PHOENIX (July 2, 2025) – Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) announces the appointment of two new curators: Colin Pearson as the institution’s Curator for Asian Art and Dr. JoAnna Reyes as its new Adjunct Curator for Art of the Americas. Reyes’ role is a collaborative appointment between Phoenix Art Museum and the School of Art in Arizona State University’s (ASU) Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. In their respective roles, Pearson will develop exhibitions that draw from and highlight the Museum’s expansive Asian art collection, and Reyes will curate exhibitions across the Museum’s American, Western American, Latin American, and Spanish Colonial art collections. Both Pearson and Reyes assume their roles effective immediately. 

“We are thrilled to welcome Colin Pearson and JoAnna Reyes to the outstanding curatorial team at Phoenix Art Museum,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “Both Colin and JoAnna have deep expertise and significant experience within their respective fields and bring fresh, innovative perspectives to the presentation of the PhxArt Collection’s rich holdings. We are excited to see how their exhibitions engage and educate our audiences in new ways, reaffirming the Museum’s role as a space of belonging that reflects the breadth of experiences represented across our community.”

“I am both excited and humbled to be appointed as Phoenix Art Museum’s third curator of Asian art, and I look forward to sharing this incredibly rich collection with audiences in a variety of new ways,” said Pearson. “I feel passionately that the physical distance between Arizona and the places where these wonderful artworks originate does not need to be a barrier to the appreciation of their beauty. By approaching the collection with an open mind, I seek to help audiences discover what makes the artistic traditions of Asia distinct, highlight the intercultural exchanges that have always connected us, and make Asian art accessible and relevant for the diverse and family-oriented audiences here in the Valley of the Sun.”

“I am excited to join the curatorial team at Phoenix Art Museum and explore the Museum’s incredible collection of art from across the Americas,” said Reyes. “By taking a hemispheric approach, I hope to create exhibitions that highlight the migrations, exchanges, and shared stories that have shaped the region, with the goal of sparking new conversations and understanding of the art of the Americas.”

About Colin Pearson

Colin Pearson assumes his new role as PhxArt’s Curator of Asian Art, bringing over a decade of experience curating collections of Asian artworks, ceramics, craft items, musical instruments, and ethnographic artifacts, with expertise on the effects of maritime and Silk Road trade routes on the arts of Tibet, China, and India. He previously served as the Museum’s adjunct curator of Asian art since 2024, overseeing the refresh of the Art of Asia galleries and curating exhibitions such as Chardi Kala: Rising Above Adversity, a presentation of Sikh artworks exploring the concept of unwavering optimism in the face of hardship. This year, Pearson will serve as coordinating curator for the Museum’s presentation of Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, and lead curator for the exhibition Flowers of the Punjab: Textiles of India and Beyond, both opening in September 2025.

In addition to his work at PhxArt, Pearson has collaborated on curatorial projects at Arizona State University (ASU) and catalogued a collection of nearly 200 textiles, artworks, and ethnographic objects for ASU’s Center for Asian Research. From 2020 to 2022, Pearson served as a curator for the Zayed National Museum in the United Arab Emirates, cultivating and sharing his extensive knowledge of ceramics and other export goods traded along overland and maritime routes from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. As a curator at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix from 2009 to 2020, Pearson organized special exhibitions of custom-inlaid guitars and Chinese antiquities. He also expanded the institution’s collection of instruments and artifacts from Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, as well as instruments from Europe and North America. 

Pearson has delivered public talks and lectures on a wide range of topics relating to Asian art, including the musical and artistic cultures of Asia, connoisseurship and classification schemes, and the global legacies of cultural interactions throughout history. He earned his Bachelor of Music at California State University, Long Beach and his Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology from the University of California at Riverside. He is currently working toward his PhD in Asian Art History at Arizona State University.

About Dr. JoAnna Reyes

Dr. JoAnna Reyes’s collaborative appointment as the Adjunct Curator for Art of the Americas at Phoenix Art Museum and Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) further deepens the collaboration between the leading art museum in the Southwest and one of the largest comprehensive arts programs at a public research university in the U.S. In her new role at PhxArt, Reyes will curate exhibitions across the Museum’s American, Western American, Latin American, and Spanish Colonial art collections, expanding opportunities for audiences to consider connections across borders, time periods, and cultures.

Reyes’ first curatorial project at the Museum will be a collection installation in the institution’s newly renovated Art of the Americas and Europe galleries, which are re-opening in November 2025. Drawing from the Museum’s Spanish Colonial and Latin American art collections, Reyes will highlight the traditions and innovations in the viceregal art of Latin America, and how artists of the period drew inspiration from Asian art objects and prints from Northern Europe to create innovative, sophisticated, and nuanced works imbued with traditional Indigenous techniques, Catholic devotional imagery, and new iconographies invented to honor local saints and miracles. The installation will also showcase contemporary works that exemplify how Latin American artists today reference this period in their practices. 

In addition to her curatorial work, this fall Reyes will teach an ASU art history seminar, located in the Museum’s Education building. Reyes will use the PhxArt collection and new North Wing collection galleries to focus on a period between the 15^th and 16^thcenturies often referred to as the Age of Discovery, when Europeans developed a growing fascination with collecting a wide array of antiquities, natural specimens, books, prints, drawings, paintings, and other projects, largely influenced by the exploration and colonization of the Americas. Students will examine the practices and theoretical frameworks that informed early modern collecting and how they evolved into contemporary museological contexts, particularly around topics of repatriation, restitution, and deaccessioning.

A specialist in the visual and material culture of viceregal Latin American and contemporary Chicana/o America, Reyes explores identity, art patronage, and how images and symbols, particularly from border regions, shape our understanding of place and culture. She developed the 2025 exhibition Agua es Vida at the Rio Salado Audubon Center and Samouraï: Armure du Guerrier (2011) at the musée du Quai Branly with the Barbier-Mueller Museum (Dallas), published an entry in Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500-1800 (Delmonico, 2022), and co-authored an article in Feminist Formations (John Hopkins University Press, 2022), among other ongoing writing and book projects. 

Reyes, who earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, worked at the Getty Research Institute and served as the curatorial assistant at LACMA (2013-2015) and Mellon Fellow (2016-2017). Previously, she worked at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (NY) and the Barbier-Mueller Museum, and from 2016-2019, she served as the book review editor for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) has engaged millions of visitors with the art and fashion of our region and world. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, PhxArt creates spaces of exchange and belonging for all audiences through dynamic exhibitions, collections, and art experiences. Each year, more than 250,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions, as well as the Museum’s collection of more than 21,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern, and contemporary art and fashion. The Museum also presents vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is home to The Gene and Cathy Lemon Art Research Library, The Thorne Miniature Rooms, The Ullman Center for the Art of Philip C. Curtis, and Arizona Costume Institute (ACI). For the community, PhxArt hosts lectures, live performances, outstanding examples of global cinema, arts-education workshops, family-focused programs, and more. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880. 

The post Phoenix Art Museum appoints two new curators appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (March 22, 2023) – Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) announces the opening of Mission and Legacy, an exhibition that celebrates the enduring impact of Friends of Mexican Art (FOMA), a Valley-based non-profit organization dedicated to building appreciation for Mexican art and strengthening cultural ties between the Greater Phoenix Metro community and Mexico. Over its nearly 60-year history, FOMA gifted works by 20th and 21st century Mexican artists José Clemente Orozco, Enrique Chagoya, Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Zúñiga, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and others to the PhxArt collection. Mission and Legacy presents many of these outstanding works to the public and is on view now through December 31, 2023 in the James K. Ballinger Gallery at Phoenix Art Museum.

“Phoenix Art Museum is immensely grateful to Friends of Mexican Art for their enduring support and shared commitment to increasing access to Mexican art,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “The artworks that FOMA has gifted to the Museum throughout our decades-long partnership form the cornerstone of our Latin American art collection, ensuring the organization’s indelible impact on this institution and on our community’s ability to engage with formative works by artists from Mexico long into the future.”

Friends of Mexican Art, colloquially known as FOMA, was founded in 1963 with a mission to encourage understanding and awareness of the importance of Mexican art and culture. Over nearly 60 years, the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization has increased the representation of Mexican art at Phoenix Art Museum, Heard Museum, Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Phoenix Public Library, Arizona State University Art Museum, Mesa Arts Center, and Tucson Museum of Art through the support of art acquisitions and exhibitions. In support of the PhxArt collection, FOMA gifted 25 outstanding works by many of the most renowned Mexican artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, forming the foundation of the Museum’s Latin American collection, which was formally established in 1992 and at the time represented only the second collection in the country dedicated to Latin American art.

