PACIFIC STANDARD TIME LA/LA
COMING SEPTEMBER 15, 2017
Arts organizations across Southern California are getting set for another groundbreaking Pacific Standard Time initiative. Led by the Getty, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, which will begin September 15, 2017, and continue through January 31, 2018. Through a series of thematically linked exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will present a wide variety of important works of art, many of them new to Southern California audiences. The exhibitions will take a fresh look at major artistic movements and contemporary artistic practices.
The Getty is initiating Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA by awarding grants to arts institutions throughout Southern California. Embracing organizations of all sizes and types, Pacific Standard Time’s planning partners already include LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, MOCA, the LA Phil, and The Music Center. In exhibitions of consequence, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will go beyond the visual arts to touch on music, performance, literature, ideas, and even cuisine.
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will be a multifaceted event—artistic, cultural, scholarly, diplomatic, civic, and festive—that will transform Los Angeles and Southern California for four months, and our understanding of modern and contemporary art forever.
Three exhibitions will be presented at the Getty. They are:
- Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas
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- A New Narrative: Constructed Photography from Latin America
- Materiality and Postwar Latin American Art
May 6, 2014
Getty Foundation Announces Grants for Pacific Standard Time
The Getty Foundation announced the first round of grant recipients for Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A., which will focus on Latin American art. Forty institutions in Southern California will receive a total of $5 million to plan exhibitions based on this subject. Jori Finkel of the New York Times reports that the project has already begun to boost scholarship in a field long considered “on the cusp or up and coming.” Said Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Cisneros Foundation in New York, an institution that will send art to the Getty for conservation research and display: “This shock to the system or jump-start, this huge infusion of capital, is really interesting—everybody is watching. Nobody has spread this amount of resources across multiple institutions before.” For the first edition of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty gave $12 million in grants and while the institution anticipates a similar grant budget for its second iteration, slated for 2017, it hopes to double the $5 million in joint marketing funds raised last time from outside sources. Said James Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust: “It’s a bigger, more complex project. Instead of looking at art produced in one area over four decades, we are now looking at art produced over diverse land masses over various centuries. To make the story deep but clear is going to be challenging.”
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA Grants Awarded
http://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/pst_lala/grants_awarded.html
From Latin America to Hollywood: Latino Film Culture in Los Angeles 1967–2017
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will undertake research for a film series, symposium, and book to explore the work and shared influences of Latino and Latin American filmmakers in Los Angeles. From the 1960s to the present, multiple generations of L.A. filmmakers were inspired by early Latin American cinema, and an exchange of ideas took place among filmmakers in Latin American countries and the Latin American diaspora. Areas of inquiry will include the Chicano film movement, which responded to stereotyped portrayals in Hollywood films and the lack of Latino participation in the industry, and the recent achievements of Latino and Latin American filmmakers, whose work has seen worldwide artistic and commercial success. The Academy will conduct oral histories with notable filmmakers and ultimately present a film series pairing contemporary films with their earlier influences.
Exhibition research support: $100,000
Aesthetic Experiments and Social Agents: Renegade Art and Action in Mexico in the 1990s
The 1990s was a period of radical social change in Mexico, marked by increasing violence, the devalued peso, industrial pollution, and political corruption. Against this backdrop, artists in Mexico City and Guadalajara created alternative spaces that nurtured experimental practices and helped gain acceptance for art that was more expansive, ephemeral, and socially based. The Armory will look at several of these spaces, from Mexico City’s Ex Teresa, founded by artists in 1993, to the energetic spaces that emerged in Guadalajara, including Jalarte and Clemente Jacks. Out of the dynamic activities of these local art spaces grew strong relationships with art centers abroad, an expanded dialogue that helped launch the careers of numerous internationally prominent artists.
Exhibition research support: $140,000
La Raza
Published in Los Angeles from 1967–1977, the influential bilingual newspaper La Raza provided a voice to the Chicano rights movement and its images became icons of the era. The Autry will examine La Raza’s photojournalism, drawing on a previously inaccessible archive of nearly 20,000 negatives now housed at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. The film images range from street and documentary photography to portraiture and relate to many critical issues that persist today, including education, media representation, immigration, and civil liberties. The exhibition will explore the individual contributions of the editors, writers, and photographers in the La Raza collective. Focusing on how a distinctive “Chicano eye” contributed to the struggle for social equality, this exhibition will situate Chicano photographic practices within a larger social, aesthetic, and hemispheric context.
