Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 07 - Latin American Art

Visitors to the Museo Jumex in Mexico City attend an opening-night party above a series of pill sculptures by art collective General Idea. http://beta.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-mexico-city-art-scene-20170601-htmlstory.html

Today I’m going through some culture shock. After a quick glance at the Fulbright’s reminders about culture shock, I think, yes I know this and can handle it.

Yesterday at PUCV’s architecture school, I met two staff from Documenta, one in exhibitions and the other in communications. They are in Chile for a month and then will stay Mexico City. Everyone’s talking about Mexico City, they said. I remember this from my time at UCSD when some artists in the mid-2000s were starting to connect to Jumex for funding. This morning, I read the following update from the LA Times.

A PUCV student asked me what North American artists think of Latin American art. Having gone to school in San Diego, our connection to Mexico was always strong. Beyond Mexico, I think of the modernist architecture and vivid use of color from Brazilian artists like Lygia Clark. Having known many Chilean artists at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1990s, I know the work of Juan Downey and painter Roberto Matta, who studied at my host school PUCV, and his son Gordon Matta-Clark, born in New York City. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Allora & Calzadilla, Pia Camil, Jose Davila, Gabriel Kuri, Adrián Villar Rojas, Gabriel Orozco, Damian Ortega, Analia Saban, Alex Da Corte and my friend Ricardo Miranda Zuniga. I could keep writing many names, but the Getty currently has an amazing survey up right now called Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA about the connection between art in LA and Latin America. More here: http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/ Highlights for me are the exhibitions at the Hammer (https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2017/radical-women-latin-american-art-1960-1985/) and LAXART (http://laxart.org/exhibitions/view/pacific-standard-time-lala-video-art-in-latin-america/#press-items). I write all this here so that I can remember the next time a Chilean student asks me.

Today I am wrapping up grades and hopefully moving onto my research here. Future global scholar awardees, this is not an ideal time to schedule part of your Fulbright, especially when you have to leave your six-year old daughter in the States (a detail that is quietly breaking me). Still, I’ll get the work done.

More about my Fulbright Global Scholar Award to Germany, Chile and Hong Kong
More about the Fulbright Global Scholar Award in general