Upon the achievement of its mission, FOMA sunset as an organization in 2022. Mission and Legacy honors FOMA’s impact by presenting numerous artworks gifted to PhxArt over the two institutions’ decades-long partnership. The exhibition also features selections from the Friends of Mexican Art Archive, which is now housed in the Museum’s Gene and Cathie Lemon Art Research Library and which preserves newsletters, photographs, invitations, correspondence, and other materials created and associated with the group during their operating history. Featured archival objects in Mission and Legacy shed light on the many ways FOMA’s programming and fundraising activities celebrated and preserved Mexican art in both the Valley of the Sun and Mexico.

“The exhibition Mission and Legacy at Phoenix Art Museum means so much to the members of Friends of Mexican Art—present and past,” said Sarah Maresco, one of four FOMA presidium members. “It is such a gift to see these beautiful artworks displayed together in representation of the works FOMA has gifted to the Museum over almost 60 years. It shows that FOMA has fulfilled its mission to increase knowledge and understanding of Mexican art and has helped to make the Valley of the Sun a center for Mexican art collections.”

For more information on FOMA and the group’s influence on Phoenix Art Museum, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2117 or samantha.santos@phxart.org.

About the Exhibition
Mission and Legacy is organized by Phoenix Art Museum. It is made possible through the generosity of Friends of Mexican Art.  

Admission is free for Museum Members; youth aged 5 and younger; and Maricopa County Community Colleges students with an active ID. Entrance into the exhibition is included in general admission for the public. Visitors may also enjoy reduced admission to the exhibition during voluntary-donation times on Wednesdays from 3 – 9 pm, made possible through the support of SRP and City of Phoenix. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, see phxart.org/visit/.

High-resolution photography can be downloaded here. To request interviews, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2117 or samantha.santos@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum
Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

The post New exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum showcases paintings by José Clemente Orozco, Enrique Chagoya, Rufino Tamayo, and other renowned Mexican artists appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (March 15, 2023) – This spring, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) presents Methuselah (2022) by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo, a digital artwork that follows a butterfly avatar along its journey from southern Canada, across the United States, into Mexico, and back again as part of the species’ annual reproductive cycle. On-site visitors will experience the Monarch’s movements and behaviors in a shared environment using a holographic device. Additionally, Methuselah is hosted and reproduced in real-time on a dedicated website so that users across the world with internet access can experience the work at any time. The mixed-reality installation at PhxArt will be on view beginning May 6 in the Museum’s Katz Wing for Modern Art. It is presented in conjunction with Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, the first retrospective since 1992 to explore the career of the late Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso.

Monarch butterflies weigh less than one gram each and live only two to six weeks, requiring four generations of offspring to complete their annual migration. Methuselah refers to the fourth generation of Monarchs who are born at the northern most point of the migration pattern and live longer than the other generations. In late summer and fall, the Methuselah generation begins a two-month, 6,000-mile journey from southern Canada and the northern United States to Mexico, where they stop to hibernate in the remote oyamel fir forests. In February and March, they awaken and begin the return home, laying millions of eggs along the way before dying.

Methuselah (2022) was created by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo in collaboration with butterfly experts, taxidermists, animators, computer modelers, and software designers, translating an analog specimen into a digital animation, or virtual avatar. The open-distribution model of the artwork, which allows for observation 24 hours a day, draws upon data points related to actual conditions the Monarch experiences during migration, including inclement weather and rough terrain. Any person with an internet connection can access the work via methuselahmonarch.com, helping to eliminate social, cultural, geographic, and economic barriers. The artwork can also be individually accessed on mobile devices via a free app on the App Store. Through a mixed-reality installation at PhxArt in May, on-site visitors will be afforded an intimate experience with the elegant Monarch via a holographic device as it continues along its migratory path.

At Phoenix Art Museum, Methuselah is presented in conjunction with the major exhibition Juan Francisco Elso: Por América and the complementary exhibition Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection, both of which are curated by Olga Viso, curator-at-large at PhxArt and senior advisor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, in collaboration with Susanna V. Temkin, curator at El Museo del Barrio, and Julio César Morales, executive director and co-chief curator of MoCA Tucson, respectively. In September 2022, the Museum was part of a group of nearly 20 international cultural organizations that came together to support the launch of Methuselah, among them the Americas Society, ​New York​; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; High Museum of Art, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; International Center for the Arts of the Americas / Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Museo Jumex, Mexico; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC, UNAM, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Florida; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri; New York Botanical Garden, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; and Seattle Art Museum, Washington.

This summer, Methuselah will also be accessible at other Valley venues, including at the ASU Art Museum in Tempe, where ASU students and museum visitors can experience Methuselah in a mixed-reality setting in the Museum’s Artists’ Workshop space; the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience Center (MIX) in Mesa, which will live stream Methuselah’s flight path north on its 80-foot exterior jumbo screen; and Desert Botanical Garden, which will host a public conversation with artist Reynier Leyva Novo and Garden pollinator experts, followed by a tour of the Garden’s renowned Cohn Family Butterfly Pavilion. Each institution will release more programming information as it becomes available.

“The soft diplomacy of the Monarch, as well as its perseverance, offers a critical metaphor for 21^st-century existence related both to migration and our impending climate crisis,” said Viso. “That Novo created this work during his own migration out of Cuba and that the Monarch was recently categorized as an endangered species makes it all the more poignant. This interest and exploration of transnationalism and the fragility of existence pays tribute to Juan Francisco Elso’s own fascination with those topics, demonstrating how Elso’s influence on new generations of Cuban artists such as Novo lives on.”

About the Installation
Methuselah is commissioned by El Museo del Barrio through the generous support of VIA Art Fund. The project is presented in relation to the exhibition Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, which is organized by El Museo del Barrio and made possible thanks to major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The presentation of Juan Francisco Elso: Por América at Phoenix Art Museum is made possible through the generosity of Partner Sponsor Sue and Bud Selig and Supporting Sponsors Men’s Arts Council, The Opatrny Family Foundation, and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Exhibition Endowment Fund, with additional support from Kimpton Hotel Palomar.

Admission is free for Museum Members; youth aged 5 and younger; and Maricopa County Community Colleges students. Entrance into the exhibition is included in general admission for the public. Visitors may also enjoy reduced admission to the exhibition during voluntary-donation times on Wednesdays from 3 – 9 pm, made possible by SRP and supported in part through the generosity of the Angela and Leonard Singer Endowment for Performing Arts. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, see phxart.org/visit/.

High-resolution photography can be downloaded here. To request interviews, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2117 or samantha.santos@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum
Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

About El Museo del Barrio
El Museo del Barrio is the nation’s leading Latinx and Latin American cultural institution. The Museum welcomes visitors of all backgrounds to discover the artistic landscape of these communities through its extensive Permanent Collection, varied exhibitions and publications, bilingual public programs, educational activities, festivals, and special events.

The Museum is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street in New York City. The Museum is open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11:00am – 5:00pm. Pay-what-you-wish. To connect with El Museo via Social Media, follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For more information, please visit elmuseo.org.

About Reynier Leyva Novo
Reynier Leyva Novo (b. 1983, Havana, Cuba, and based in Houston, Texas) is one of Cuba’s leading conceptual artists. Novo’s practice challenges ideology and symbols of power, challenging notions of an individual’s ability to affect change. His multidisciplinary practice includes mining historical data and official documents, the content of which he transforms into formally minimalist and conceptually charged sculptures and multimedia installations. Novo’s artwork has been presented at the Liverpool Biennial (2010), Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), Havana Biennial (2015, 2019), Shanghai Biennale (2018), Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2019), Aichi Triennial (2019), among others. His art is collected by international museums and arts institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Museo de Bellas Artes de Habana; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

The post Mixed-reality installation at Phoenix Art Museum traces migration of endangered Monarch butterfly appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (February 7, 2023) – This spring, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) and Arizona State University Art Museum (ASU Art Museum) will co-present a new exhibition, Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection, the first major curatorial collaboration between the two institutions in more than a decade. The collaboration explores artistic expression during times of humanitarian crises and social upheaval while presenting a record of human experiences that will resonate across audiences of varying identities. The new exhibition draws from the contemporary Cuban art collection at ASU Art Museum to provide deeper context to PhxArt’s simultaneous presentation of the special-engagement exhibition Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, the first retrospective in more than 30 years of the late Cuban artist and a project organized by El Museo del Barrio in New York City. The two exhibitions will provide a deeper understanding of the social and political context in which Elso’s art emerged in 1980s Communist Cuba, in addition to the culture and political climate of post-Soviet Cuba in the decade following Elso’s death in 1988. PhxArt and ASU Art Museum will also partner to present community programs designed to engage visitors with these dynamic art works and bring greater visibility to the complex histories of migration in Cuba and Mexico. Both Juan Francisco Elso: Por América and Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been were curated by Olga Viso, a dual-appointee of PhxArt and ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. They will be on view from May 6 through September 17, 2023 at Phoenix Art Museum.