Exhibition research Support: $115,000
David Lamelas: A Life of Their Own
The University Art Museum (UAM) will organize the first U.S. monographic exhibition on the Argentine-born photographer, filmmaker, and conceptual artist David Lamelas. A pioneer of conceptual art in Argentina and beyond, Lamelas gained international acclaim for his work in the 1968 Venice Biennale, Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels. Starting in the 1970s, Lamelas began living in Los Angeles for extensive periods. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he produced videos for the Long Beach Museum of Art’s experimental video arts program. The UAM exhibition will feature selected objects, films, performance documentation, media installations, and ephemera from the 1960s and 1970s, and drawings of unrealized architectural “interventions”—one of which will be realized for the exhibition.
Exhibition research support: $100,000
Home
To be presented at LACMA as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, Home will feature works by approximately 30 U.S. Latino artists from the 1950s to the present. The focus will be on the largest historic groups—artists of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban origin—with Latin American diaspora artists also considered. Home seeks to investigate what the curators call the “betwixt–and–between” of these Latino artists who do not typically find a comfortable home in either American or Latin American art history. Works in a range of media will be examined for their exploration of such timely ideas as belonging, domesticity, and nationalism. The curators’ object driven approach will take into account the stylistic complexities of the artworks and the boundary crossing practices of many of the artists—a departure from previous exhibitions that tended to use individual artworks to illustrate preexisting concepts about Latino culture.
Exhibition research support: $210,000
Caribbean Visual Culture and the Chinese Diaspora
The Chinese community has been an important part of Caribbean society since the mid-19th century, when island-based enterprises, searching for cheap labor, recruited Chinese workers. This exhibition will bring together modern and contemporary work by artists of Chinese descent working in the Caribbean, or who have emigrated from the region. These artists often had a complicated relationship to their Asian roots, sometimes denying them, as in the case of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, or enfolding them in a hybrid vocabulary, as in the work of Trinidadian artist Carlisle Chang. This exhibition seeks a richer understanding of Chinese diasporic art and how it relates to the broader spectrum of Caribbean art and culture, the study of which has traditionally been more focused on the region’s African influences.
Exhibition research support: $55,000
Design on the Border: Contemporary Design in Mexico and Mexican America
For the past twenty years, designers in Mexico have worked with traditional folk communities to preserve popular art forms. While championing the iconography of popular culture, these artists also infuse the imagery with fresh attitudes, assigning new meanings to familiar cultural symbols. The design collective DFC, for example, creates product lines with traditional crafts people that feature motifs related to Day of the Dead celebrations, celebrities, and Aztec imagery. Others such as Einar and Jamex de la Torre, working between Ensenada and San Diego, question notions of taste and kitsch in installations such as the Borderlandia (2011), with it glass versions of sugar skulls and luchador libre wrestlers. Design on the Border will be the first project to fully explore the work of these designers and the burgeoning cross-border market for their borrowed imagery of stereotypes.
Exhibition research support: $70,000
As part of their collaboration with LACMA on A Universal History of Infamy—an exhibition focused on alternative artist practices in Latin America and in the U.S.—18th Street Arts Center will provide eight residencies for Latin American artists over the next two years. Having hosted more than 300 artists from 36 countries, particularly those working in non-traditional performance, social practice, and multi-media, 18th Street is an ideal partner for the project. Artists in residence will interact with local artists, schools, museums, galleries, and community-based organizations, possibly resulting in new site-specific or process-oriented works. The partnership will also help shape the flexible structure of the LACMA exhibition, with segments of the show traveling to alternative venues similar to 18th Street in size and capacity throughout the U.S. and Latin America.
Support for artists’ residencies: $60,000
The Roads that Lead to Bahia: Visual Arts and the Emergence of Brazil’s Black Rome
Salvador, the coastal capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia, emerged in the 1940s as an internationally renowned center of Afro-Brazilian culture and an important hub of African-inspired artistic practices in the Americas. The Fowler will undertake the most comprehensive presentation of African-inspired arts of Bahia, looking at a complex group of artists from various racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, along with their social circles and the arts patrons, government officials, and international development officers who fueled Salvador as a Mecca of Afro-Brazilian culture. The relationship between art and local religious and spiritual practices; prevailing notions of Africanness, regionality, and nationality; and why this art accrued such cultural significance beyond Brazil will all be examined.
