The depth of the MoMA Library's holdings on the field of Latin American art has been possible because of the Museum's longstanding commitment to Latin American art.
This page offers recommended titles, all in our holdings, to jumpstart your research into the artwork originating from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
Chosen Memories
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Chosen Memories' presents artworks that find their poetic and political vitality by mobilizing histories of Latin America. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the publication presents artworks by contemporary Latin American artists who, over the last four decades, have looked to history as the source material for new work. Videos, photographs, paintings and sculptures, many of which were donated to the museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 2018, are presented in dialogue with one another.00Organized into three thematic sections, the catalog examines how artists have investigated and reimagined histories and cultural legacies of the region, including long histories of colonialism, undervalued cultural and visual heritages, and inherited and chosen kinships. The richly illustrated catalog features over 40 artists from different generations working across Latin America.
Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction
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Presents highlights from the transformative gift of nearly 150 works of modern art from Latin America offered to The Museum of Modern Art by Patricia Phelps de CisnerosSur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction presents a richly illustrated overview of the significant cultural transformations propelled by the abstract and concrete art movements in South America between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the catalogue features works by artists working in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela - including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero and Tomás Maldonado - who advanced the achievements of geometric abstraction in the early twentieth century, and built a new modern vision of the region.The catalogue highlights a selection of works gifted to MoMA by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros between 1993 and 2016, which had a transformative impact on the Museum's holdings of Latin American art. The Cisneros collection, which includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, allows for in-depth study of art produced in the region during this period, allowing the Museum to represent a more comprehensive, plural, and robust narrative of artistic practices that demonstrate the integral role of Latin America in the establishment of modern art.
Latin American and Caribbean Art : MoMA at El Museo
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Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museo del Barrio, New York, Mar. 4-July 25, 2004.
Portadores de Sentido : arte contempráneo en la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
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The exhibition was curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy and Sara Meadows and brought together 70 contemporary artists from 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean whose works were acquired by the CPPC between 1990 and 2015. The works in the exhibition are informed by artistic research that elicits narratives, resources and associations with a number of disciplines. With those disciplines in mind, the exhibition was organized into four groupings, each one of which borrowed methodology or derived inspiration from areas of inquiry beyond aesthetics: Insertions (ethnography and its theories); Excursions (analysis of geography; Concrete Environments (implication of urbanism); and Mediations (media and mass communication)
Concrete Invention
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The profile of Latin American abstract art in North America and Europe has dramatically increased over the past decade or so, thanks in large part to the activities of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. However, this is the first publication to specifically address the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements, spanning the 1930s through to the 1970s, and focusing on centers of activity throughout Latin America, in cities such as Montevideo, Buenos Aires, S o Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Caracas. In these decades, artists such as Lygia Clark, H lio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jes s Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Judith Lauand, Geraldo de Barros, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Luiz Sacilotto, Willys de Castro and Ferreira Gullar infused European Concrete art with fresh energy and warmth, extending it into the realms of performance and interactive sculpture (as seen in the works of Clark, Pape and Oiticica). The book organizes this rich range of work into five thematic sections: "Geometry," "Illusion," "Dialogue," "Vibration" and "Universalism." Accompanying an exhibition at the Reina Sof a, Concrete Invention also includes texts by several of the artists; an essay by sound artist and scholar Steve Roden; a questionnaire on the legacy of these movements answered by Luis Camnitzer, Jes s Carillo, Sofia Hern ndez Chong Cuy and Ana Longoni; and a series of geometric-abstract gatefolds designed for the catalogue by Jos Le n Cerrillo.
Geometric Abstraction
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Widely praised for its fine collection of Latin American geometric abstract art, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection of Caracas, Venezuela, contains the compelling work of such leading artists as Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García, Brazilians Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Venezuelans Gego and Jésus Rafael Soto, and Argentinians Tomás Maldonado, Raúl Lozza, and Alfredo Hlito. This lavishly illustrated book presents sixty-five paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the Cisneros Collection that was on exhibition at the Fogg Museum from March 3 to November 4, 2001.
This bilingual (English and Spanish) volume explores the history and importance of the major movements that were dedicated to geometric abstraction. These include concretism and neoconcretism in Brazil, constructivism in Uruguay, the Madí Group and concrete artists in Argentina, and kineticism in Venezuela.
Making Art Concrete
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In the years after World War II, artists in Argentina and Brazil experimented with geo-metric abstraction and engaged in lively debates about the role of the artwork in society. Some of these artists used novel synthetic materials, creating objects that offered an alternative to established traditions in painting--proposing that these objects become part of everyday, concrete reality. Combining art historical and scientific analysis, experts from the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute are collaborating with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a world-renowned collection of Latin American art, to research the formal strategies and material decisions of these artists working in the concrete and neo-concrete vein. Making Art Concrete presents works by Lygia Clark, Willys de Castro, Judith Lauand, Raúl Lozza, Hélio Oiticica, and Rhod Rothfuss, among others, with spectacu-lar new photography. The photographs, along with information about the now-invisible processes that determine the appearance of these works, are key to interpreting the artists' technical choices as well as the objects themselves. Indeed, this volume sheds further light on the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of the artists' propositions, making a compelling addition to the field of postwar Latin American art.
Radical geometry : modern art of South America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection
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First published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Radical geometry: Modern art of South America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection', Royal Academy of Arts, London, 5 July - 28 September 2014."-- Verso, title page.
"The exhibition's title ... points to the transgressive and iconoclastic spirit that swept through the visual arts in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s."--pages 20-21.
"Biographies of the artists" by Sara Meadows on pages 160-166.
Radical geometry: an introduction / Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro -- Cities of abstract art: urban journeys through South America / María Amalia García -- Signals London, signals Latin America / Isobel Whitelegg -- Uruguay, Argentina / Adrian Locke -- Brazil / Adrian Locke -- Venezuela / Adrian Locke.
