May, 10, 2020
Art
PhXLatinXArt
At Phoenix Art Museum, we are committed to diversifying our exhibitions and collections to showcase a multiplicity of thought and experience and to increase the visibility of communities historically underrepresented in museum spaces.
Today, we’re spotlighting works by Latin American and Latinx artists that we’ve featured and added to our collections over the years. Plus, we provide a sneak-peek of upcoming exhibitions, including one scheduled to open in 2021. So keep scrolling to discover artworks and artists from Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Los Angeles, and even right here at home in Phoenix. And yes—we created a new playlist. And yes—it includes Selena.
In the Galleries
Past Exhibitions
Horacio Zabala: Mapping the Monochrome (2016-2017)
One of the 20th century’s most important conceptual artists to emerge in Argentina, Horacio Zabala is fascinated with architectural, cartographic, and narrative definitions of space. Horacio Zabala: Mapping the Monochrome underscored how the artist engages viewers with monochromatic and accessible works, often featuring mathematical signs or punctuation marks, that reference various socio-political concerns or art-historical traditions.
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Past/Future/Present: Contemporary Brazilian Art from the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo (2017)
Featuring 70 artworks across a wide array of media, Past/Future/Present: Contemporary Brazilian Art from the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo presented a rare panorama of the most innovative art produced in Brazil from the 1990s to the 2010s.
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Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now (2018)
Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now was a mid-career survey of works created by the Brazilian artist over two decades. A partnership between PhxArt and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as part of the Getty-led Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, the exhibition presented Soares’ minimal and multisensory artworks and installations that explore themes of memory, time, love, and desire.
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Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire (2018-2019)
With more than 200 objects, including sculptures, murals, masks, and stone carvings, Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire provided deep insight into the art, everyday life, and religion of the first, largest, and most influential metropolis on the American continent.
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Mexican Photographers, Mexican Views (2018-2019)
Drawn exclusively from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Mexican Photographers, Mexican Views featured more than 60 photographs that offer an intimate view into 20th-century Mexico and the country’s shifting national identity.
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Antonio: The Fine Art of Fashion Illustration (2019-2020)
Antonio: The Fine Art of Fashion Illustration showcased ANTONIO, the signature that represented the collaborative work of fashion visionaries Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. Both born in the early 1940s in Puerto Rico, Lopez and Ramos met as students in New York. Antonio featured the duo’s artistic, editorial, and commercial work created for Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, and more.
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Upcoming Exhibitions
Teresita Fernández: Elemental (2020-2021)
Teresita Fernández: Elemental is the first major traveling exhibition and the first mid-career survey of works by Teresita Fernández, considered one of the most innovative artists of her generation. Co-organized with Pérez Art Museum Miami, the retrospective showcases more than 50 visually stunning artworks that reinterpret the relationships between material, history, nature, and the sociopolitical references tied to place.
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Eager to catch a glimpse of Elemental? Use our exhibition and audio guides to preview select works from the exhibition.
Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context (2020-2021)
Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context features more than 40 rarely seen works by some of Latin America’s foremost contemporary artists to explore how abstract art has been used to convey key social, political, and cultural issues from the region. The groundbreaking exhibition also highlights the relationship between Latin American abstraction and contemporary art movements in the United States and Europe.
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Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia (2021)
Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia is the first mid-career survey in the United States of work by Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. Muñoz splices photographic processes with drawing, printmaking, installation, video, and sculpture, as well as interactive works, to create hybrid artworks that give visible form to the elusive phenomena of memory and time. The exhibition at PhxArt will feature 50 works, including site-specific work, spanning the late 1980s through the present day.
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Collection Highlights
Juchitecas de pie (Juchitecan Women on Foot) (1965) by Francisco Zúñiga
Francisco Zúñiga is known primarily for his naturalistic images of standing and seated women, an example of which is above. These often silent, robust figures were inspired by the women of southeastern Mexico, which Zúñiga used as his models.