Exhibition research support: $170,000
The Political Body: Radical Women in Latin American Art 1960–1985
The Hammer Museum will bring to light the conceptual and aesthetic experimentation of women artists in Latin America from 1960 to 1985, extraordinary contributions that have received little scholarly attention to date. Made during a key period in the women’s rights movement, this work often required heroic acts in the face of harsh repression under military dictatorships. The exhibition will feature work in a range of media, including photography, video, and installation by several better-known Latin American women artists, such as Lygia Clark and Ana Mendieta, alongside lesser-known artists, such as Brazilian Mara Alvares and Argentine Margarita Paksa. With approximately 80 artists from 12 countries, The Political Body will constitute the first genealogy of feminist and radical women’s art practices in Latin America and their influence internationally.
Exhibition research support: $225,000
Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin
Drawing on the Huntington’s Latin American and botanical holdings, Visual Voyages will explore indigenous and European depictions of Latin American nature over a 500-year period. From the time of Columbus through the 19th century, European and American naturalists produced images of fantastic animals, lavish flora, and landscapes of military and spiritual conquest as a means of understanding the natural world in Latin America, including Spanish California. The project will reveal how early explorers and chroniclers portrayed the region as an earthly paradise; how indigenous artists used representations of nature as a site for the study of cultural contact and transformation; and how 19th-century Latin American artists envisioned nature as integral to the creation of national identity.
Exhibition research support: $200,000
JANM will mount the first exhibition on modern and contemporary artists of Japanese or Japanese Latino ancestry in Latin America and Southern California, expanding our understanding of what constitutes Latin American art. From the large wave of Japanese immigrants to Brazil to the influx of Okinawans in Peru, Japanese Latinos have complex cultural identities. Curators will investigate how the work of artists in places such as Lima, São Paulo, Tijuana, and Los Angeles illuminates regional differences, generational approaches, and the impact of transnationalism on individual and communal identity.
Exhibition research support: $100,000
Mexico/California, 1820–1930
Mexico/California, 1820–1930 is about how Mexico became California. Following the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), lands that had for centuries belonged to New Spain, and later Mexico, were transformed into the thirty-first state in the U.S. This process was facilitated by the visual arts that forged distinct pictorial motifs and symbols to establish its new identity. This exhibition focuses on works that speak to the process of becoming California and to the dialogues and intersections between these two geographic identities. Contents range from a Mexican colonial painting transported to a California mission where it became a beloved icon, to the work of early modernists such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose Portrait of Luther Burbank depicts the California horticulturalist whose development of over 800 fruits, flowers, and other plants contributed to the state’s agricultural growth. Utimately the exhibition will demonstrate how California evolved a profile distinct from any other U.S. state, which is directly attributable to its unique amalgam of Mexican and Anglo visual traditions.
Exhibition research support: $92,000
Jose Dávila
LAND plans 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 both explore and dismantle the legacies of 20th century avant-garde art and architecture. Referencing artists and architects from Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz 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, studies, drawings, proposals, and models, as well as a new interactive public sculpture. In keeping with its mission to curate site-specific projects, LAND hopes to install the exhibition in a local modernist building, thereby referencing the architectural language so critical to Dávila’s work.
Exhibition research support: $70,000
The LA Phil will undertake research and planning for bookend contributions to Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, including an opening concert event at the Hollywood Bowl and a closing music festival at Disney Hall. Taken in combination, these events will represent the largest scale and most in-depth exploration of Latin American performing arts ever presented by the LA Phil. Under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel, the LA Phil has already taken an active role in connecting Latin American music with L.A. audiences, but now it will be able to present an even more complex picture of contemporary Latin American musical expression. Exploratory trips throughout Latin America in the coming months will enable the curatorial team to identify and cultivate relationships with leading artists and ensembles. As a result the team will work actively with the artists to create a wide range of new programming.
Programming planning support: $68,000
Juan Downey: Radiant Nature
LACE and the Pitzer College Art Galleries will mount a two–part exhibition on the early performance work of video art pioneer Juan Downey (1940–1993). Born in Chile, Downey moved to Paris in the 1960s and later to Washington, D.C. where he developed a practice combining interactive performance with sculpture and video. Works such as Video Trans Americas (1973–1976), based on his Amazonian travels, and The Thinking Eye (1976–1977), a meditation on myths, media, and mass culture, highlight the artist’s fascination with perception and identity. While previous exhibitions have focused on Downey’s video work, the current project will consider his extensive body of performance art. Along with drawings, installations, photographs, videos, and ephemera from the performances, LACE and Pitzer will restage some of Downey’s rarely seen, interactive performances, such as the four-day piece Plato Now (1973).
