For the past 60 years, Latino and Latin American artists have been exploring the notion of home amid a changing political and socioeconomic landscape.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the first institution to combine about 100 thought-provoking works by 40 artists for the exhibit “Home — So Different, So Appealing: Art from the Americas since 1957,” now on view through Oct. 15 in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.
Four years in the making, the exhibition is not a chronological survey but organized into thematic clusters that showcase diverse artists of different generations working across continents in a range of styles.
“I like to think of each gallery as a meditation upon issues that have been extremely topical over the last 60 years but that are extremely topical today in our current political climate,” says Mari Carmen Ramirez, the exhibition’s co-curator.
Ramirez is also the Wortham curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she is also director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Vincent Price Art Museum at East L.A. College.
Highlights include Camilo Ontiveros’ “Temporary Storage: The Belongings of Juan Manuel Montes,” a “dreamer” protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program designed to shield kids brought to the country illegally and recently deported by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The work is a re-creation of Ontiveros’ 2009 work. In this updated version, the artist gathers Montes’ personal belongings — a plaid quilt-covered twin bed, flat-screen TV, basketball, office chair, red boxing gloves, full-length door mirror, welding books and clothing — and bundles them together with ropes.
The objects are shown precariously balanced atop a pair of sawhorses to represent the instability in the lives of undocumented immigrants with no permanent place to call home.
Ontiveros’ sculpture is one of many reiterations of a previous work, including Maria Elena Gonzalez’s “Magic Carpet.”
A replica floor plan of an apartment in the Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts transformed into an undulating wave, the sculpture has been shown many times, including in South L.A.’s Ted Watkins Park, where residents interacted with it over a six-month period.
“We’re very excited to include it in this new context and to give it a new element of play while considering issues that pertain to housing developments and the urban condition,” says Pilar Tompkins Rivas, the first Latina to oversee the Vincent Price Art Museum since its founding in 1957.
Still another re-creation is Daniel Joseph Martinez’s “The West Bank Is Missing: I Am Not Dead, Am I.” First shown in New York, it consists of two large sculptures featuring three-dimensional representations of 22 Israeli settlements outlined in clear Vacuform shapes.
“This is a model of architecture that is used in the United States for the poor, middle class and very rich,” Martinez says. “But the Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank are using architecture as a tool of war, and they’ve done it by building illegal settlements. By building illegal settlements, they’re essentially squeezing the territory of the Palestinians until there’s nothing left.”
“Home — So Different, So Appealing” is the first of five exhibitions to open at LACMA in conjunction with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which officially launches in September at institutions across Southern California to explore Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with L.A.
The other LACMA exhibitions include “Playing With Fire: Paintings by Carlos Almaraz” opening Aug. 6, “A Universal History of Infamy” opening Aug. 20, “Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985” opening Sept. 17 and “Painted in Mexico, 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici” opening Nov. 19.