“As institutions, we often overlook the richness of shared expertise and resources within our own communities,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “Through this collaboration with the ASU Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum has the opportunity to bring works by Cuban artists from ASU’s incredible collection to our galleries while partnering on a series of public programs to better understand the complexity of issues surrounding exile faced by Cuban artists. These exhibitions present a distinctive look at the impact of a singular artist and his place in art history, as well as how the Phoenix community has embraced and supported artists whose voices and artistic practices have been challenged by political establishments.”

“ASU Art Museum has a 25-year history of highlighting the work, voices, and perspectives of Cuban artists,” said Miki Garcia, director of ASU Art Museum. “Our partnership with PhxArt is a great opportunity to deepen our connection with the community. The artists in these exhibitions demonstrate how Cuban artists created a new visual culture—one that challenged the Soviet-era preference for art imbued with a political agenda and censorship. Cuban artists of the ’80s and ’90s experimented with both the materials they used and the messages they crafted. We see a mixture of conceptual art, folkloric themes, and institutional critiques that simultaneously shaped the new culture and served as a space to process the impact Communist ideologies had on artists’ sense of personal and communal identity.”

Curated by Olga Viso, in collaboration with Susanna V. Temkin, curator at El Museo del Barrio, Juan Francisco Elso: Por América provides a rare opportunity to experience Elso’s fragile extant works that draw influence from Indigenous Mesoamerican traditions, Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs, and the traumas of colonial oppression on contemporary Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American identities. Elso’s sculptures and installations reveal a more expansive understanding of the Americas, free of geopolitical borders and nations, and likewise provide insight into the social and political context of 1980s Communist Cuba, a period that led up to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and birthed the first generation of artists to be educated fully within a post-revolutionary system. These artists eventually emerged on an international stage and began to reflect critically on Cuban society. 

The story continues with Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection, which features ASU Art Museum’s most iconic artworks created during the period immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. Termed Cuba’s “Special Period in a Time of Peace” by then-president Fidel Castro, the early 1990s through the mid-2000s on the island were marred by severe food and material shortages caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its financial subsidies, along with the persistence of trade embargoes enacted by the United States since the early 1960s. As a result, thousands of Cuban refugees fled in 1993–1994, at the height of the crisis, on makeshift rafts across the treacherous straits between Cuba and the United States.  

Works in Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been comment on the struggles of daily subsistence and the human experience during the “Special Period,” themes that are at once specific and relevant to communities who have faced exile and political repression across the globe. Highlights include:

• Kcho’s 1996 makeshift kayak perched on a precarious sea of bottles in Para Olvidar (In Order to Forget), a reference to the tragedy of the balseros, or rafters, in 1994, many of whom perished at sea in their attempt to secure freedom
• Sandra Ramos’s painted suitcase from her 1994-series Migrations II Swimming Under the Stars, depicting two figures traversing dark, open waters
• Aimee García Marrero’s 2002 sculpture Bajo Presión/Under Pressure of a pressure cooker, referencing women’s use of pots and pans as percussive objects in protests against widespread food shortages.

The exhibition also features works by Belkis Ayón, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Abel Barroso, Jacqueline Brito, Yamilys Brito, Los Carpinteros, Carlos Estévez, René Francisco, Luis Gomez, Filiberto Mora, Kadir Lopez Nieves, Fernando Rodríguez, and Tonel.

Along with providing a glimpse into the past, Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been additionally explores the way Cuban artists today continue to grapple with issues of governmental control, economic failure, and censorship that likewise characterized the island’s Special Period. This is the subject of Reynier Leyva Novo’s monumental portrait of the Cuban national hero, José Marti, which is currently on view on the main floor of the Museum’s Katz Wing. The iconic portrait of Martí appears as a slumbering giant suspended in time. The work’s title, Lo que es, el lo que ha sido (What it is, is what has been), provides the inspiration for the title of the larger exhibition and links the recent past to the present moment. In conversation, Novo’s work, Por América, and the exhibition featuring work from the ASU Art Museum take on more universal significance, particularly when viewed through the lens of global tumult and social change in a rapidly changing world.

“In 2018, Cuba established Decree 349, which legislates creative expression and imposes controls on artistic content,” said Olga Viso, a dual appointee of both Phoenix Art Museum and Arizona State University. “Artists who have protested these measures in recent years have been met with harsh governmental response and even imprisonment. As The New York Times recently reported, another mass exodus of Cuban citizens fleeing the island is underway. The title of this exhibition— Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been—not only echoes a common sentiment among the Cuban populace of making due with what lies ahead (it is what it is) but also poignantly acknowledges that very little has changed in regard to scarcity and civil liberties in Cuba since the ‘Special Period’ commenced more than 30 years ago.”

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América and Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been are exhibitions led by Olga Viso, senior curatorial advisor and curator-at-large at PhxArt and senior advisor at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Viso was joined by co-curator Julio César Morales, executive director and co-chief curator of MoCA Tucson, on Lo que es, lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been. High-resolution photography for Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/ What It Is, Is What Has Been can be downloaded here. To request interviews, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2117 or samantha.santos@phxart.org. For the full news release on Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, click here.

About the Exhibition
Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/ What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and ASU Art Museum and curated by Olga Viso, curator-at-large at PhxArt and senior advisor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and Julio César Morales, executive director and co-chief curator of MoCA Tucson. The exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members.

Admission is free for Museum Members; veterans, active-duty military, and their immediate families; youth aged 5 and younger; and Maricopa County Community Colleges students. Entrance into the exhibition is included in general admission for the public. Visitors may also enjoy reduced admission to the exhibition during voluntary-donation times on Wednesdays from 3 – 9 pm, made possible by SRP and supported in part through the generosity of the Angela and Leonard Singer Endowment for Performing Arts. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, see phxart.org/visit/.

About Phoenix Art Museum
Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

About Arizona State University Art Museum and Cuban Art
The ASU Art Museum’s collection of contemporary Cuban art is distinguished by art produced on the island from the mid 1980s to the early 2000s and focuses on art made during a period in Cuban history known as the “Special Period.” The collection numbers over 250 objects in all media. The ASU Art Museum was one of the first art museums globally to collect Cuban art from this moment in depth and it continues to maintain one of the premier collections of art from this era.

The collection was assembled by the museum’s former chief curator and director Marilyn Zeitlin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Zeitlin sought to build on the museum’s long-standing commitment to collecting Latin American art, especially from under-represented regions and communities. She also aimed to expand the museum’s holdings of Latin American prints and deepen the museum’s existing concentrations of political graphics documenting social movements. The Cuban Art Collection was both commissioned and acquired at ASU with the generous support of national foundations and local donors who sought to urgently respond to the hardship artists were experiencing. In the 1990s, the ASU Art Museum commissioned many of the artists presented here to produce a print portfolio. That series is on view concurrently in the Art in Focus gallery at the ASU Art Museum until September 2023. For more information, please visit asuartmuseum.asu.edu.

The post Phoenix Art Museum and ASU Art Museum explore artistic expression in times of crisis through new joint exhibition featuring contemporary art of Cuba appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (January 17, 2023) – This spring, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) presents Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, the first retrospective in an art museum since 1992 to explore the career of the late Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso. The exhibition is organized by El Museo del Barrio and guest curated by Olga Viso, curator-at-large at PhxArt and senior advisor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, in collaboration with Susanna V. Temkin, curator at El Museo del Barrio. The survey offers a rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to experience Elso’s fragile extant works, including sculptures and installations that demonstrate the artist’s rigorous study of Afro-Cuban rituals and ancient Indigenous cultures as he attempted to at once understand and articulate an authentic Cuban national identity while expounding upon a broader trans-American citizenhood. By placing these artworks in conversation with prints, sculptures, and more by an intergenerational group of artists active since the 1970s—among them José Bedia, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Melvin Edwards, Karlo Andrei Ibarra, Glenn Ligon, Ana Mendieta, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Reynier Leyva Novo, Lorraine O’Grady, and others—Por América uncovers the impacts of  Elso’s legacy on generations of creators across the Americas since the artist’s untimely death in 1988 at the age of 32. Juan Francisco Elso: Por América will be on view from May 6 through September 17, 2023 in Steele Gallery at Phoenix Art Museum.

“It is essential for Phoenix Art Museum to bring Juan Francisco Elso: Por América to audiences in the Southwest,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “The late Cuban artist had a brief yet impactful career, and as an institution committed to the research, scholarship, and presentation of art of the Americas, it is critical for our viewers to understand the complexity and diversity of views and histories from the region and among its artists. Elso’s deeply researched and incredibly moving works speak to a wider desire for a more equitable human existence and a multicultural worldview informed not only by larger philosophical views on the history of Cuba and its people but of a greater Latin American and contemporary identity. Through Elso’s work and the inclusion of an impressive roster of artists in conversation, we hope this exhibition broadens our audience’s understanding of Cuban art and that visitors find parallels between their own experiences and the issues Elso grappled with over his career.”

