The Concept of Latin American Art

AMA AND THE CONCEPT
OF LATIN AMERICAN ART

– Olga U. Herrera, PHD

Opening on October 14, 1976, the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States (OAS) holds a place of great significance in the formation of modern and contemporary networks of Latin American Art.¹ The first museum of its kind, AMA’s captivating history of promoting the visual arts of the hemisphere and supporting an emerging field of study has its genesis in the work of two equally important institutional predecessors: the Division of Intellectual Cooperation of the Pan American Union (1929-1948) and the Visual Arts Section of the Department of Cultural Affairs at the OAS (1948-1976).² Both Division and Section were not only instrumental in advancing a nascent network of modern Latin American art in the United States at mid-century, but also in helping to bring a larger aesthetic consciousness into a geographical artistic scene and an art historical category in U.S. academia. In a Pan-American System dating from 1890, the dissemination of information on art and artists and the presentation of temporary exhibitions became a means for international cooperation and understanding fostering cultural interchange within a framework of peace and moral disarmament in the inter-war years,³ as well as international relations in a post-war world.⁴ As such, the Division and the Section played key roles in solidifying the initial circuits and circulations of art, artists, and knowledge with exhibitions, pamphlets, bibliographies, reports, and art-related articles in their respective newsletters and bulletins.⁵ Along with other equally important actors, they were influential in shaping and maintaining notions of a contemporary visuality in the Americas with evolving concepts and canons of Latin American art.⁶  While the foundational role of the Division in the 1930s and 1940s with its hidden, and not dissimilar, histories and actors has barely begun to be explored and recognized after decades of obscurity in narratives,⁷ the Section’s activities post-1948 have benefitted from closer scholarly attention and scrutiny.⁸ A study of the influence of AMA and its historical contributions cannot be complete without considering the impactful trajectory of these two predecessors and the key interventions of the Division in the 1930s and 1940s in setting the strong foundations of a hemispheric and regional art and various entanglements with shifting concepts of Latin American art. In fact, in 1931 the city of Washington, seat of U.S. power and permanent diplomatic missions, was transformed into a central node for international art and artists.⁹ Through the efforts of Leo S. Rowe, Director General of the Pan American Union, and in collaboration with foreign embassies and the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, Latin American and Caribbean art exhibitions soon became a permanent fixture and the city became the first stop to introduce emerging and established artists to U.S. audiences. When the Pan American Union’s Office of Education was absorbed by the new and expanded Division of Intellectual Cooperation in 1929, its efforts to collect and disseminate information on aspects of culture soon established a model for the promotion of the visual arts.¹⁰ Working with national committees of intellectual cooperation throughout Latin America, it created a substantial network for exchange of information and collaboration.In the years between 1931 and 1933, the Division became actively involved in hosting exhibitions such as The First Representative Collection of Paintings by Contemporary Brazilian Artists organized and circulated by the International Art Center of the Roerich Museum in New York;¹¹ a loan exhibition of paintings by children from the open-air art schools in Mexico (escuela de pintura al aire libre); and an exhibition of lithographs by a Mexican artist that circulated throughout the country.¹² Likewise, it sponsored the presentation in 1932 of the exhibition Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós Paintings featuring twenty-nine paintings of Gaucho life,¹³ as well as an exhibition of etchings, woodcuts, and dry-points by nineteen Argentinean artists. It contributed artworks by Latin American children to the Children’s Gallery at the Chicago World’s Fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933-1934. In parallel and complementary actions, it worked with the American Federation of Arts to secure art journals for a museum in Argentina;¹⁴ collaborated with the Carnegie Institute to send catalogs of former international exhibitions to Latin American artists,¹⁵ and, equally important, established a knowledge foundation by initiating the compilation of the first detailed bibliographies about colonial and contemporary Latin American art.¹⁶ The Division’s work exclusively centered on contemporary art and artists anticipating the future focus of the Section of Visual Arts and the AMA. Spending five months in nine countries in Latin America in 1934, the Division’s new assistant chief Concha Romero James met and established long lasting relationships with painters, sculptors, and graphic artists. In the process she collected photographs and reproductions of their artworks, newspaper clippings, catalogs of exhibitions, and monographs and books that became part of the Division’s initial and popular loan collection for schools, colleges, and libraries.¹⁷ Some of this new material went immediately on display at the San Diego Exposition of 1935-1936, the Carnegie Public Library, Addison Gallery, Goucher College, Phillips-Exeter Academy, Berea College, and at the International House of the Young Women’s Christian Association in Milwaukee.¹⁸ In addition, Romero James set up one of the initial models of contemporary Pan American art information exchange in 1935 with the newsletter Correo featuring news volunteered by its readers in Latin America, a tactic which would be employed later by her successor in the Boletín de Artes Visuales of the 1950s-1970s.