Exhibition research support: $120,000
For three exhibitions
50 Years of Design in Latin America, 1920–1970
LACMA will undertake the first survey of modern design in Latin America, from Art Nouveau and Pre-Columbian Revival, to mid-century modernist design and its successor styles. During the interwar era, Latin American designers adopted styles from Europe while also emphasizing regional motifs that reflected increasing nationalism. The region embraced utopian ideas of progress, from Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, to Gui Bonsiepe’s work for Salvador Allende’s Project Cybersyn in Chile, and by the 1960s was home to internationally recognized designers and several industrial art schools. 50 Years of Design in Latin America will include a range of media—furniture, ceramics, jewelry, graphic design, paintings, photography, and film—to highlight the interplay between local and international contexts. The ties between Latin American and U.S. designers will also be featured, from pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial revival styles to mid-century design.
A Universal History of Infamy
Taking its title from a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy will present interdisciplinary works at LACMA and in a variety of venues around Los Angeles by some of today’s most compelling Latin American and Latino artists. As part of the project, LACMA will partner with 18th Street Art Center to organize artist residencies from 2015 to 2017, emphasizing process, collaboration, and performance. The culminating exhibition will offer a platform for new projects alongside significant works made in the U.S. and Latin America in the last twenty years.
Playing with Fire: The Art of Carlos Almaraz
Painter Carlos Almaraz was a driving force behind the Chicano art movement in the 1970s, active in the farm workers causa and with Gilbert Luján, Frank Romero, and Roberto de la Rocha, founding the artist collective Los Four. As a politically active Chicano artist, Almaraz’s identity was complicated, and this complex notion of self played out in his work. Almaraz’s images of lush vegetation, vibrant L.A. skylines, fiery freeway crashes, and flaming suburban houses are imbued with beauty and tension. While Almaraz has been the subject of smaller exhibitions since his untimely death in 1989 at age 48, Playing with Fire will be the first large retrospective, comprising some 60 works, including the major paintings, along with pastels, prints, ephemera, and notebooks. Following its landmark exhibition of Los Four in the mid-1970s, LACMA will be a fitting venue for this important artist whose work holds value for multiple communities.
Total exhibition research support: $335,000
With leading scholars from the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Spain, Filmforum will research experimental film in Latin America, tracing the web of connections between the pioneering cinema of various countries. Starting in the 1930s with rarely–seen films such as the Brazilian surrealist masterpiece Limite, through the 1970s with collaboratively produced films such as Robarte el arte, to the current day, the series will look at the relationship of experimental film to mainstream entertainment, as well as to other avant–garde art forms. Along with its own film series and publication, Filmforum will also connect with the artists and movements explored in the various Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions, creating film programs in collaboration with the other partners.
Research support: $150,000
How to Read El Pato Pasqual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney
The MAK Center will investigate Walt Disney Studio’s work in Latin America, and its ongoing reception and reinterpretation. An early example is Disney’s 1942 The Three Caballeros, a musical film starring Donald Duck that was the product of a public–relations tour of South America by Walt Disney and his artists, musicians, and screenwriters to promote the U.S. government’s “Good Neighbor” policy. Disneyland itself was inspired in part by the Argentine theme park República de los niños, conceived by Juan and Eva Perón to teach children citizenship. The MAK Center will explore this history of Disney engagement with Latin American imagery, and the ways that Latin American artists have responded to, played with, re-appropriated, and misappropriated Disney iconography.
Exhibition research support: $140,000
Latin American Abstractions
From the 1930s through the 1970s, a wide variety of artists in Latin America experimented with diverse modes of abstraction. While geometric abstraction has been featured in U.S. and European exhibitions, other strains with which it was in dialogue are less well-known, including lyrical, informalist, gestural, and expressionist abstraction. MOCA will uncover this heterogeneity of non-representational art throughout Latin America, and the ways in which the various forms developed, interacted, and competed over a span of almost 50 years. The exhibition will include the exploration of unfamiliar terrain, such as the work of Japanese artists who came to Brazil in the 1930s, the Grupo Signo in Chile in the 1950s, and the first presentation of the informalist movement in Argentina in 1959, as well as abstract practices in Central America and the Caribbean.