Based in Havana and Mexico City, Juan Francisco Elso (1956–1988) was part of the first generation of artists born and educated in post-revolutionary Cuba. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he emerged as a visual artist before dying of leukemia at the age of 32. Using natural, organic materials such as mud, clay, straw, twigs, bark, and earth, Elso crafted sculptures and installations that examine the influences of Indigenous traditions, Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs, and the traumas of colonial oppression on contemporary Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American identities. The artist’s limited production, including plans for several unrealized works, reveal his more expansive understanding of the Americas, free from continental division and conventional ideas of state and nationhood.

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América is the first retrospective on the late artist’s work in more than 30 years, largely due to the delicate nature of Elso’s artworks and the strained political relationship between Cuba and the United States, which has hindered the exchange of artworks drawn from Cuban national collections between the two countries. The exhibition takes a contextual approach, placing Elso’s work in dialogue with a group of 40 multigenerational artists active in the Caribbean and throughout North, South, and Central America, who explore similar ideas and topics that preoccupied Elso throughout his life and career. Juan Francisco Elso: Por América is organized into the following thematic sections:

Elso and the Americas
At the heart of this section is Elso’s masterwork Por América (José Martí) (1986), which portrays Cuban poet, philosopher, national hero, and martyr José Martí. As a leader in the island’s struggle for national independence from Spain in the 19th century, Martí ultimately died on the battlefield in pursuit of that liberty. Considered one of the most important works of the late 20th century, Por América recasts the iconic portrait of Martí in human terms. The figure is rendered in wood, plaster, and earth and resembles a colonial church santo. Wielding a machete, the poet is positioned as both a devotional saint and an Afro-Cuban warrior. Other works in this section by an array of artists from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States, including Papo Colo, Melvin Edwards, Scherezade Garcia, Ana Mendieta, Belkis Ayón and Ángel Ramírez, and more similarly consider the impassioned, frenzied, violent, and revolutionary moments throughout history that have shaped the Americas since European conquest.

African Legacies

Elso viewed the Americas as a geography and social experiment defined as much by the histories of ancient indigenous cultures as the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. This section of the exhibition explores Elso’s dedication to studying Afro-Cuban and Amerindian histories, as well as the influence of his own devotional practice of the Afro-Cuban religion La Regla de Ocha (also known as Santería) on his artistic production. Complementary prints, objects, and more by artists such as Albert Chong, Lorraine O’Grady, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Elso’s peer and friend José Bedia also examine the influences and legacies of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond.

Essay on America
Elso often worked in series, creating sculptural groupings that interrogated his larger musings about the Americas. This section features various multi-object installations that consider humanity as a confluence of earthen imperfection and divine excellence, always on the edge of self-destruction or enlightenment. Pájaro que vuela sobre América [Bird that Flies Over America] (1985), for example, is a flying machine constructed from wood, wax, and jute. Designed to fit Elso, the object is built for an imagined earthly warrior to metaphorically access spiritual and heavenly realms. Other works featured in this section include prints, sculptures, and more by Mexican artists Graciela Iturbide and Magali Lara.

The Transparency of God
During the last years of his life while living in Mexico, Elso started his final series, The Transparency of God, which was part of a larger vision he was unable to complete before his death. In this section of the exhibition, visitors encounter the three sculptures that Elso did finish—Corazón de America [Heart of America], El Rostro de Dios [The Face of God], and La mano Creadora [The Hand of the Creator] (1987-1988). Although three additional objects were never realized, the artist left verbal instructions for how the three sculptures should be installed in relation to each other to suggest the contours of a monumental god-like entity. The exhibition’s presentation of The Transparency of God honors Elso’s intent with the objects he completed.

Unfinished America
Elso viewed the Americas as a work in progress, a living entity that could be remapped, reworked, and re-envisioned endlessly. His hopeful, more equitable, trans-American worldview was free of geopolitical borders and nations and instead stood grounded in respect and care for the land, ancestral traditions, and shared food, goods, and services that all humans need to thrive. This final section of Por América presents Elso’s last completed work before his death: Caballo contra colibri [Horse against Hummingbird] (1988). The sculpture depicts a bird (symbolic of Indigenous life) confronting a horse (a symbol of European colonization). It reflects on the lived histories of the Americas while encouraging viewers to imagine an alternative reality in which the bird is victorious. Works by Luis Camnitzer, Karlo Andrei Ibarra, Kcho, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and others throughout this section also consider and theorize new narratives beyond our collective memories.

“A contextual approach underpins all of Juan Francisco Elso: Por América,” said exhibition curator Olga Viso. “It stems from a desire to situate the artist firmly in his place and time, while also considering his influence and legacy. All too often, the art world positions Caribbean and Latin American artists whom it sees as working outside the mainstream, or who have had abbreviated careers, as artistic anomalies unmoored from their context. To challenge such assumptions, this investigation offers an alternative proposition that weaves Elso firmly into the fabric of a contemporary diasporic imaginary. It is an approach that I hope offers readers the opportunity to learn about Juan Francisco Elso and the history of artistic production in Cuba, as well as a generation of international artists who were at the center of defining the multicultural 1980s and are critical figures of the rich and prismatic cultural landscape in the Americas today.”

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue co-published by El Museo del Barrio and [NAME] and edited by Olga Viso. The approximately 400-page volume is the first English-language monograph on the artist and is also produced in Spanish. It features essays by international scholars Rachel Weiss, Orlando Hernández, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Gerardo Mosquera, whose previous essays and interviews with Elso are translated into English for the first time. New voices, including the Afro-Caribbean scholar Erica Moiah James and the Cuban-American curator Gean Moreno, offer theoretical perspectives and positions informed by contemporary race and diasporic studies, while contributions from artists and curators such as Tania Bruguera, Coco Fusco, Jimmie Durham, Graciela Iturbide, Reynold Kerr, Magali Lara, Corina Matamoros, Gerardo Suter, and Javier Tellez provide personal reflections on the artist and his legacy.

About the Exhibition
Juan Francisco Elso: Por América is organized by El Museo del Barrio and guest curated by Olga Viso, curator-at-large at Phoenix Art Museum and senior advisor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, in collaboration with Susanna V. Temkin, curator at El Museo del Barrio. The exhibition is made possible thanks to major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Commissions are made possible by VIA Art Fund and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Its presentation at Phoenix Art Museum is made possible through the generosity of Partner Sponsor Sue and Bud Selig and Supporting Sponsors Men’s Arts Council, The Opatrny Family Foundation, and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Exhibition Endowment Fund, with additional support from Kimpton Hotel Palomar.

Admission is free for Museum Members; veterans, active-duty military, and their immediate families; youth aged 5 and younger; and Maricopa County Community Colleges students. Entrance into the exhibition is included in general admission for the public. Visitors may also enjoy reduced admission to the exhibition during voluntary-donation times on Wednesdays from 3 – 9 pm, made possible by SRP and supported in part through the generosity of the Angela and Leonard Singer Endowment for Performing Arts. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, see phxart.org/visit/.

High-resolution photography can be downloaded here. To request interviews, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2117 or samantha.santos@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum
Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

About El Museo del Barrio
El Museo del Barrio is the nation’s leading Latinx and Latin American cultural institution. The Museum welcomes visitors of all backgrounds to discover the artistic landscape of these communities through its extensive Permanent Collection, varied exhibitions and publications, bilingual public programs, educational activities, festivals, and special events.

The Museum is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street in New York City. The Museum is open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11:00am – 5:00pm. Pay-what-you-wish. To connect with El Museo via Social Media, follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For more information, please visit elmuseo.org.

The post Phoenix Art Museum presents first major exhibition of work by Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso in more than 30 years appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (May 20, 2021) –This September, Phoenix Art Museum will premiere Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia, the first retrospective of work by renowned Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz presented in the United States. Co-organized by Phoenix Art Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art, the traveling exhibition is curated by Vanessa Davidson, PhD, formerly the Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art at Phoenix Art Museum who now serves as Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton. The retrospective will feature a wide selection of approximately 50 works created by the artist over five decades that explore themes of time, memory, history, and knowledge. Beginning with Muñoz’s early charcoal drawings from the 1970s, it will feature hybrid works created over the past five decades that combine photographic processes with drawing, printmaking, installation, video, sculpture, and interactive elements. The exhibition will also showcase new work that has never before been exhibited. Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia will be on view at Phoenix Art Museum from September 11, 2021 through January 16, 2022 before traveling to the Blanton in Spring 2022.