¹⁹ Working collaboratively with the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress (LOC), Romero James became the scholar in charge of the annual bibliography and review of literature on contemporary art for the Handbook of Latin American Studies in 1936-1941.²⁰ Her statements provide glimpses into her conception of contemporary art as a well-versed individual on the subject and attuned to yearly art historical scholarship production, artistic developments, and exhibitions. Her perspective indeed was informed by a regional lens of her employer as a “union” of twenty-one countries with active artistic links among them. Although presented under the heading “Spanish American Art”—an indexing term by the LOC uniting the Americas—Romero James in her reviews used the term “Latin American Art” widely. In her introductory and critical bibliographic notations in architecture, painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts, she noted her views on the inter-regional presentation of art and the crucial role of art “as a tool to cement inter-American cultural relations.”²¹

The early orientation of the intellectual cooperation and cultural relations work and functions of the Division were always mandated by resolutions adopted at the various Inter-American Conferences. Therefore, these initial encounters of the Division with contemporary Latin American art were subsequently amplified by the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance, Preservation, and Establishment of Peace held in Buenos Aires on December 1-23, 1936. Specific conventions for the exchange of publications and art exhibitions facilitated the strengthening of the early hemispheric circuit for dissemination of information on modern Latin American art that Romero James was initiating for the Pan American Union.²² Although the Division’s main tool in the contemporary visual arts became its image loan collection, the impact of circulating reproductions of modern art in the U.S. at this early time, even as simply as dry-mounted board exhibitions of reproductions of artworks, should not be discounted. About it Romero James would remark: “On several occasions the advisability of exhibiting the original work of certain Latin American artists in the United States was determined after an examination of the reproductions…the Carnegie Institution, for instance, made use of the photographs in the loan collection of the Division before extending invitations to Argentina, Brazil, Chile to send exhibits to the Carnegie International Exposition in 1935.”²³ By 1939, the Division was contributing to new and shifting conceptions of Latin American art thanks to increased hemispheric interchange and awareness in the visual arts through channels of collaboration among public and private institutions and individuals. The Division also worked to strengthen and increase art education by distributing sixty sets of forty-eight color prints of masterpieces put together by the National Committee on Art Appreciation to schools of fine arts, artists, and critics in Latin America. Interested in the promotion of graphic art and book design, it organized an exhibition of the art of book-making with the best books of 1937 in collaboration with the American Institute of Graphic Arts for display in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima.²⁴ In Washington, the Division was one of the key actors in the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Art organized by the Department of State on October 11-12, 1939 with Romero James providing a comprehensive assessment of the development of the visual arts in Latin America.²⁵ She also participated in the subsequent Continuation Committee of the Conference in February 1940 charged with recommendations for artistic interchange, facilities for research, and publications, some of which were implemented a decade later.²⁶ During the World War II years, the work of the Division grew. By 1943 it counted an image loan collection of about 2,000 photographs and reproductions by some 500 contemporary artists in the Americas, in addition to exhibition catalogs that were used by scholars, museums, colleges, libraries, and universities at the time. Recognizing the opportunity to bring these resources together and make them available in more intellectual formats—bio sketches and interpretation at a moment when a limited number of images and information circulated in the United States—led the Division to early conversations about a dedicated Art Section in the Division.²⁷ Securing a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the “systematization of work in the field of [contemporary] art”²⁸ and the “compilation of information on Latin American artists.”²⁹ This step meant the recommitment of the PAU to contemporary art of Latin America, rather than 19^th century or the colonial period, areas left to the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress.³⁰ A reflection of this new attention to documentation was the publication Thirty Latin American Artists, Biographical Notes in September 1943. Carefully curated, it was the first attempt at establishing a baseline for the future work in contemporary art: Eduardo Abela, Luis Alberto Acuña, Ricardo Aguerre, Tarsila do Amaral, Carmelo de Arzadun, Camilo Blas, Horacio Butler, Julia Codesido, Miguel Covarrubias, Camilo Egas, Humberto Garavito, Jesús Herrera Galván, María Izquierdo, Alfredo Guido, Eduardo Kingman, José Mejía Vides, Camilo Mori, Francisco Narváez, Marina Nuñez del Prado, José Clemente Orozco, Emilio Pettoruti, Cândido Portinari, Diego Rivera, Lorenzo Romero Arciaga, Rómulo Rozo, José Sabogal, Lasar Segall, Antonio Sotomayor, Sergio Sotomayor, and Jorge Vinatea Reinoso.³¹ Although without an introduction to explain a method of selection, and considerably varying from the 1943 dominant grouping developed by the Museum of Modern Art’s Latin American Collection, this was a canonical and balanced representation of artists—including four women artists hailing from member countries of the Pan American Union. Besides the bibliography, it also issued a packet of thirty black and white reproductions of paintings and sculptures under the title of Contemporary Art in Latin America.  

