The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York will present the exhibition Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, which marks the second phase of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, the exhibition features contemporary works by 37 artists and collaborative duos from 16 countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico (United States), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Following its presentation in New York, Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today will travel to two additional venues.
Featuring nearly 50 works including installations, mixed-media works, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and works on paper, Under the Same Sun surveys the most significant contemporary art practices in Latin America today. This presentation is the second of three exhibitions that form part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. The artworks in the exhibition, along with others acquired as part of the initiative, will become part of the Guggenheim's permanent collection under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund.
Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, stated: “The Guggenheim has a long history of engagement with Latin American art, beginning with The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960s, an exhibition organized by former Guggenheim Director Thomas Messer in 1964. With Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative adds to our growing collection of contemporary Latin American art and provides the opportunity to engage visitors in meaningful dialogue about the many variations of identity and culture in the region.”
"The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative helps provide a holistic view of some of the world's most dynamic and fast-changing regions," says CEO, UBS Wealth Management Jürg Zeltner. "With this collaboration we align a global, cultural perspective with our experience in the emerging markets."
Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today is organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America. Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and Joan Young, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, provide curatorial oversight for the entire initiative.
“The Guggenheim UBS MAP Initiative gives us the opportunity to redraw cultural and artistic maps, to remove boundaries, and to create new relationships between different artistic centers,” León de la Barra stated. “The term peripheries no longer applies; we’ve learned to recognize that what’s happening elsewhere is as important as what’s happening in what used to be the centers. The more aware we are, and the more in dialogue we are with what’s happening, the more we will learn as artists, as people, and as communities, and the more we will be able to create new ways of thinking.”
The exhibition examines the diversity of today’s creative responses to complex shared realities, which have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress. Despite financial growth and increased stability in most of the continent over the past decade, it remains divided by social and ethnic differences and marked by political and economic shifts. León de la Barra’s exhibition presents artistic responses to the past and present that are inscribed within these contexts, and explores the possibility of the construction of alternative futures.
The artworks in Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today are organized according to the following themes:
- Conceptualism and its Legacies includes works by pioneering Latin American Conceptualists who were active in the U.S. during the 1970s and ’80s, many of whom are still working today. These figures infiltrated and questioned the artistic and political mainstream, attempting to intervene in social reality and propose a narrative in marked contrast to that of the North American and European Minimalist and Conceptualist artists, whose works are often rooted in ideas of autonomy and immateriality.
- Tropicologies acknowledges the effects that climate, nature, and location have on cultural production, but argues that being “tropical” goes beyond weather and geography. Works in this section also re-evaluate the knowledge of native Amerindian cultures, reactivating their aesthetics and symbolisms.
- Political Activism addresses social and political context, and confronts the ways in which Latin American artists have steered aesthetics toward denunciation and dissent, protesting against foreign political and economic influences, dictatorial political regimes, and the violence of the drug trade.
- Modernism and its Failures questions the disjunction between modernity’s ideals and its imperfect realities, and includes work by artists dealing with the legacy of modernism today.
- Participation/Emancipation examines the possibilities of participation through art. Works will invite visitors to understand art as a participatory experience, not only as an object of contemplation.
*image (left)
Wilfredo Prieto
Walk, 2000
Plant, soil, photograph, and wheelbarrow, overall dimensions variable
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund
Courtesy the artist and NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona/Madrid