Exhibition research support: $225,000
Memories of Underdevelopment
In collaboration with Mexico City’s Museo Rufino Tamayo and the Museo de Arte de Lima, MCASD will examine the ways that artists from the 1960s through the 1980s, primarily in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico, used conceptual and performance art to subvert artistic norms and redefine avant-garde practice outside the established centers of the art world. Searching for alternatives to museum-based exhibition practices, these artists sought to engage directly with local communities, often incorporating popular strategies from film, architecture, and theater, and grappling with political oppression. The exhibition will shed new light on such well-known artists as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape, as well as lesser-known artists in Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru. Along with paintings, sculptures, and videos, the exhibition will recreate a number of site-specific, ephemeral works in Southern California for the first time.
Exhibition research support: $275,000
Art in Guatemala, 1960–present
This exhibition will feature key Guatemalan artists such as Roberto Cabrera, Isabel Ruiz, and the collectives Grupo Vértebra and Imaginaria, and the unique performance and conceptual art strategies they developed under the repressive regimes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Even during the worst years of war under the presidency of General Rios Montt, these artists produced work, often 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.
Exhibition research support: $65,000
Spirituality in the Art of the Caribbean
Africans slaves arrived in the Caribbean with a rich artistic and spiritual heritage that has persisted in the art of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. MOLAA will trace the ways that African spiritual practices such as Santería, Macumba, and Voodoo were suppressed, tolerated, or embraced under different socio-political conditions. From Colonial-era Afro-Caribbeans creating equivalents between their “Orishas” (deities) and Catholic saints, to modern Haitian artists Hector Hyppolite and Robert Saint Brice incorporating elements of Voodoo, Caribbean artists have adopted traditional forms of spirituality for their own ends. Other artists such as Wifredo Lam used spiritual elements to promote a new pride in African culture, Ana Mendieta created highly ritualized self-portraits, and contemporary artists such as painter Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal, himself a “Babalao” or priest in the Ifá tradition, are also now incorporating spiritual practices.
Exhibition research support: $95,000
Displacement: Mexican Photography, 2000–2012
The most recent generation of photographic artists in Mexico came of age in an era of profound political and social change, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ceded power after seven decades. Drug wars, outward migration, and changing attitudes toward religion and traditional gender roles characterized this “post-nationalist” period. Inheriting the social reforms of the 1990s, artists such as Karina Juarez, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Luis Arturo Aguirre used a range of practices, from “straight” photography, to manipulated photographs, installations, and videos, to explore the fracturing of personal and cultural identities in the new Mexico—displacements that were both disorienting and liberating. Located in San Diego’s Balboa Park, MOPA will draw on its strong relationship with artists and organizations across the border for this project, and will also contextualize this work within broader international developments in photography.
Exhibition research support: $100,000
The Music Center will undertake a survey of performing arts organizations across Southern California to identify programs that could complement the visual arts exhibitions supported by the Getty. As a result of the survey, the Music Center intends to encourage and coordinate participation by a selection of artists, companies, and centers around dance, theater, and opera in support of LA/LA.
Programming planning support: $65,000
Kinesthesia: South American Kinetic and Light Art of the 1960s
While L.A. was becoming the epicenter for vanguard sculptural practices in light and space, a separate set of experiments was unfolding in South America and Europe. With roots in 1940s Buenos Aires, two artists groups developed approaches to kinetic sculptures that had strong links to contemporaries in Paris, where many of the artists eventually relocated. These pioneers of optic and mechanical art, the “cinetic” generation, include Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Julio Le Parc (Argentina), and Carlos Cruz-Diez (Venezuela), and they had a profound impact on the trajectory of South American art. OCMA will showcase these remarkable yet under-known sculptural experiments and explore their dynamic social and political underpinnings, particularly the relationship between artists’ use of new technologies and the region’s political struggles, such as those that followed the 1962 military takeover in Argentina.