This engagement with promotion and distributing images of contemporary Latin American art also extended to a second packet Children in Latin American Art. With a thematic arrangement, the educational set of twelve black and white reproductions of paintings with children and families as subject matter featured descriptive text and short biographies. Once mounted on board, the reproductions could be displayed as an exhibition of works by Luis Alberto Acuña, Carlos Aliseris, Héctor Banderas, Antonio Berni, Maria Capdevila, Fernando Castillo, Pachita Crespi, Alfredo Gálvez Suárez, Eduardo Kingman, José Mejía Vides, Cândido Portinari, and Diego Rivera. Adding a few new artists to this project expanded the Division’s own promulgated evolving canon of foremost artists of a geographic Latin American art in the World War II years. However, the Division attained a deeper engagement with Latin American art in August 1944 when Leslie Judd Switzer, former Secretary of Alfred H. Barr at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), joined the Pan American Union as an art specialist—a temporary position made possible by the Rockefeller grant.³² Instrumental in solidifying projects, she traveled to Mexico and Central America to collect materials and get acquainted with artists such as those she wrote about in the Bulletin of the Pan American Union.³³ She likewise converted files of more than 1,000 artists into an archive and worked in the initial production of a series of monographs to be written by renowned art critics from Latin America. Switzer also had a significant role in acquiring artworks and developing a collection of woodcuts, lithographs, and silk screens which were organized in a series of small exhibitions in the Map Room of the main PAU building and offered as circulating exhibitions.³⁴ Among these were Carlos Mérida: Color Prints of Mexico and Guatemala, Engravings of Mexico by Leopoldo Méndez, and Sixty-five Woodcuts from Argentina.³⁵ She also worked on curating the exhibitions of Héctor Poleo Paintings and Drawings, and Antonio Sotomayor which the Council for Inter-American Cooperation circulated throughout the United States, and the exhibition Sculptures by Genaro Amador Lira at the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. A second grant from the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) furthered the work of the Division in 1944-1945 with the development and presentation of a series of temporary and traveling exhibitions.³⁶ Annemarie Henle, an exhibits specialist in the Division, organized and circulated the exhibitions Ancient Peruvian Textiles, Mexican Handicrafts From the Ledbetter Collection, Children’s Books Illustrated by Latin American Artists, Chilean Textiles. ³⁷ She worked along Switzer on curating the Poleo exhibition. In addition, Henle collaborated with the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) in organizing small exhibitions that the AFA circulated across the country.³⁸ She also traveled to various sites in the U.S. to study Latin American collections in twenty-one centers and participate in conferences where the need for group and solo exhibitions of contemporary artists such as Héctor Poleo, Mario Carreño, Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamayo, Candido Portinari, and Federico Cantú publications, films, slides, and recordings were noted.³⁹ Both Switzer and Henle worked on the second set of the Contemporary Art in Latin America packet with new reproductions and biographical information on thirty-six new artists from sixteen countries which complemented the 1943 selection. Expanding the canon were artists Luis Alberto Acuña, Genaro Amador Lira, Jorge Arche, Aquiles Badi, Roberto Berdecio, Cundo Bermúdez, Antonio Berni, Jean-Baptiste Bottex, Mario Carreño, Teresa Carvallo, José Chávez Morado, Julia Codesido, Raquel Forner, Antonio Gattorno, Francisco Goitia, Oswaldo Guayasamín, Ricardo Martínez, Carlos Mérida, Bernabe Michelena, José Clemente Orozco, Máximo Pacheco, Amelia Peláez, Héctor Poleo, Cândido Portinari, Alfonso Ramírez Fajardo, Teodoro Ramos Blanco, Israel Roa, Felix Rojas Ullóa, Lasar Segall, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Darío Suro, Antonio Tejada Fonseca, Joaquín Torres García, Raúl Vargas, René Vincent, and Francisco Zúñiga, some of whom have artworks featured in this catalog. However, with these packets, the Division presented a wider view of the various styles and subjects to showcase a complete panorama of a contemporary hemispheric art scene. Although not using the term “Latin American art,” but a more appropriate “art in Latin America,” the selections were representative of most countries with an emphasis on what they distinguished as trends marked by pre-Columbian art (Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador), modernist experiments (Cuba, Brazil, and Venezuela) and African influence (Brazil and West Indies).