| TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art features the work of more than 40 highly acclaimed artists working over the last two decades. They engage fully with the language of contemporary, so-called “postmodern,” art, working across media and between disciplines. Included in the exhibition are artists from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, and Cuba. Their artwork, like the term “Latin American,” is far from homogenous: it moves across and beyond borders that are geographical, social, cultural, and aesthetic. |  |
Nancy Doll, Museum Director
TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin America and Latino Art at the Weatherspoon Art Museum is on view from June 20 to September 28.
Salomón Huerta, Untitled Figure, 2000. Oil on canvas on panel. Courtesy of Weatherspoon Art Museum.TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art features the work of more than 40 highly acclaimed artists working over the last two decades. They engage fully with the language of contemporary, so-called “postmodern,” art, working across media and between disciplines. Included in the exhibition are artists from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, and Cuba. Their artwork, like the term “Latin American,” is far from homogenous: it moves across and beyond borders that are geographical, social, cultural, and aesthetic.
Curator of the exhibition, Dr. Stephanie Hanor of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, has framed the exhibition within what she calls a “post-Latin American” age—that is, an age in which artists are no longer constrained by boundaries of representation, geography, or aesthetic tradition. Rather, as they engage topics of national and cultural identity, the artists cull imagery and inspiration from such global sources as comic books, athletics, commerce, and other forms of popular culture. And, like their counterparts around the world, the artists in TRANSactions respond, too, to the legacies of Minimalism, performance art, and conceptualism.
Diversity and hybridity are the defining characteristics of the art and artists included in TRANSactions. For example, Maria Fernanda Cardozo’s installation of artificial flowers pays homage to those who have “disappeared” in her native Colombia. James Luna, who is part Mexican and part Native American, asks us to consider how his dual heritage combines in a complex but still singular identity. Perry Vasquez translates the 1960s icon, Mr. Natural, into a stereotyped Mexican figure in his multimedia work, Keep on Crossin’. As Ms. Hanor writes in an introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “Contemporary art from Latin America now forms an intrinsic part of the international art arena. While engaged in a global dialogue, these artists explore and parody cultural locations and identities even as they uphold and transgress them.”
TRANSactions is the most extensive and significant exhibition of this material ever presented in North Carolina. It is also the first to look closely at the connections between Latinos working in the United States and artists from Latin America. This nationally traveling exhibition has been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which has one of the finest collections of Latino and Latin American art in this country. The Weatherspoon Art Museum is its only venue within the mid-Atlantic states. A bilingual, fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
