| El Museo del Barrio, New York’s premier Latino and Latin American cultural institution is pleased to present its groundbreaking exhibition, Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000. "Arte no es vida" surveys, for the first time ever, the vast array of performative actions created over the last half century by Latino artists in the United States and by artists working in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central, and South America. |  |
Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs
Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 was on view at El Museo del Barrio in New York in May.
El Museo del Barrio, New York’s premier Latino and Latin American cultural institution is pleased to present its groundbreaking exhibition, Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000. "Arte no es vida" surveys, for the first time ever, the vast array of performative actions created over the last half century by Latino artists in the United States and by artists working in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central, and South America.
Through a rich and lively presentation of photographs, video, texts, ephemera, props, and artworks that reference canonical works, the exhibition represents a landmark within the documentation of action art. Arte ≠ Vida expands standard descriptions of "performance art," revealing how work created by Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American artists is often not only dramatized, but also politicized. An accompanying exhibition catalogue serves as the first comprehensive resource publication to address this segment of the field of performative art. El Museo del Barrio has a great history of conceiving and presenting exhibitions that advance deeper understanding of Caribbean and Latin American art and culture. This project furthers our mission by bringing the Latin American contributions within performative art to a larger audience, and within a historical context, it is particularly resonant for us as it includes the work of El Museo’s founding director, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, a leading action artist well before the museum’s founding in 1969.
Many of the works included in Arte ≠ Vida have subtle or overt political contexts and content: military dictatorships, civil wars, disappearances, invasions, brutality, censorship, civil rights struggles, immigration issues, discrimination, and economic woes have troubled the artists’ homelands continuously over the past four decades and therefore have infiltrated their consciousness.
Over 75 artists and collectives are represented in Arte ≠ Vida. It is arranged in four major sections, in which each decade is represented by several specific themes that often cross national boundaries. 1960-1970 looks at select precursors, signaling, destructivism, and neoconcretism; 1970-1980 considers political protest, class struggle, happenings, land/body relationships and border crossing; 1980-1990 focuses upon anti-dictatorship protest and dreamscapes; and 1990-2000 references the Quincentenary, multiculturalism, postmodernism, and endurance. An additional section highlights interventions that artists have carried out on television over the past 20 years. In these chronological, thematic groupings, viewers will be able to explore the interconnections among various artists’ actions as well as the surges of activities triggered by specific events in certain countries.
The exhibition title Arte ≠ Vida challenges the commonplace idea that art is equivalent to life, and life is art. While art sharpens and provokes our critical senses, and affirms and celebrates life with a regenerative force, artistic actions that address inequalities and conflict are still not equivalent to real life endured under actual repression.
