MoMA Presents a Major Exhibition of Contemporary Latin American Art Centered Around Works Gifted to the Museum by The Colección Patricia Phelps De Cisneros

Cildo Meireles. Fio (Thread), 1990-95. 48 bales of hay, 1 18-carat gold needle, 100 meters of gold thread. Dimensions variable, approximately 7′ 1″ x 6′ 1 1/16″ x 72″ (215.9 x 185.5 x 182.9 cm). Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. © Cildo Meireles

The Exhibition Also Features New Acquisitions, Loans, and Commissions That Address the Themes of History, Heritage, and Remembrance

Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond
April 30—September 9, 2023
Floor 3, The Robert B. Menschel Galleries

The Museum of Modern Art presents Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, a major exhibition that gathers approximately 65 works by Latin American artists who, over the last four decades, have looked at history as the source material for new work. On view from April 30 through September 9, 2023, this exhibition focuses on late-20th and early- 21st century artworks from the transformative gifts made by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros to the Museum over the last 25 years. Videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are presented in dialogue with MoMA’s extensive Latin American collection, recent acquisitions, a new commission, and select loans. Chosen Memories features works by 39 artists from different generations working across Latin America, including 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), and José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia), among others. Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond is organized by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America; with Julia Detchon, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.

“The artworks in this exhibition demonstrate that some of the most relevant art of the present is conceived through investigating and retelling history in new ways,” says curator Inés Katzenstein. “This exhibition will introduce visitors to key Latin American artists working in recent decades who have engaged with the past as a means to repair histories of dispossession, reconnect with undervalued cultural legacies, and strengthen threads of kinship and belonging.”

Chosen Memories begins with a sound piece that imagines the calls of extinct birds by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Rosângela Rennó’s Wedding Landscape (1996), which addresses the mnemonic and material challenges of collective memory. Together these works introduce visitors to the exhibition’s three main sections: Returns, Reverberations, and Kinships.

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), both based on images produced by European explorers in the region. A grouping of works in this section, including Regina José Galindo’s Looting (2010), show how colonial views of the landscape and its natural resources continue to shape economies of the present.

The next section, Reverberations, brings together works by artists who revisit undervalued or forgotten cultural heritages. This section 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. Reverberations also includes drawings by artist Sheroanawë Hakihiiwë depicting traditional symbols used by his Yanomami community, alongside a selection of photographs by his longtime friend Laura Anderson Barbata, documenting her experiences in the Amazon region.

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.

Since its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art has collected, exhibited, and studied the art of Latin America. Today, MoMA’s collection includes more than 5,000 works of modern and contemporary art by artists from Latin America, as well as artists of Latin American heritage, distributed across its six curatorial departments. Over the last 25 years, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has donated more than 250 works by Latin American artists to The Museum of Modern Art. In addition to those generous donations, in 2016 the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros established the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA. The Institute’s programming includes fellowships for scholars, curators, and artists, and long-term research initiatives that aim to expand the knowledge and perspectives on Latin American modern and contemporary art.

PUBLICATION:
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. An essay by curator Inés Katzenstein examines how artists working in video, photography, painting, and sculpture over the past four decades have investigated and reimagined the region’s legacies, including long histories of colonialism, undervalued cultural and visual heritages, and inherited and elective kinships. 128 pages, 105 color illustrations. Hardcover, $45. ISBN: 978-1-63345-138-4. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and available at MoMA stores and online at store.moma.org. Distributed to the trade through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada, and through Thames & Hudson in the rest of the world.

AUDIO TOUR:
Guided by several artists with works on view in Chosen Memories, the exhibition playlist offers perspectives on the ideas and processes behind works in the exhibition. The playlist feature excerpts of exclusive interviews with Leandro Katz, Elena Damiani, Regina José Galindo, Laura Anderson Barbata, Armando Andrade Tudela, Francisco “Pancho” Casas Silva, and Paulo Nazareth. Available in both Spanish and English, MoMA Audio is free of charge at moma.org/audio/.

RELATED PROGRAMMING:

Leandro Katz on The Catherwood Project Wednesday, May 17, 6:00 p.m.
Mezzanine, Theater 3

In this talk, Argentine artist Leonardo Katz will discuss his series The Catherwood Project, currently on view in the exhibition, as well as other works stemming from his travels in the Yucatán. He will be joined in conversation by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America.

Artist Talk with Laura Anderson Barbata

Tuesday, May 23, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Floor 3

Mexico-born, New York–based artist Laura Anderson Barbata will discuss her
series Intercambios, Amazonas Venezuela 1996–1998, currently on view in the exhibition. In 1992, Barbata traveled to the Upper Orinoco region of the Amazon, where she met the Yanomami artist Sheroanawë Hakihiiwë. Together, they established the Yanomami Owë Mamotima project (Rainforest Paper Project). Barbata’s photographs, documenting her earliest visits to the region, are shown in the exhibition alongside drawings by Hakihiiwë, as well as the book Shapono, which they published together in 1996. Barbata will be joined in conversation by Julia Detchon, curatorial assistant in Latin American Art. Barbata’s presentation will be followed by an audience Q&A.

Art and Practice with Rosângela Rennó

Tuesday, June 20, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Floor 2, Creativity Lab

Art and Practice is a series of programs that bring together emerging and experienced artists to explore the challenges and possibilities of sustaining a creative life. For this session, join artist Rosângela Rennó in a workshop on photography, archives, and reconstructing new narratives through visual culture.

Anti-paisajes

Tuesday, July 18, 12:00 p.m. Online

In this online seminar, three scholar/curators will analyze the complexity of three major works in the exhibition: Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves’s double slide
projection Secrets of the Amazon (2011), José Alejandro Restrepo’s video installation El paso del Quindío I (1992), and Elena Damiani’s sculpture Fading Field No. 1 (2012). Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Jens Andermann, and Florencia Portocarrero will analyze the aforementioned works by delving into the following questions: Is it possible to reverse the romantic and exoticizing gazes on South America through the critical use of precisely those materials that helped create these conceptions? What is the role of the artist’s corporeal experience of territories in works otherwise based on the use of existing images and narratives? And, related to this topic, what implications does exploratory travel have for present-day artists? And, finally, have these works been contributing to a kind of contemporary “anti-landscape art,” according to the definition of the artistic duo of Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves?

Writer Graciela Speranza will act as respondent.

As part of the series of online seminars devoted to the study of the Cisneros donation that the Institute has been holding since 2021, this session will attempt to throw light on essential questions for thinking about new ways of relating to history and the land.

The program will be in Spanish, with English simultaneous translation.

SPONSORSHIP:
Major funding for the exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Additional support is provided by the Annual Exhibition Fund. Leadership contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund, in support of the Museum’s collection and collection exhibitions, are generously provided by the Sandra and Tony Tamer Exhibition Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Eva and Glenn Dubin, the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Anne Dias, Kenneth C. Griffin, Alice and Tom Tisch, the Marella and Giovanni Agnelli Fund for Exhibitions, Mimi Haas, The David Rockefeller Council, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Major contributions to the Annual Exhibition Fund are provided by Emily Rauh Pulitzer, The Sundheim Family Foundation, and Karen and Gary Winnick.

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