Exhibition research support: $170,000
Talking to Action
The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design will survey the artistic, social, and anthropological actions of contemporary “Social Practice” artists in Latin America—artists who freely blur the lines between object making, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism, and performance. Creating a participatory art outside the gallery and museum system, these artists and artists’ collectives engage their respective communities in compelling ways. Argentine artist Eduardo Molinari, for example, adopts the strategy of walking—simply traveling and observing—to produce work critical of official historical narratives, while travel is also central to the SEFT (Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada) collective in Mexico, which uses a playfully futuristic vehicle to traverse land and rail, exploring disused railroads. Connections between Social Practice in Latin America and those of Los Angeles artists will also be explored though a series of artist residencies and collective research projects. Talking to Action builds upon the scholarship of Otis’ Graduate Public Practice MFA program.
Exhibition research support: $160,000
Prometheus: 1930/2017
In 1930 José Clemente Orozco completed his Prometheus fresco at Pomona College, the first mural painted in the U.S. by one of Los Tres Grandes of Mexican muralism and a work that Jackson Pollock declared the greatest contemporary painting in North America. Drawing on the Greek myth about 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. For Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Pomona College will examine the politics of Orozco’s mural through the lens of contemporary Mexican artists who are producing a variety of socially-engaged and politically activist artworks, including forms of public intervention and social practice. Possible themes may include the ways socially-engaged art has been positioned in the public arena in Mexico from the 1920s until today, to the impact of conceptual art and post-minimalist art practices of the 1990s and the emergence of trans-disciplinary actions in more recent years.
Exhibition research support: $100,000
Palabras Ajenas–León Ferrari
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 Argentine dictatorship and the Catholic Church to the U.S. military’s war in Vietnam. REDCAT will focus on Ferrari’s use of appropriated text, his “deformed writing,” restaging the performance Palabras Ajenas (1965)—the first complete presentation of this landmark piece. This literary collage is an imaginary dialogue among 160 historic figures, composed of fragments from contemporary news-wires and historical texts. The project will be accompanied with an exhibition and publication that will contextualize the performance in its time and in Ferrari’s body of work.
Exhibition research support: $110,000
Spanish Colonial Revival in the Inland Empire
Spanish by way of colonial Mexico, the Spanish Colonial Revival style in architecture and design has been part of the aesthetic fabric of Southern California’s Inland Empire for 100 years. While claiming ties between Southern California and 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, the New California elite adapted Spanish Colonial, Mission, ecclesiastical, and native elements to create romanticized perceptions of California for a burgeoning tourism industry. Landmarks such as Myron Hunt’s First Congregational Church of Riverside (1912–1914) and the historic Mission Inn Hotel are amalgamations of the historic and the imagined. Even today the region’s suburban housing and public infrastructure continue to use an eclectic mix of elements rooted in Spanish Colonial Revival design motifs. 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
Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero
This exhibition will focus on representative figures from three generations of women photographers in Mexico. From Sara Castrejón, the least known of the three artists and one of the few woman photographers who documented the Mexican revolution, to Graciela Iturbide, who often photographed the daily lives of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, to Tatiana Parcero, a contemporary photographer who splices images of her own body with cosmological maps and Pre-Columbian Aztec codices, the exhibition will trace a broader transformation in notions of Mexican identity. As part of a women’s college, the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery has built its photography collection with a special emphasis on women who have shaped the photographic field.
Exhibition research support: $100,000
Indigenismos: Amerindian Inscriptions in the Art of the Americas
Indigenismos—the concern with peoples indigenous to a region—has primarily been studied as a defining characteristic of Mexican modernism, but SDMA will investigate the multiple ways in which indigenismos was a persistent force in Latin American art. 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 and early performance and video art.
Exhibition research support: $175,000
Valeska Soares
Brazilian-born artist Valeska Soares began her career in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and even after moving to New York in the 1990s, she maintains a deep connection to her home state of Minas Gerais. Soares creates environmental installations that use the phenomenological effects of reflection, light, entropy, and scent to explore how viewers experience time. Her work is often identified with other minimal and conceptual artists, including Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, and with the sensibilities of Brazilian artists from the 1960s through the 1980s, including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel. This mid-career survey will include early works such as Vanishing Point (1999–2000), along with later installations not yet seen in the U.S., such as Narcissus (2005) from the Venice Biennale or Un-Rest (2010).