“We are very excited to collaborate with the Blanton Museum of Art to bring an expansive retrospective of works by Oscar Muñoz to the United States for the first time,” said Tim Rodgers, PhD, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “By refining and redefining the medium of photography, Muñoz has become one of the most significant contemporary artists working not only in Latin America but in the world. We hope audiences across the Southwest and the nation take advantage of this rare opportunity to experience his powerful and deeply human artwork.”

Born in 1951 in Popayán, Colombia, Oscar Muñoz is internationally renowned for materially diverse works that bridge the media of film, video, photography, installation, and sculpture to explore such elusive yet universal themes as identity, social amnesia, memory, and the transience of life. Working in a country beset by the catastrophes of civil war, he employs ephemeral materials like light, water, fire, and dust to create portraits and experiential works that associate the precarity of the image with the fragility of life and that are simultaneously indelible and fleeting. Muñoz explores photographic processes as the foundation of his practice due to the medium’s inherent relationship with concepts of time and history, in addition to its great potential for being deconstructed and manipulated for other formal and conceptual concerns. Although he does not consider himself a photographer, Muñoz was awarded the 2018 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. He has been the subject of international traveling retrospectives throughout Latin America and Europe, and has been featured in various group exhibitions globally, including in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Sweden, Spain, Paris, and New York City. His work has been acquired by numerous international private and public collections, including those of the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), Los Angeles, Calif.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass.;  Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, N.Y.;  Tate Modern, London, UK; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; and Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia, among many others.

Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia represents the first collaboration between Phoenix Art Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art. Davidson has collaborated closely with the artist himself since 2018 to create this retrospective that traces the evolution of Muñoz’s radical practice over five decades.

“Oscar Muñoz is part of an outstanding and little-known tradition of conceptual and photographic art in Colombia that has transformed the global perception and understanding of contemporary Latin American art,” said Gilbert Vicario, curator of contemporary art at Phoenix Art Museum. “Dr. Vanessa Davidson’s comprehensive and scholarly focus on Muñoz’s practice will fundamentally change the depth of understanding of this artist’s work in relation to a larger conversation on conceptually driven, lens-based work since the 1970s.”

Invisibilia features works spanning the late 1970s through 2021, from early, photo-realist charcoal drawings to never-before-seen recent works that illuminate the artist’s increasing interest in literature and the configuration of text and image upon the page. Rather than presenting works chronologically, Invisibilia is organized into four overlapping sections that explore the intertwined themes at the heart of Muñoz’s experimental approach. Presence/Absence features works that examine the empty spaces that remain where once there was a concrete form or physical being. It explores the tension between our ability to see and our blindness to experiences or histories that we might rather forget or that are physically erased, replaced, or obscured from view. Memory/Amnesia highlights work that refers to the impossibility of permanence, especially in relation to the corrosion or transfiguration of memory over time and humanity’s tendency toward social amnesia. Appearance/Disappearance showcases works that often operate cyclically and evoke associations with the fragility of the image, the malleability of time, and the precariousness of life itself. Finally, Cohesion/Fragmentation presents works that are self-referential with regards to both process and conceptual content, frequently providing fleeting visual clues that viewers must actively complete in their own imaginations. 

Key artworks in Invisibilia include:

• Cortinas de baño (Shower Curtains) (1985-1986), a large-scale installation that fuses method with meaning, creating shadows of people in the bath by using water and airbrushed ink in serigraphs on plastic curtains. The resulting images are ghostly traces of absent bodies at their most intimate and vulnerable—nude and unguarded as they perform their daily ritual. Viewers are transformed into voyeurs of these shadowy specters.

• Ambulatorio (Walking Place/Outpatient Ward) (1994-2008), an installation of a large aerial photograph of Cali, Colombia, printed on sheets of shattered security glass on which viewers are invited to walk and gaze down upon the city. Based on the experiences of several bombings in Cali, the glass crackles and fractures underfoot, just as urban pedestrians tread streets littered with glass after bomb explosions shattered windows in buildings.

• Aliento (Breath) (1995), a series of seemingly blank mirrors that, when breathed upon by the viewer, momentarily reveal obituary portraits of those who have “disappeared” in armed conflict or otherwise. Here, there is a mirroring of presence and absence, memory and oblivion, as images of the disappeared dead appear only to disappear again when viewers are not looking at and breathing upon them.

• Re/trato (Portrait/I Try Again)(2004), a video work depicting the artist attempting to paint a self-portrait with water on sun-warmed pavement, an image that quickly vanishes once the liquid makes contact with the hot ground. Viewers watch as Muñoz tries in vain again and again to complete the image over the course of 28 uninterrupted minutes.

• Paístiempo/Countrytime (2007),a work featuring images and texts pyro-engraved on newsprint  that dissolve and disintegrate as the pages are turned, mirroring the immediate obsolescence of periodical content after it is printed as well as Colombians’ numbing overexposure to violence in the news.

• Libro abierto (Open Book) (2019), a book of shadowy photographic prints whose pages show a ghostly hand in the midst of turning pages, creating the optical illusion that the viewer is watching this action in progress.

“The universality of Oscar Muñoz’s work lies in his exploration of far-reaching themes of identity, time, knowledge, and history in diverse media,” said Davidson. “As viewers experience the exhibition, I hope they consider the ways in which Muñoz uses the simplest means, such as water on cement, to illustrate the transience of the image as a metaphor for the transience of life. Muñoz strives to ‘hacer memoria’—to ’make memory’— in his work. I also hope visitors contemplate how the meanings of the photographs they take and keep to document their own lives change over time, and how they help to build memory and community. What do our selfies say about us, and how do they themselves ‘make memory’?”

About the Exhibition

Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia will be on view from September 11, 2021 through January 16, 2022 in the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Wing for Modern Art at Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition is co-organized by Phoenix Art Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art. Its Phoenix premiere is made possible through the generosity of The Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation, Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, with additional support from the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members. For more details about the exhibition, visit phxart.org/exhibition/oscar-munoz-invisibilia/.

Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue in English and Spanish, constituting the first substantive monograph on the artist’s work in English. The exhibition catalogue will also be the first to consider the impact of the artist’s entire five-decade career, featuring works from the 1970s through 2020 to underscore his contributions to the field of conceptual photography in Latin America and beyond. It also features two interviews with Oscar Muñoz, as well as a text by the artist. The publication is designed by Tracey Shiffman Associates; published by Hirmer Publishers (New York and Berlin) in association with the University of Chicago; and edited by project curator Vanessa Davidson, PhD, formerly the Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art at Phoenix Art Museum who now serves as the Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin. Contributors include: Florencia Bazzano, PhD, Blanton Museum of Art; Natalia Brizuela, PhD, University of California, Berkley; Marta Gili, former Director of the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Mariángela Méndez, PhD, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá; Oscar Muñoz; María Inés Rodríguez, Independent Curator and Curator at Large, MASP São Paulo; Elena Shtromberg, PhD, The University of Utah; Robert Storr, Visual Arts Director of the 52nd Venice Biennale, and former Dean of the Yale School of Art; Joan Fontcuberta, Independent Curator, Barcelona; and Alejandra Uslenghi, PhD, Northwestern University.

Admission is free for Museum Members; youth aged 5 and younger; and veterans and active-duty military and their families through the Military Access Program at Phoenix Art Museum (MAP@PAM), made possible through the generosity of Dr. Hong and Doris Ong, Nancy Hanley Eriksson, and Shamrock Foods Foundation. Entrance to the exhibition is included in general admission for the general public. During voluntary-donation times, the exhibition is offered to the general public with pay-what-you-wish admission. Voluntary-donation times include Wednesdays from 3 – 7 pm and the first Friday of each month from 3 – 7 pm. For a full breakdown of general admission prices and hours, see phxart.org/visit/.  

To request interviews and high-resolution photography, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2105 or samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 350,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

About Oscar Muñoz

Born in Popayán, Colombia, Oscar Muñoz (b. 1951) studied art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Cali in the 1970s. As an art student, he began by making drawings based on photographic images, and although his studies did not specifically include photography or audiovisual media, his independent explorations of these media became central to his artistic practice. Known for his use of ephemeral materials in poetic reflections upon memory and mortality, Muñoz often bridges the media of film, video, photography, installation, and sculpture. His work has been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including those at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico; Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Peru; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República – Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia; and High Line Art, New York, NY. Muñoz’s works are in numerous private and public collections around the world, including those at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich, Switzerland; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco, CA; and Tate Modern, London, UK, among many others.

In 2006, Muñoz founded Lugar a Dudas (Room for Doubt), a cultural center and residency program for artists located in Cali, which has become a center for young artists to work through ideas and participate in a dialogue and public debate about art and politics with the larger community. For more information on the artist, visit sicardi.com.