The Almost Real History of Art in Phoenix (La casi verdadera historia del arte en Phoenix) (2007) by Annie Lopez
As a fourth generation Phoenician, Annie Lopez creates work inspired by her family’s history and her own experiences as a Chicana. For 17 years, she was an active member of MARS (Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado)—an artist cooperative composed mostly of Latinx members, with the goal of showcasing underrepresented Latinx artists around the Southwest. Lopez’s artwork above is a pointed and disarmingly witty institutional critique, illustrating the sometimes contradictory realities of being an artist in the Valley of the Sun.
Lengthen Floral Rectangle (Rectángulo floral alargado) (2007) by Fausto Fernandez
Mexican-American artist Fausto Fernandez was born in El Paso, Texas, and currently lives in Phoenix. A mixed-media collage artist, he is best known for his large-scale multimedia paintings and site-specific installations. The artwork above from his Linear Series explores how mechanical renderings, architectural drawings, and various instructional materials influence human behavior and environments.
Broken Up, Breakin’ Up in the 92057 (Deshecho, deshaciendo en el 92057) (2007) by Ruben Ochoa
Ruben Ochoa is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. His sculptures, installations, paintings, and photographs expose how the city’s forms and spatial boundaries, such as curbs, freeways, and fences, often speak directly to the social and economic divisions that define the urban landscape.
Blizzard (Tormenta de nieve) (2001) by Anthony Goicolea
Anthony Goicolea is a first-generation, Cuban-American artist whose work across diverse media explores themes of personal history and identity, cultural tradition and heritage, and alienation and displacement. His early works, like the one above, feature young boys on the threshold of adolescence in staged compositions. They often consist of complex composites of the artist himself.
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Did You Know?
In 1992, Phoenix Art Museum became only the second museum in the United States to establish a department of Latin American art, after the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, at Austin.
Make It! Visiones Teotihuacanas
Print out this illustration by local artists Martin Moreno and Edgar Fernandez inspired by Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire. Then use colored pencils, crayons, markers, or watercolors to bring the scene to life.
PhxArt Recommends
Recommended Reading
Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire
This illustrated publication examines newly discovered cultural artifacts from Teotihuacan’s three main pyramids, all of which shed light on the role art played in civic life throughout the metropolis.
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Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now
Discover how contemporary Brazilian artist Valeska Soares navigates love and intimacy, loss and longing, memory and language through her conceptual artworks with this monograph published in conjunction with the artist’s largest survey exhibition to date.
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Past/Future/Present: Contemporary Brazilian Art from the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo
An accompanying publication to the eponymous 2017 exhibition, this catalogue showcases artworks from the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, which houses one of the most important collections of Brazilian art in the world.
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Teresita Fernández: Elemental
Read up on the forthcoming exhibition Teresita Fernández: Elemental in preparation for its Phoenix premiere. This fully bilingual and illustrated monograph reveals how one of America’s most exciting installation artists investigates the intersection of culture and landscape.
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Recommended Viewing
Forget Netflix and chill! Check out these films available to stream for free on Kanopy using your library card. Don’t have a library card? Our friends at Phoenix Public Library are offering e-Card registration here.
WASTE LAND
(Walker, NR, Documentary, 98 mins, 2010, English and Portuguese with English subtitles)
WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz to his native Brazil and the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, just outside of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores,” or self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. His project, however, quickly morphs into a collaboration that proves the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit. Watch the trailer here.
Visiones: Latino Art & Culture Series
(Galán, NR, Documentary series, 163 min, 2004, English and Spanish)
This award-winning PBS series focuses on Latinx artistic expression in the United States, from New York City’s break-dancers to mural painters in Los Angeles and Chicago to theater in Texas. Tune in and discover how these artists continue to build on rich traditions that reflect a multiethnic experience.
Recommended Listening
Our latest PhxArt mix features Bad Bunny, Ozuna, Celia Cruz, Chicano Batman, Selena….the list goes on and on.
Artists Talk
This selection of videos features just a few of the many Latin American and Latinx artists we’ve worked with over the past five years.
Retail Therapy
Check out these items from The Museum Store inspired by the artworks above and other works by Latin American and Latinx artists in our collections.