Exhibition research support: $95,000
Martín Ramírez
SMMoA will reexamine the work of one of the most accomplished outsider artists, Mexican-born immigrant Martín Ramírez, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1930s and confined to California state hospitals most of his adult life. Ramírez produced intricate drawings and collages of horses and riders, the Madonna, and trains and tunnels, whose rhythmic linear qualities and spatial tension have been compared to the techniques of Wassily Kandinsky, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt. This first presentation of Ramírez’s work in Southern California will trace the artist’s technical development, his formal connections to mainstream modern art, and the significance of his cultural identity as a Mexican-American. A reexamination of the artist’s psychiatric evaluations may even call his diagnosis into question, recontextualizing Ramírez’s work and contributing to the growing reconsideration of outsider art more broadly.
Exhibition research support: $90,000
Idols & Icons: Anita Brenner and the Visual Culture of Mexico, 1920–1960
Moving often between her native Mexico and the U.S., the Jewish Mexican-American anthropologist, translator, author, and art critic Anita Brenner (1905–1974) was close to the leading Mexican intellectuals and artists, including José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti. An influential and prolific writer on Mexican culture, Brenner is best known for her critical study of Mexican art from the Pre-Columbian to the modern era, Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (1929). The Skirball will use Brenner’s unique position as a contemporary observer and collaborator to reexamine Mexican modernism, looking not only at the most famous artists of the day, but also at lesser-known artists such as Lola Cueto and the photographer and cinematographer Agustín Jiménez. Befitting the Skirball’s mission, the exhibition will also trace the ties between Jewish intellectuals and the Mexican avant-garde.
Exhibition research support: $125,000
Classic Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1932–1960
As Los Angeles became a key destination for Mexican immigrants and native film industries developed in Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba, L.A. became the undisputed capital of Latin American cinema culture in the United States. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Downtown movie palaces like the Teatro Eléctrico, California, Million Dollar, and the Roosevelt were a prominent cultural force, presenting vaudeville, live appearances by top stars, and such classic films as La mujer del puerto (1934), Simón Bolivár (1941), and comedies with the Mexican actor Cantinflas. UCLA will conduct research for a film exhibition and related publication that will revive these classic but largely forgotten films from Latin America, painting a full portrait of Spanish-language cinema culture in L.A., from audiences to cinema owners and film critics.
Research support: $80,000
Magulandia and Aztlán
One of the founding members and the major force behind the Chicano artists collective Los Four, UCI alumnus Gilbert (Magu) Luján (1940–2011) is known for his colorful large-scale paintings and drawings, outrageous lowrider art, and Día de los Muertos altars. Irvine’s retrospective will focus on two concepts central to Magu’s work: Aztlán, the mythic northern ancestral home of the indigenous Mexican Aztecs that became a charged symbol of Chicano activism; and Magulandia, the term Luján used for the space in which he lived and produced his work, and for his work as a whole. While Aztlán and Magulandia represented physical spaces, together they also symbolized the complex cultural, geographic, and conceptual relationships that exist between Los Angeles and Mexico. Mining several local archives, curators will examine Magu’s background, professional activities, writings, and travels to paint a full picture of the artist’s practice.
Exhibition research support: $75,000
Critical Utopias: The Art of Futurismo Latino
The three gallery spaces that comprise UCR’s ARTSblock will host an exhibition on the representation of Latin American artists and Latinos/as in science fiction, and the ways that contemporary Latin American and Latino artists employ science fiction for social, cultural, and political critique. Scholars and writers have begun to investigate the genre’s affinity with histories of colonialism and its power to offer alternative perspectives on history. Drawing on the University’s strong faculty and collections in this area, the project will bring together scholars in science-fiction studies with curators and artists to examine Latin American and Latino science fiction’s capacity to imagine new realities, both utopic and dystopic. While the study of Latin American science fiction in literature and film is well underway, UCR’s focus on the visual arts promises to be groundbreaking.
Exhibition research support: $125,000
Xerox Art in Brazil and Argentina, 1970–1980
Xerox art flourished internationally in the 1970s and 1980s under the names “Copy Art” in the United States and “Electrographie” in France, and was particularly strong in Brazil and Argentina. As part of a broader interest in the dematerialization of the art object, artists in these two countries experimented with photocopiers, fax machines, and teletext as they explored the intersection between art and forms of communication. The exhibition will explore how the work of Brazilians such as Nelson Leirner, Paulo Bruscky, Regina Silveira, Carmela Gross, and Eduardo Kac, along with León Ferrari in Argentina, developed in reaction to the rise of authoritarian regimes, and as an attempt to produce a truly democratic form of art. Xerox art’s relationship to billboards, artist books, and graffiti art and to international movements such as Fluxus and Mail Art will also be considered as a smaller component of the project.
