The Evolving Latin American Canon

The Evolving Latin American Canon

Date: 7 June 2012 (Thursday)
Time: 12:30-2:00pm
Venue: Room 2.38, Main Building, HKU

In this seminar the following questions will be examined: How do Western museums re-think modernist art historical canons today? How can modern museums frame global contemporary art within a modernist context that does not represent modernities outside the US/Eurocentric art historical narrative? My case study is a crucial and undocumented aspect of Alfred H. Barr’s articulation of the modernist canon at The Museum of Modern art, the presence of works by artists from Latin America in permanent collection galleries. The goal is to shed light on an as yet unstudied aspect of MoMA’s preeminent role in establishing the definition of the problematic term “Latin American art” in the United States. In examining Barr’s shifting categorization of these works according to stylistic and geographic taxonomies, we gain a greater understanding of his thinking about the organization of the Museum’s collections as a whole during the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 1960s, curator Elaine L. Johnson sought to revive Barr’s interest in this area of the collection yet her contributions are unknown today. Barr’s inclusive international collection display groupings and Johnson’s proposals to fill gaps in collecting by creating a geographically specific curatorial area within MoMA prefigure strategies employed by museums in the United States and Europe today.

Speaker: Miriam Margarita Basilio

Dr. Miriam Margarita Basilio is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at New York University, where she has been since 2005. She was previously Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, where she co-curated Tempo (2002) and Latin American and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo (2004). Her research interests include the history of visual, print, and exhibition culture during the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and contemporary art, museums, and the the politics of memory today, the subject of her first book. Another are of research interest is the history of collection displays at The Museum of Art during the 1940s-1950s in relation to the creation of the category “Latin American art” in the United States, as it moved within, and outside of, the Western Modernist canon, the subject of her second book. She has published in publications for exhibitions held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.