduced, initially attracted artists like Paulo Bruscky to the medium. Later on, artists including Hudinilson Jr. and Mário Ramiro performed actions in front of the photocopier, using it as a sort of camera. Eventually, this experimentation led to work in fax, videotext, and other forms of early new media. In essence, photocopy became a new artistic medium, offering exciting possibilities for performance, documentation, publishing, and even international exchange through mail art strategies.

Exhibition research support: $58,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $125,000 (2015)

Caption: Paulo Bruscky, Facsimil-arte, 1980, photocopy and fax, Courtesy of the artist.

Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College

Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell

The Vincent Price Art Museum will present the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laura Aguilar, shedding new light on a Los Angeles-based artist who has garnered significant critical attention for her contributions to performative, feminist, and queer art. With approximately 95 photographs, as well as examples of Aguilar’s work in video, the exhibition will span more than three decades of the artist’s career. Show and Tell will highlight themes of class, literacy, and the body in Aguilar’s work and will demonstrate how these themes challenge prevailing notions of beauty, gender or sexuality, and cultural or ethnic identities. The presentation of Aguilar’s retrospective at the Vincent Price Art Museum is particularly fitting, since she is an alumna of the East Los Angeles College, where she studied photography.

Exhibition research support: $50,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2015)

Caption: Laura Aguilar, Nature Self Portraits #12, 1992, Ink jet print, 16” x 20”, Courtesy of the Artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.