Exhibition research support: $58,000
Mundo Meza
The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries will organize a retrospective exhibition of Tijuana-born artist Edmundo “Mundo” Meza (1955–1985). Meza grew up in East L.A. as part of a generation of Chicano conceptualist artists that included Gronk and Robert Legorreta/Cyclona, with whom he staged confrontational performances in East L.A. in the 1960s and 1970s. Meza’s multidisciplinary practice encompassed performance, painting, design, fashion, and installation, and his work addressed the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s with wit and campy extravagance. Many early works also responded to his contemporaries’ use of Mesoamerican imagery, such as his queer “return to Aztlán” that co-opted this revered Chicano visual symbol. The exhibition aims to contextualize Meza within both the Chicano and Gay Liberation movements, and position sexual difference as a crucial, yet largely unwritten, facet of Chicano art history.
Exhibition research support: $95,000
For two exhibitions
L.A. Collects L.A.
Beginning in the 1920s, legendary Hollywood figures, including Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Otto Preminger, and Natalie Wood collected Latin American art, from Olmec jades to Rufino Tamayo paintings. Starting with Museum founder Vincent Price’s own collection, L.A. Collects L.A. will examine these patterns of collecting and display, as well as the reframing of Mesoamerican antiquities as art objects and the ways collecting was popularized through mass media. Period rooms in L.A. Collects L.A. will evoke this history, including possible reconstructions of Walter and Louise Arensberg’s foyer on Hillside Avenue, a corner of John Huston’s Puerto Vallarta home, and Bernard and Edith Lewin’s furniture store in Van Nuys. Historical photographs, biographical sketches, and ephemera will further illuminate the sensibilities and ideologies that shaped these collecting practices.
Laura Aguilar Retrospective
East Los Angeles College alumna Laura Aguilar will be the focus of the Museum’s second show, organized in collaboration with UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. Aguilar uses startlingly frank portraiture to document social groups typically marginalized in mainstream culture including Latina lesbians. Many of Aguilar’s photographic series are autobiographical, exploring her own bi-national, Mexican American identity, as in her famous work Three Eagles Flying (1990). The exhibition will trace the development of her work from early themes to more recent self-portraits that explore the boundaries between the body and iconic landscapes in the American Southwest.
Exhibition research support for two exhibitions: $150,000
Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas
In contrast with other parts of the world, gold and silver in the ancient Americas were first used not for weaponry, tools, or coinage, but for objects of ritual and ornament, resulting in works of extraordinary creativity. The J. Paul Getty Museum will explore the idea of luxury in the pre-Columbian Americas, particularly the associated meanings of various materials, from 1000 BC to the Europeans’ arrival in the 16th century. The exhibition will trace the development of metallurgy from the Andes to its expansion northward into Mexico, but will also include works made of shell, jade, and tapestry—materials that were considered even more valuable than rare metals. Co-organized by the Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas will highlight the most precious works of art from the Americas, and provide new ways of thinking about materials, luxury, and the region’s visual arts in a global perspective.
A New Narrative: Constructed Photography from Latin America
Although several previous exhibitions on contemporary Latin American photography have called out the interest in fabricated imagery, no exhibition has been solely devoted to this practice of arranging compositions for the camera with props, models, and other materials. The J. Paul Getty Museum will explore the production of these images for religious purposes, the souvenir trade, propaganda, memorial portraits, journalistic photo-essays, medical diagnoses, identity politics, performance art, self-portraiture, and for narrative tableaux that recreate the pictorial traditions of painting and sculpture. Possibly focusing on one country, the exhibition is expected to include post-modern photography of the past forty years, with key earlier works included for historical context.
Materiality and Postwar Latin American Art
The Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Foundation, and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros will work together to research the materials and techniques used in key works from the Colección Cisneros—a world renowned collection of modern Latin American art—to inform new art historical interpretations. The team’s work will culminate in an exhibition at the Getty Center, bringing some of the collection’s most canonical works to Los Angeles for the first time. Included will be artists such as those in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela who were experimenting in the 1940s and 1950s both formally with geometric abstraction and through their use of new industrial materials. By considering the works’ social, political, and cultural underpinnings in tandem with the results of technical studies, the project aims to make significant contributions to both the conservation field and postwar Latin American art history.