⁴⁰ The scope and focus of the work carried out by Switzer and Henle under Romero James in these years was foundational in establishing concepts of Latin America art as being inclusive of all member countries of the Pan American Union. Also important was their work in temporary and traveling exhibitions which had grown to seventeen at the beginning of 1945.⁴¹ Their most significant project of the time relating to Latin American art documentation, however, was the series of small twenty-four-page monographs on notable contemporary artists to be published with the support of a grant from the temporary war agency Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). Featuring a biographical sketch, a bibliography, about twenty images, and an essay by an art critic tracing the development of his/her art and locating the artist’s work in the larger art scene of his/her/their country and the world, they would increase the circulation of knowledge about the foremost Latin American artists among U.S. audiences. Although eliciting suggestions from more than a dozen experts and compiling a final list of living artists, ⁴² the series Contemporary Artists in Latin America only issued three monographs on Diego Rivera by Bertram D. Wolfe, Emilio Pettoruti by Leonardo Estarico, and Mario Carreño by José Gómez Sicre, Switzer’s replacement when she left the Division in January 1946.

At the untimely death of Director General Leo S. Rowe in December of 1946, former Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Presidential Designate Alberto Lleras Camargo succeeded him in June 1947, a moment of deep institutional self-assessment to respond to a new postwar world order and an evolving Inter-American system.⁴³ A more fitting regional organization for the American states in a new atomic era was approved in 1946 by the PAU General Council “to achieve an order of peace and justice, to promote their solidarity, to strengthen their collaboration, and to defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and their independence,”⁴⁴ serving the cause of the United Nations. This included three Assistant Secretaries overseeing seven administrative departments among them one of Cultural Affairs, which expanded the work, previously in the purview of intellectual cooperation, in the areas of Education; Music, and Visual Arts; Philosophy, Letters, and Science; the Columbus Library and the Office of Inter-American Library Service.⁴⁵ It also established a new technical organ, the Inter-American Cultural Council whose secretary was the director of the department.⁴⁶ Concha Romero James moved to a new role of special advisor while Jorge Basadre, a historian and former minister of education in Peru, became the first Director of Cultural Affairs (1948-1953) under an Assistant Secretary of Cultural, Scientific, and Informational Affairs. He would be succeeded by Érico Veríssimo (1953-1956), Juan Marín (1956-1963), Rafael Squirru (1963-1970) and others thereafter. In this more complex multi-layered hierarchical organization, a new Division of Music and Visual Arts directed by Charles Seeger with Gómez Sicre as an art specialist continued the initial foundations already in place for a deeper engagement with contemporary artists and Latin American art and new tasks of technical cooperation and special projects with all member countries.⁴⁷

Noteworthy, the last and yet very significant act of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation—before the April 1948 reorganization—provides a glimpse into the larger role the new OAS would play in further maintaining and promoting active hemispheric contemporary art circuits in the postwar era. In February 1948 both Romero James and Gómez Sicre took part in the festivities surrounding the inauguration of Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos. The Division organized the exhibition Exposición Panamericana de Pintura Moderna in collaboration with the Venezuelan minister of education with artworks belonging to the Museum of Modern Art, galleries, artists, and private collectors presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas on February 16-28, 1948.⁴⁸ Curated by Gómez Sicre the ambitious exhibition marked a new canon from earlier ones in the 1943-1945 art packets. Now encompassing the whole hemisphere, the selection of sixty-two paintings, drawings, gouaches, and pastels by forty-three artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela became a representative sample of a new moment in art.