What is Latin American Art? (PST: LA/LA)

Carribean Fragoza (laweekly.com 9/12/17, FB, Twitter); PacificStandardTime.org; edited and expanded by Crystal Quintero, Dhr. Seven, Xochitl, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

This will be the most important showcase of Latin American art in the US in a decade.

Emigdio Vasquez's El Proletariado de Aztlán (detail), 1979, acrylic on plaster, 8’ x 40’ (Chapman University Art Collections/Jessica Bocinski/pacificstandardtime.org/laweekly.com)

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What is Latin American Art? Finding answers at Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

Joaquin Torres-Garcia

The year was 1935. Fascism was on the rise throughout Europe, but the art world was preoccupied with  petty infighting between its abstract and figurative camps. And Joaquín Torres-García had had enough. 

That year the multifaceted artist left France to return to his native Uruguay, eager to quash misguided essentialist European delusions of ethnic, cultural, and artistic purity by writing a manifesto that initiated a new philosophy he called the "School of the South."

He announced that his movement's guiding cardinal direction would be south rather than north, articulating a new way of thinking about Latin American art and the world.

Ken Gonzales-Day:  Exploring Identity and the Construction of Race

 

Kahlo as Campbell's soup can

To further illustrate his point, he irreverently flipped a map of South America on its head.

 

Torres-García's simple ink drawing, called América Invertida ("American Inverted"), captured the spirit of other iconic Latin American artists.

They, too, had returned home from places like New York and Paris to forge an artistic identity in a newfound pride in their cultural and aesthetic heritage. They would become the pillars of Latin American art.

Danny ["Machete" Trejo] mural by Levi Ponce, Van Nuys Bl., Pacoima (Skirball Cultural Center's Gonzales-Day exhibition, "Surface Tension: Murals, Signs and Mark-Making in LA")

 

I love Frida Kahlo this much. She's a goddess.

Torres-García challenged U.S. and European dominance over Latin America.

He proposed creating a uniquely Latin American perspective and aesthetic that honored the region's indigenous roots while drawing connections between pre-Columbian art [this land before the arrival of the genocidal colonial rapist Columbus and the Conquistadors] and European modernism.

Refusing to grant privilege to Western traditions, he proclaimed, "There should be no north for us. From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently to the south, our north."

 

I'm the real Frida, Mexican artist, ex of Diego Rivera

Eighty-two years later, as the world rocks on its political and moral poles once again [due to Trump and his Republocrat backers], Los Angeles shifts its attention to a dazzlingly expansive and interconnected series of exhibitions.

These exhibits by Latin American artists are the latest and largest iteration of The Getty Museum's PST initiative. Over the course of several months, at institutions from Santa Barbara to San Diego, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA features art and artists from across Latin America.

They illuminate the region's historical legacies, from pre-Columbian [500+ years before the present] to contemporary, across all mediums and disciplines.

"Hi, neighbor" (by Vincent Ramos)

The scheduled shows, performances, and other events present the possibility for adventure, but they also pose an impossible-to-answer question: What is Latin American art? Better yet, What constitutes Latin America?

• [WQ's proposed answer: All of the places that used to speak Nahuatl or a dialect of the Uto-Aztecan language that were then forced to speak only Spanish by the imperial invading colonial overlords.]

The idea of Latin America, according to renowned Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo, is an outdated project of nation-building that belonged to 19th-century Europe that homogenizes as it subdivides the Americas.
 

Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A., Los Angeles Central Library (oaxaca.lfla.org)

When we got to Ellis Island... Wait. We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us.

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Aztec eagle and serpent motif

PST: LA/LA attempts to break up homogenizing notions of what Latin American art is and who Latin American artists are.

"One thing I've found after all these years, when you're looking at a whole hemisphere, there is no way to sum it up. There are many things that join us, but there are so many stories to tell. It's vast," says Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum Pilar Tompkins-Rivas.

 

Tompkins-Rivas, who was part of the brain trust that conceived of PST, acknowledges that mounting such a massive venture was daunting but it felt necessary in Los Angeles. More

• Los Angeles Times: Exhibits will celebrate Latin American and Latino art in Orange County
• PacificStandardTime.org: Exhibitions: Emigdio Vasquez's "The Proletariat of Aztlan" mural

Detail of first figure ((left side) in El Proletariado de Aztlan by Emigdio Vasquez

It's an enormous mural on the side of a SoCal building, "The Proletariat of Aztlan"