About the Blanton Museum of Art

Founded in 1963, the Blanton Museum of Art holds the largest public collection in Central Texas with around 19,000 objects. Recognized as the home of Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, its major collecting areas are modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings, and prints and drawings. The Blanton offers thought-provoking, visually arresting, and personally moving encounters with art.

The post Phoenix Art Museum to premiere first U.S. retrospective of Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz featuring drawings, installations, and photographic and video works appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (November 10, 2020) – On December 10, 2020, Phoenix Art Museum will present internationally renowned artist Teresita Fernández as the speaker for the Museum’s third annual Lenhardt Lecture, a key component of the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative. Considered one of the most innovative artists of her generation, Fernández, who was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2005, is best known for her immersive installations and sculptures and her monumental public-art commissions. The 2020 Lenhardt Lecture featuring Fernández coincides with the presentation at Phoenix Art Museum of Teresita Fernández: Elemental, a mid-career survey exhibition of the artist’s work, now on view through January 3, 2021. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s Lenhardt Lecture will be presented virtually and live-streamed at 6 pm on December 10, 2020. This virtual event is free for Museum Members and open to the public with a suggested donation.

“We are delighted to announce Teresita Fernández as the speaker for the Museum’s upcoming Lenhardt Lecture,” said Tim Rodgers, PhD, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “This year’s event is a particularly unique opportunity for our audiences to hear from an internationally recognized artist who has more than 50 large-scale sculptures, installations, and mixed-media wall works currently on view in our galleries here at the Museum. We are grateful for the ongoing generosity of Dawn and David Lenhardt, whose support has made this virtual event possible and whose landmark initiative continues to expose our community to some of the most innovative and significant contemporary artists working today.”

Based in New York, Fernández is renowned for her prominent public installations and experiential sculptures. Through her practice, she explores perception and the psychology of looking, inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place and regularly manipulating light and space to create immersive, intimate, and evocative experiences for individual viewers. Fernández emphasizes the connection between place and material, using gold, graphite, iron-ore, charcoal, and other minerals that have loaded historical ties to colonization and the violence embedded in the landscape. Her work is characterized by a quiet unraveling of place, power, visibility, and erasure. Minimalist yet substantive installations and sculptures evoke landscapes, the elements, and various natural wonders, including meteor showers, clouds formations, and the night sky. Fernández, who has created site-specific commissions for such public spaces as Harvard College, Madison Square Park, and Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, and in 2005, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for “integrating architecture and the optical effects of color and light into exquisitely constructed, contemplative spaces,” according to the Foundation’s website. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, Mass.); Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (Fla.); and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), among others. Her work can be found in various international public and private collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (N.Y.); The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Mass.); Israel Museum (Tel Aviv, Israel); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (Fla.); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Calif.).

“The Lenhardt Lecture is designed to expose our community to impactful, dynamic artists who are making a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art,” said David Lenhardt, vice chair of the Museum’s Board of Trustees. “This year, Dawn and I are thrilled to welcome Teresita Fernández because not only is she considered one of the most innovative artists of her generation, her advocacy work has helped to open doors and make space for other Latinx artists and curators in the art world.”

Fernández currently has work on view at Phoenix Art Museum through January 3, 2021 as part of Teresita Fernández: Elemental, her first mid-career survey. Co-organized by Phoenix Art Museum and Pérez Art Museum Miami, Elemental features more than 50 large-scale sculptures, installations, and mixed-media wall works that span the mid-1990s to the present, offering a comprehensive view of Fernández’s career to date and introducing Arizona audiences to the artist’s evocative creations that reinterpret the relationships between nature, history, and identity. Featured works include Untitled (1997), a mirrored floor sculpture that references voyeurism but encourages self-reflection from those examining the structure, and Fire (2005), which uses thousands of hand-dyed silk threads to construct flame patterns that become animated by light and air as viewers move around it. Elemental also showcases the artist’s most recent body of work, in which she contrasts the sublime nature of traditional landscapes with the current politically charged climate of the United States. Both Fire (America) 5 (2017) and Charred Landscape (America) (2017) underscore Fernández’s reinterpretation of the land, presenting a contemporary American landscape marred by violence, climate change, and warring ideologies that stand in stark contrast to the idealized vision of the American dream. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, bilingual publication designed by McGinty, Inc., co-published with DelMonico Prestel Books, and featuring contributions by co-curators Amada Cruz, formerly the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum who now serves as the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO of Seattle Art Museum, Franklin Sirmans, Director of Pérez Art Museum Miami, and María Elena Ortiz, Associate Curator of Pérez Art Museum Miami; Matthew Spellberg, PhD, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows; Aruna D’Souza, author of Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protests in 3 Acts; and Seph Rodney, PhD, staff writer and editor for Hyperallergic, and adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design.

“The work of Teresita Fernández contributes to an urgent debate around diversity and inclusion that is shaping the cultural dialogue of the moment,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Museum’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Selig Family Chief Curator, who served as the organizing curator at Phoenix Art Museum for the presentation of Teresita Fernández: Elemental. “We are excited for our Arizona audiences to experience her large-scale artworks, which are forged out of a conceptual framework that questions accepted historical and political narratives and crafted from natural materials with complex relationships tied to colonialism, land, and power.”

Fernandez is the third featured speaker for the annual Lenhardt Lecture, which has previously presented internationally renowned artists Jim Hodges and Daniel Joseph Martinez to Arizona audiences. The Lenhardt Lecture was established as part of the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative, which seeks to elevate contemporary art at Phoenix Art Museum and provide access to major, international artists working today for the broader Phoenix community. Along with the Lenhardt Lecture, the Lenhardt Initiative also provides resources to acquire new works by next-generation contemporary artists and supports the annual Lenhardt Emerging Artist Lecture, featuring emerging artists on a national scale whose work has been acquired through the Lenhardt Initiative. For more information about the Dawn and David Lenhardt Lecture or Teresita Fernández: Elemental, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.307.2003 or samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org.

About Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández(b. 1968, Miami, Fla.) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from Florida International University, Miami, in 1990 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, in 1992. Fernández’s work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her immersive, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Often referencing the natural world, Fernández’s conceptual practice emphasizes the connection between place and material, using gold, graphite, iron-ore and other minerals that have loaded historical ties to colonization and the violence embedded in the landscape. Her work is characterized by a quiet unraveling of place, power, visibility, and erasure that prompts an intimate experience for individual viewers.

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a 100-year-old federal panel that advises the president and Congress on national matters of design and aesthetics.

Fernández’s works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Calif.); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Mass.); The Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, Mass.); and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others.

About the Dawn and David Lenhardt Lecture

The Dawn and David Lenhardt Lecture engages Valley audiences with some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the world. In 2018, the inaugural lecture presented New-York based artist Jim Hodges, and in 2019, the Museum welcomed Daniel Joseph Martinez, a Los Angeles-based artist, as the lecture’s speaker.

The Lenhardt Lecture is a key component of the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative. Made possible through the generosity of the Arizona-based Lenhardt family, the initiative aims to deepen the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art through various programs and, along with the annual Lenhardt Lecture, includes the Lenhardt Emerging Artist Acquisition Fund, the Museum’s first fund designed specifically to collect works by next-generation contemporary artists; the Lenhardt Emerging Artist Lecture Series, aimed at introducing Valley audiences to emerging contemporary artists on a national scale; and the Dawn and David Lenhardt Gallery, designated for the presentation of contemporary art, including works acquired with funds from the Lenhardt Emerging Artist Acquisition Fund, loans from national and local collectors, and a rotating series of artworks from the Lenhardts’ personal collection.

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

The post Phoenix Art Museum names Teresita Fernández as speaker for third annual Lenhardt Lecture appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (September 10, 2020) – Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context at Phoenix Art Museum will present for the first time more than 40 recently acquired works of contemporary Latin American art in conversation with those by 30 European and American artists, including four currently working in Phoenix. The new exhibition explores how the visual language of abstraction has generated profound insights into Latin American culture and politics and how Latin American artists have drawn on abstraction’s parallel history in the United States and Europe. By providing an overview of post-1990s abstraction from various geographies in Latin America, the exhibition examines how abstraction is employed in contemporary Latin American art to convey specific emotions, stories, and ideas stemming from the cultural and political zeitgeist, while addressing the multitude of ways in which artwork lacking figuration or recognizable characters can generate new narratives, insightful commentary, and even political change. Stories of Abstraction will be on view at Phoenix Art Museum from October 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021. 