⁴⁹ In his introduction, Gómez Sicre allowed a critical stance that would go on to shape new concepts of a Latin American art free of any “official flavors” or as he explained “extricated from the trappings of an intolerable realism, product of the majority of the art academies of the world that only feed ‘medals’ and ‘diplomas.’”⁵⁰ Underscoring the artists’ aesthetic independence, he emphasized this new moment in art “as a fragment of a movement energetically developing in the Americas, giving hope to the rich fate awaiting its future.”⁵¹ Invalidating notions for a rampant realism, this was a reaffirmation of his penchant for emerging art trends and his dedicated focus on young artists whom he would go on to champion in the 1950s. In this last exhibition by the Division, Gómez Sicre saw a new beginning: “as diverse versions of sensibilities—national, international, intellectual, primitivist, etc.—and as valid reasons for a firm belief in the reality of a new continental culture.”⁵² As such, the work of the Division in 1943-1948 anticipated aspects and served as a foundation to the post-1948 visual arts orientation in the 1950s and 1960s with temporary exhibitions, documentation, publications, and bulletins. ⁵³

CONCEPTS AND CONCEPTIONS FOR A CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN ART IN A NEW WORLD ORDER

A larger continental conception of Latin American art would come to inform the new Department of Cultural Affairs’ visual arts vision as the postwar circuits of modern art were being reactivated in 1948. Just a few months after joining the Division in 1946, Gómez Sicre had shared his aesthetic creed in a Venezuelan newspaper where he stated his values: “I love, I adore, an art born of freedom, as I am passionate about the idea of a world of free men who do not depend but on their own effort…I hate localisms and I disparage a demanding nationalism which wants to link form to content.”⁵⁴ His new impetus to network the hemisphere led him to key interventions that would help to further elaborate his conceptions. The exhibition 32 Artistas de las Americas, as his first major curatorial project of 1949, became his international presentation card. With art works mostly on loan from the Latin American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, it marked the moment in which the OAS Visual Arts Section began to establish the coordinates of Latin American art in a new art world. More refined in its selection than the 1948 Exposición Panamericana de Pintura Moderna, the exhibition nevertheless shifted a discourse of the possibilities of a contemporary Latin American art by “initiating a revision of the diverse currents feeding the visual arts of the Americas.”⁵⁵ Establishing a new geographical aesthetic and visuality as the decade of the 1940s was coming to an end, it featured such figures as Horacio Butler, Alfredo Guido, Emilio Pettoruti, Roberto Berdecio, Percy Deane, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Cândido Portinari, Lasar Segall, Israel Roa, Luis Alberto Acuña, Gonzalo Ariza, Cundo Bermúdez, Mario Carreño, Luis Martínez Pedro, Amelia Peláez, Eduardo Kingman, Stuart Davis, Arthur G. Dove, Karl Zerbe, Carlos Merida, Gabriel Alix, Philome Obin, José Chavez Morado, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Rodrigo Peñalba, Pedro Figari, Joaquín Torres García, Mateo Manaure, Alejandro Otero, and Héctor Poleo. Throughout the cities on the West Coast of South America and Central America where it travelled, it generated great interest in the dissemination of the various artistic currents in the various geographical locales in Panama, Bogota, Quito, Lima, Santiago, Havana, Guatemala, and El Salvador.⁵⁶ Just as Goméz Sicre was expanding the space of action with new nodes in a large nascent network, São Paulo was adding a new central one in the world’s contemporary art scene with plans for a new biennial to be held in 1951. Invited to conversations about the initials plans, he saw a larger role for his new office in an area in which he was an expert. At the lack of an official representation of his native Cuba, he proposed a presentation of Cuban art sponsored by his OAS Visual Arts Section, which was accepted. True to his credo against academism, he chose vanguard artists who had rebelled against academism and others who were self-taught—all learning to investigate by themselves forms, light, and colors of the island. He showcased works by Cundo Bermúdez, Mario Carreño, Luis Martínez Pedro, Amelia Peláez, and René Portocarrero.