Cruce de miradas : visiones de América Latina: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
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Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museo del Placio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Aug. 2-Oct. 22, 2006.
Remix
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"Celebrating the diversity of institutions in the United States, Latin America, and Canada, Remix aims to change the discourse about museums from the inside out, proposing a new, "panarchic"--Nonhierarchical, adaptive, community-oriented--vision for museum practice and audience engagement. Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Álvarez offer an unconventional approach to museum studies, one premised on breaching conventional systems of communications and challenging the dialogues that drive the field. Featuring more than forty authors in and around the museum world, Remix frames a series of vital case studies demonstrating how specific museums, large and small, have profoundly advanced or redefined their goals in creative ways"
Constructing Latin America
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In the interwar period and immediately following World War II, the U.S. government promoted the vision of a modern, progressive, and democratic Latin America and worked to cast the region as a partner in the fight against fascism and communism. This effort was bolstered by the work and products of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Using modern architecture to imagine a Latin America under postwar U.S. leadership, MoMA presented blockbuster shows, including Brazil Builds (1943) and Latin American Architecture since 1945 (1955), that deployed racially coded aesthetics and emphasized the confluence of "Americanness" and "modernity" in a globalizing world. Delving into the heated debates of the period and presenting never-before-published internal documents and photos from the museum and the Nelson A. Rockefeller archives, Patricio del Real is the first to fully address MoMA's role in U.S. cultural imperialism and its consequences through its exhibitions on Latin American art and architecture.
The Americas Revealed
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Acquisitive passions : observations on collecting the art of the Americas in the United States / Edward J. Sullivan -- Evolving taxonomies at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and 40s and the definitions of the "Latin American collection" / Miriam Margarita Basilio -- Hot styles and Cold War : collecting practices at the Museum of Modern Art and other museums in the sixties / Delia Solomons -- The Philadelphia story / Joseph Rishel -- Cargadores : collecting Rivera, Mexican modernism, and bearing the burdens of historiography / Anna Indych-López -- An American museum : representing the arts of Mexico at the Metropolitan Museum of Art / Ronda Kasl -- Building a model of diversity : Grace McCann Morley and collecting modern Latin American art in San Francisco / Berit Potter -- Inverted strategies : an exhibition as matrix for a permanent collection / Mari Carmen Ramírez -- Beyond Mexico : the evolution of Phoenix Art Museum's Latin American collection / Vaness K. Davidson -- Robert and Richard Huber's adventures in collecting / Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt -- Expanding paradigms : the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and the changing of Latin American art / Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro -- Collecting Latin American art in the United States from New Spain to today : a life's story / Estrellita B. Brodsky.
Latinx Art
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The last two decades have seen an expanded version of the art world, both in terms of the commercial sphere of contemporary art galleries and collectors and also in terms of museum exhibitions. Art beyond that produced by European and North American artists, almost entirely male and white, is getting long overdue attention, from South Asian modernism to major African American solo retrospectives. While Latin American art has benefited from this attention, Latinx art has largely been overlooked. In LATINX ART anthropologist and critic Arlene Dávila explores why. She argues that Latinx art is neglected for reasons of race and class by Latin American art institutions, with their largely wealthy and white-identified patrons aspiring to be seen like Europeans on the world stage, rather than confused with Latinx artists whom they see as too poor or insufficiently white. In the US, reparative efforts have focused more along the perceived Black/White binary, and curators are happier engaging the formal experiments of Latin American artists rather than dealing with the political issues raised by Latinx artists in their own country. Efforts that start as centers for Latinx communities, like El Museo del Barrio in New York, have brought in elite curators from Mexico, whose ambitions are quite different from the communities that founded the centers. Dávila interviews artists, gallerists, and curators, identifying the problem and what needs to be done. The book takes the form of a long essay over five chapters and the introduction, with the ethnographic reporting integrated into the overall argument. Chapter 1 draws out the implicitly raced and classed way that Latinx art is seen, including by curators from Latin America. Even Puerto Rican artists distance themselves from Nuyorican artists, with the exception of those most identified with the island. Here and in the succeeding chapters, Dávila points out the role of the national and the national aspirational, and the way Latinx artists are marginalized both within the US and by their nation of origin or descent. Chapter 4 looks at the lack of gallery representation and undervaluing of even major Latinx artists, along with the additional challenges for artists who are both Black and Latinx. Chapter 5 looks at how galleries present the Latinx artists they do show, including the way artists such as the late Félix González-Torres have their identities whitened as they become commercially successful. In the conclusion Dávila points to the interconnection of collectors, museums, and galleries, and she calls for change. The book hits issues that will make it important to the broad contemporary art readership, as well as to scholars in Latinx studies, art history and theory, anthropology, museum studies, American studies, and critical ethnic studies
Configuring the New Lima Art Scene
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This book examines the contemporary art world in Latin America from an anthropological perspective and recognises the recent reconfiguration of Lima's art scene. Giuliana Borea traces the practices of artists, curators, collectors, art dealers and museums, identifying three key moments in this reconfiguration of contemporary art in Lima: artistic explorations and new curatorial narratives; museum reinforcement and the strengthening of Latin American art networks; and of the rise of the art market. In so doing, Borea highlights the different actors that come into play in activating and de-activating directions and imaginations. The book exposes the practices of the local, the global, indigeneity and politics in the arts, and reveals that the strengthening of the Lima art scene has fostered the expansion of dominant art views and formats mobilised by transnational elite actors. Featuring analytical chapters interspersed with personal stories, Borea's book presents an in-depth analysis of a specific art scene to open up a new way of understanding contemporary art practices in relation to globalisation, neoliberalism and the city