“Stories of Abstraction seeks to uncover how Latin American artists have used abstraction as both a vehicle to explore key issues relating to society and a tool to recast sometimes radical civic discourse,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Museum’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Selig Family Chief Curator who curated the exhibition. “The title of the exhibition intends to make clear that there are complex narratives within these abstract works that connect Latin America to the rest of the world. Abstraction in Latin America didn’t develop independently; rather its genesis is inextricably tied to the region’s history of colonialism, a relationship that is visually evident through formal and conceptual frameworks. This exhibition also furthers the Museum’s dedication to preserving and presenting significant works by Latin American artists, as well as its commitment to developing original scholarship that examines the meaning and underpinnings of abstract Latin American art. As our Phoenix community is more than 40% Latinx, Stories of Abstraction offers a timely examination of the visual language of Latin American abstraction that we believe our visitors can relate to and find inspiring and exciting.”

The exhibition also celebrates a 2018 gift to Phoenix Art Museum of 112 contemporary Latin American artworks, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and works on paper, from Nicholas Pardon, co-founder of the former SPACE Collection—the largest collection of post-1990s abstract Latin American art in the United States. Featuring artwork from the landmark gift, which increased the Museum’s holdings of contemporary Latin American art by nearly 300%, Stories of Abstraction makes accessible a wide range of compelling artwork from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala by 25 of the most innovative artists working in Latin America in recent years and today, including seven women artists, thus opening a window onto how abstraction is used to visualize the social philosophies of the present.

To historically contextualize the exhibition’s contemporary Latin American artworks from Pardon’s recent gift, Stories of Abstraction incorporates works by an earlier generation of artists from the Americas and around the world to substantiate their influence on post-1990 Latin American abstractionists. These works, by seminal artists like Alexander Calder, Pedro Friedeberg, Agnes Martin, Carlos Mérida, Hélio Oiticica, Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, and Jesús Rafael Soto, create historical touch points demonstrating how formal threads become appropriated, reworked, and reimagined in the post-1990 Latin American landscape.

Artworks by contemporary U.S. artists working in abstraction, including those based in Phoenix, further expand the conversation around abstraction to illuminate how these tendencies continue to develop and unfold in a global context. Locally based artists featured in Stories of Abstraction include Argentine sculptor and light and fire artist Geny Dignac, abstract and conceptual artist Matt Magee, photographer and performance artist Liz Cohen, and internationally renowned artist and sculptor Rotraut Klein-Moquay.

“By including works by Phoenix-based artists, Stories of Abstraction will help audiences trace the evolution of abstraction to the present day and illuminate its importance as a visual language that is currently being employed within our local art community through various media,” Vicario said. “Each artist uses abstraction in surprisingly different ways to elicit emotional and spiritual transcendence toward singular ends.”

Key highlights from the exhibition include:

• Honduran artist Adán Vallecillo’s Pantones (2013), in which six hanging banners made of moto-taxi covers are placed in dialogue with each other. The work highlights the use of non-traditional materials in Latin American abstraction and encourages viewers to engage with and walk along its stratified banners to examine the visual continuities and obscurities between each layer.

• Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra’s Sin título (siete conejos) (2001-2013), a sculptural installation consisting of glue and straw bricks arranged in descending scale that continues the artist’s exploration of the languages of design and architecture. Sierra uses straw as a vernacular material for construction to signify humans’ modification of nature and adaptation to the environment, engaging ideas of community, habitat, and urbanism and examining the forces that govern human interaction with built environments.

• Argentinian artist Sergio Vega’s Shanty Nucleus After Derrida 2 (2011-2013), which presents yellow monochrome planes suspended in space to create an array of configurations and walkways that enable an interactive viewing experience. These various planes constitute the color ground on which photographs of “shanty” homes have been mounted to create fragmented sculptural formations inspired by Derrida’s theory of deconstruction.

• American artist Louise Nevelson’s Royal Tide V (1960), a sculptural work made with discarded pieces of wood that features abstract compositions framed within gridded structures. Nevelson’s imposing and often monotone wooden sculptures are commonly referenced in relation to artistic tropes such as Abstract Expressionism and assemblage and bear a strong resemblance, albeit in three dimensional space, to the work of Joaquin Torres-Garcia and his School of the South.

• American artist Alexander Calder’s Constellation with Orange Anvil (1960), which is rendered in painted sheet metal and wire. From the artist’s Constellations series, the work demonstrates Calder’s deep interest in cosmology, evoking the movements and pure forms of the planets. Its biomorphic forms also reference works by Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Jean Arp.

• Him (2015-16) by American artist Liz Cohen, who is based and works in Phoenix. In this work, the wool and silk from Loja Saarinen’s weavings meet the walnut from an Eames chair, an example of mid-century modern furniture. Him marries abstraction with image making and the artist’s interest in representing the difficulties of radical self-expression.

• American artist Matt Magee’s Xantrion (2013), which reflects his signature use of repetition. Magee, who is also based in Phoenix, draws inspiration from Agnes Martin, and his work combining geometry, the grid, science, and nature with a random poetic sense references both an interior and intuitive language rooted in the objective and experiential. 

• Stella Stella (1968) by Phoenix-based artist Geny Dignac, a neon piece exploring color perception and movement. Born in Buenos Aires in 1932, Dignac was exposed in the 1950s to the artistic vanguard of Latin America that sought to create concrete, non-objective art. Her kinetic light sculptures, which have ultimately led to a radical rethinking of fire as an artistic medium, carry on the principles of artists such as Gyula Kosice. 

“Stories of Abstraction places the Museum at the forefront of conversations surrounding scholarship, exhibition practices, and the global significance of contemporary Latin American art,” said Vicario. “The exhibition will foster new dialogues in the Phoenix community and beyond and provide the opportunity to learn about the significant achievements of Latin America’s foremost abstract artists.”

About the Exhibition

Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context will be on view from October 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021 in Steele Gallery. It is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members. The exhibition features objects donated to the Phoenix Art Museum collection by Nicholas Pardon.

This special-engagement exhibition is free for Museum Members; veterans and active-duty military and their families; Maricopa Community College students (with ID); and youth aged 5 and younger. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices, visit phxart.org/visit/.

All special-engagement exhibitions are included with general admission. During voluntary-donation times when general admission is pay what you wish, admission to Stories of Abstraction is $5. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, please see phxart.org/visit/.

To request interviews and high-resolution photography, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.307.2003 or samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org.

Download Media Images and Credit Lines

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

The post Groundbreaking exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum to feature artworks from major gift of contemporary Latin American art appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (May 15, 2020) – A new exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum will present for the first time more than 40 recently acquired works of contemporary Latin American art in conversation with those by 30 American and European artists. Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context explores how the visual language of abstraction has generated profound insights into Latin American culture and politics and how Latin American artists have drawn on abstraction’s parallel history in the United States and Europe. By providing an overview of post-1990s abstraction from various geographies in Latin America, the exhibition explores how abstraction is employed in contemporary Latin American art to convey specific emotions, stories, and ideas stemming from the cultural and political zeitgeist, while addressing the multitude of ways in which artwork lacking figuration or recognizable characters can generate new narratives, insightful commentary, and even political change. Stories of Abstraction will be on view at Phoenix Art Museum from October 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021. 

“Stories of Abstraction seeks to uncover how Latin American artists have used abstraction as both a vehicle to explore key issues relating to society and a tool to recast sometimes radical civic discourse,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Museum’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Selig Family Chief Curator who curated the exhibition. “The title of the exhibition intends to make clear that there are complex narratives within these abstract works that connect Latin America to the rest of the world. Abstraction in Latin America didn’t develop independently; rather its genesis is inextricably tied to the region’s history of colonialism, a relationship that is visually fluent through formal and conceptual frameworks. This exhibition also furthers the Museum’s dedication to preserving and presenting significant works by Latin American artists, as well as its commitment to developing original scholarship that examines the meaning and underpinnings of abstract Latin American art. As our Phoenix community is more than 40% Latinx, Stories of Abstraction offers a timely examination of the visual language of Latin American abstraction that we believe our visitors can relate to and find inspiring and exciting.”

The exhibition also celebrates a 2018 gift to Phoenix Art Museum of 112 contemporary Latin American artworks, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and works on paper, from Nicholas Pardon, co-founder of the former SPACE Collection—the largest collection of post-1990s abstract Latin American art in the United States. Featuring artwork from the landmark gift, which increased the Museum’s holdings of contemporary Latin American art by nearly 300%, Stories of Abstraction makes accessible a wide range of compelling artwork from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala by 25 of the most innovative artists working in Latin America in recent years and today, including seven women artists, thus opening a window onto how abstraction is used to visualize the social philosophies of the present.

