Past Exhibitions
Defining Moments:
The Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography
A strong photographic tradition emerged in Latin America in the 20th century that explores themes of social and political unrest, the documenting of landscape, culture and indigenous people, and the exploration of modernism, personal history and identity. The 38 selections from the Zuber Collection in this exhibition organized by Phoenix Art Museum feature fine examples from Brazil, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela created over eight decades by three generations of such preeminent artists as Hugo Brehme, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti, Graciela Iturbide, Luis González Palma, Marta María Pérez Bravo, and others.
Key works from the Mexican photographic tradition form the core of the Zuber Collection. The earliest images in the exhibition are by German photographer Hugo Brehme, who spent most of his career in Mexico. His traditional romantic and lyrical approach to photography was challenged in the late 1920s by members of the photographic avant-garde. The work of Mexicans Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo, Americans Paul Strand and Helen Levitt, and Italy's Tina Modotti contributed to the vigorous exchange of ideas concerning the role of photography in relation to post-revolutionary art and politics in Mexico.
In the early part of the century, for example, Lola Alvarez Bravo and her husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo became active in Mexico City's lively art scene. They counted among their friends the muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, as well as Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and others. Lola, a respected photojournalist, took many portraits of her friends in the 1940s and 50s, creating a historical record of Mexico's cultural icons of the post-revolutionary period. One such portrait in the exhibition captures Frida Kahlo's charismatic presence and provides a glimpse of the artist in a moment of quiet self-reflection.
The extensive photo-documentation of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) was an effective tool used to shape opinion within and beyond Mexico's borders and became a model for photographers of the Cuban Revolution nearly 50 years later. Brehme's famous photograph of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata and Raúl Corrales' images of Cuban soldiers are fine examples.
Contemporary artists included in Defining Moments combine conceptual strategies of representation with a desire to confront history, including that of suffering and loss experienced in the oppressive regimes in Guatemala, Peru and Cuba during the 1980s and 1990s. The works of Luis González Palma and Milagros de la Torre honor the lives of victims of political violence by making symbolic references to their tragic disappearance and death. Marta María Pérez Bravo's nude self-portraits transcend the personal to explore contemporary Cuban problems as well as universal experiences of women. Other artists, such as Tatiana Parcero and Alexander Apóstol, steer away from political content in favor of inventive portraiture far removed from the constraints of reality. Works by Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño and Mariana Yampolsky document and celebrate traditional rural lifestyle and culture in Mexico. The photographs by Mario Cravo Neto of Brazil, Juan Carlos Alom of Cuba, and Javier Silva Meinel of Peru evoke spiritual realms.
This exhibition is organized by Phoenix Art Museum.