To historically contextualize the exhibition’s contemporary Latin American artworks from Pardon’s recent gift, Stories of Abstraction will incorporate works by an earlier generation of artists from the Americas and around the world to substantiate their influence on post-1990 Latin American abstractionists. These works, by seminal artists like Alexander Calder, Pedro Friedeberg, Agnes Martin, Carlos Mérida, Hélio Oiticica, Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, and Jesús Rafael Soto, will create historical touch points demonstrating how formal threads become appropriated, reworked, and reimagined in the post-1990 Latin American landscape. Artworks by contemporary U.S. artists working in abstraction, including those based in Phoenix, will further expand the conversation around abstraction to illuminate how these tendencies continue to develop and unfold in a global context.

Key highlights from the exhibition include:

• Honduran artist Adán Vallecillo’s Pantones (2013), in which six hanging banners made of moto-taxi covers are placed in dialogue with each other. The work highlights the use of non-traditional materials in Latin American abstraction and encourages viewers to engage with and walk along its stratified banners to examine the visual continuities and obscurities between each layer.

• Venezuelan artist Emilia Azcárate’s La mar de letras (2013), a five-paneled work exploring language and written communication, features illegible strings of letters from an old typewriter in a radiant green ink. By visualizing mechanical, repetitive, and obsessive forms of mark-making on paper, Azcárate creates an indecipherable sea of letters to prompt reflection on the complications and fallibility of language and to turn a coherent system of writing into a complex abstraction.

• Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra’s Sin título (siete conejos) (2001-2013), a sculptural installation consisting of glue and straw bricks arranged in descending scale, continues the artist’s exploration of the languages of design and architecture. Sierra uses straw as a vernacular material for construction to signify humans’ modification of nature and adaptation to the environment. Engaging ideas of community, habitat, and urbanism, Sierra manipulates architectural dynamics to examine the forces governing human interaction with built environments.

• Argentinian artist Sergio Vega’s Shanty Nucleus After Derrida 2 (2011-2013), which presents yellow monochrome planes suspended in space, creates an array of configurations and walkways that enable an interactive viewing experience. These various planes constitute the color ground on which photographs of “shanty” homes have been mounted to create fragmented sculptural formations inspired by Derrida’s theory of deconstruction.

“Stories of Abstraction places the Museum at the forefront of conversations surrounding scholarship, exhibition practices, and the global significance of contemporary Latin American art,” said Vicario. “The exhibition will foster new dialogues in the Phoenix community and beyond and provide the opportunity to learn about the significant achievements of Latin America’s foremost abstract artists.”

About the Exhibition

Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context will be on view from October 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021 in Steele Gallery. It is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members. The exhibition features objects donated to the Phoenix Art Museum collection by Nicholas Pardon.

This special-engagement exhibition is free for Museum Members; veterans and active-duty military and their families; Maricopa Community College students (with ID); and youth aged 5 and younger.

General admission:
$23 — Adults
$20 — Senior citizens (Ages 65+)
$18 — Students (with ID)
$14 — Children (Ages 6–17)

All special-engagement exhibitions are included with general admission. During voluntary-donation times when general admission is pay what you wish, admission to Stories of Abstraction is $5. Voluntary-donation times include Wednesdays from 3 – 9 pm and the first Friday of each month from 6 – 10 pm, with free admission for youth 17 and younger on the last Saturday of each month. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, please see bit.ly/VisitPhxArt.

To request interviews and high-resolution photography, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.307.2003 or samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

The post Phoenix Art Museum to celebrate major gift of contemporary Latin American art with groundbreaking exhibition in October 2020 appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.

PHOENIX (February 14, 2020) – A new exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum will present for the first time more than 40 recently acquired works of contemporary Latin American art to explore how the visual language of abstraction has generated profound insights into Latin American culture and politics and how Latin American artists have drawn on abstraction’s history within the region as well as the United States and Europe. Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art celebrates the contemporary artworks gifted to the Museum in 2018 by Nicholas Pardon, co-founder of the former SPACE collection—the largest collection of post-1990s abstract Latin American art in the United States. Featuring work by 25 artists from eight countries, the exhibition opens a window onto this important genre of contemporary art and explores how abstraction is used to visualize the social philosophies of the present. Stories of Abstraction will be on view at Phoenix Art Museum from May 2 through September 20, 2020. 

“Stories of Abstraction seeks to uncover the ways in which Latin American artists have used abstraction as both a vehicle to explore key issues relating to society and a tool to recast sometimes radical civic discourse,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Museum’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Selig Family Chief Curator who curated the exhibition. “The title of the exhibition intends to make clear that there are complex narratives within these abstract works. The exhibition also furthers the Museum’s dedication to preserving and presenting significant works by Latin American artists, as well as its commitment to developing original scholarship that examines the meaning and underpinnings of abstract Latin American art. As our Phoenix community is more than 40% Latinx, Stories of Abstraction offers a timely examination of the visual language of Latin American abstraction, one that we believe our visitors can relate to and find inspiring and exciting.”

The recent acquisition of 112 works of art from Pardon, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and works on paper, represents a nearly 300% increase in the Museum’s holdings of contemporary Latin American art. Featuring artwork from the most innovative artists working in Latin America in recent years and today, including seven women artists, Stories of Abstraction makes accessible a wide range of compelling artwork from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala. Stories of Abstraction will historically contextualize the exhibition’s contemporary works by placing them alongside key artworks from earlier decades to clarify Latin American abstraction’s relationship to other abstract movements. Historical works by Alexander Calder, Pedro Friedeberg, Carlos Mérida, Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, and Jesús Rafael Soto, among others, will complement more contemporary works from the Museum’s collection.

Key highlights from the exhibition include:

• Honduran artist Adán Vallecillo’s Pantones (2013), in which six hanging banners made of moto-taxi covers are placed in dialogue with each other. The work highlights the use of nontraditional materials in Latin American abstraction and encourages viewers to engage with and walk along its stratified banners to examine the visual continuities and obscurities between each layer.

• Venezuelan artist Emilia Azcárate’s La mar de letras (2013), a five-paneled work exploring language and written communication, features illegible strings of letters from an old typewriter in a radiant green ink. By visualizing mechanical, repetitive, and obsessive forms of mark-making on paper, Azcárate creates an indecipherable sea of letters to prompt reflection on the complications and fallibility of language and to turn a coherent system of writing into a complex abstraction.

• Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra’s Sin título (siete conejos) (2001-2013), a sculptural installation consisting of glue and straw bricks arranged in descending scale, continues the artist’s exploration of the languages of design and architecture. Sierra uses straw as a vernacular material for construction to signify humans’ modification of nature and adaptation to the environment. Engaging ideas of community, habitat, and urbanism, Sierra manipulates architectural dynamics to examine the forces governing human interaction with built environments.

• Argentinian artist Sergio Vega’s Shanty Nucleus After Derrida 2 (2011-2013), which presents yellow monochrome planes suspended in space, creates an array of configurations and walkways that enable an interactive viewing experience. These various planes constitute the color ground on which photographs of “shanty” homes have been mounted to create fragmented sculptural formations inspired by Derrida’s theory of deconstruction.

As an exploration of how abstraction is employed in contemporary Latin American art to convey specific emotions, stories, and ideas stemming from the cultural and political zeitgeist, Stories of Abstraction introduces new narratives within the work of Latin American artists. Providing an overview of post-1990s abstraction from various geographies in Latin America, the exhibition seeks to address the multitude of ways in which artwork lacking figuration or recognizable characters can generate insightful commentary and even political change.

“Stories of Abstraction places the Museum at the forefront of conversations surrounding scholarship, exhibition practices, and the global significance of contemporary Latin American art,” said Vicario. “The exhibition will foster new dialogues in the Phoenix community and beyond and provide the opportunity to learn about the significant achievements of Latin America’s foremost abstract artists.”

About the Exhibition

Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art will be on view from May 2 through September 20, 2020 in Steele Gallery. It is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members. The exhibition features objects donated to the Phoenix Art Museum collection by Nicholas Pardon.

This special-engagement exhibition is free for Museum Members; veterans and active-duty military and their families; and youth aged 5 and younger.

General admission:

$23 — Adults

$20 — Senior citizens (Ages 65+)

$18 — Students (with ID)

$14 — Children (Ages 6–17)

All special-engagement exhibitions are included with general admission. During voluntary-donation times when general admission is pay what you wish, admission to Stories of Abstraction is $5. Voluntary-donation times include Wednesdays from
3 – 9 pm and the first Friday of each month from 6 – 10 pm, with free admission for youth 17 and younger on the last Saturday of each month. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, please see bit.ly/VisitPhxArt.

To request interviews and high-resolution photography, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.307.2003 or samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

The post Phoenix Art Museum to celebrate major gift of contemporary Latin American art with groundbreaking exhibition in May 2020 appeared first on Phoenix Art Museum.