⁵⁷ Unusual as it was a representation by an organization rather than an official one by a nation, Gómez Sicre carved a new space for the artists of Cuba and eventually for those who were not part of national representations. With a Brazilian national—Érico Veríssimo—as Chief of the Department of Cultural Affairs, it was easier for him to navigate the bureaucracy to have permanent delegations of the Pan American Union at future editions of the influential São Paulo Biennial. In 1955 he presented the work of Roberto Matta, Alejandro Obregón, José Ygnacio Bermúdez, José Luis Cuevas, Hugo Consuegra, and Carlos Faz as artists “who deserved to appear in this event of unparalleled importance in the Americas.”⁵⁸ In his work disseminating and promoting emerging artists, he presented a delegation of a new selection of painters and sculptors in the 1957 biennial, among them Carlos Merida, Alejandro Otero, Manuel Rendon, Enrique Zañartu, and Edgar Negret. In his introduction to the group, Gómez Sicre noted his criteria to select artists working in tendencies such as abstraction to promote new perspectives and talent.⁵⁹ Continuing in his quest to network contemporary Latin American art and artists and provide a much wider circulation for the 1959 biennial, he presented Armando Morales and Georges Liautaud, as two artists of two generations, two techniques, two trainings, and two spirits who reflected the serious art of the Americas.⁶⁰ For the 1961 edition he chose Alfredo Da Silva and Clorindo Testa as two artists whose educational background was architecture,⁶¹ and for the 1963 edition he featured David Manzur, Omar Rayo, and Pedro Pont Verges whose art represented the new trends of young artists.⁶² From these experiences and other observations in the 1950s and early 1960s, Gómez Sicre advanced a series of concepts of Latin American art from his editorial notes in Boletín de Artes Visuales which helped to construct a larger hemispheric aesthetic imaginary and foundation for the 1970s and beyond. As he demonstrated with the permanent representation at the biennial, he advocated the creation “of our own scale of values in the visual arts of the continent and our points of support, our art evaluation centers.”⁶³ In a network with centers and circulations, Gómez Sicre also made appeals anticipating tenets of contemporary globalization of the 1990s such as the free circulation of images and art. In 1958 he was calling for a borderless hemisphere “in which art would circulate, without passport or restrictions, everywhere in the Americas.”⁶⁴ In his vision of a networked geographical space he was not shy to claim: “The young artist in the Americas knows that new international centers of art are appearing on this continent and he/she counts with prerequisite points of reception, New York and Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Lima, Mexico City and São Paulo, and Caracas and Washington.”⁶⁵ These were reflections of the formalist values he inflected to shape a particular concept where in 1959 there was no room for “indigenisms, farmerisms, working class movements or demagogy.”⁶⁶ But as Alejandro Anreus’s and Abigail McEwen’s essays in these pages so eloquently tell us, indeed he shaped our understanding of what a Latin American art should be with his multiple interventions in the 1950s and 1960s. As Gómez Sicre continued his work to promote the modern and contemporary art of Latin America on a path of an ascendant arc, the great visibility in international circuits would mark his tenure until 1976 when at age sixty and after thirty years of professional work he realized his dream of a permanent home for a growing art collection, which he had successfully nurtured from 1949 with his gift of Portinari’s Return from the Fair. The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America was created by the OAS Permanent Council for “preserving, studying, and exhibiting works by outstanding Latin American artists and (to) carry out other activities of an educational nature which will increase understanding and appreciation of Latin American culture.”⁶⁷ He would remain in the job until May 1983 and was instrumental in securing artworks for the new OAS Secretariat Building by Leonardo Nierman, Manabu Mabe, Fernando de Szyszlo, Raquel Forner, Ramón Oviedo, Cundo Bermudez, Enrique Arnal, Inés Córdova, and Elmar Rojas. 

Upon Gómez Sicre’s retirement, Rogelio Novey of the Office of the Secretary General became the museum’s interim director. He oversaw the completion of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to reinstall the permanent collection and improve its educational and aesthetic appeal as well as the publication of the catalog of selections in 1985.⁶⁸ Adopting an art historical and inter-disciplinary approach, the museum revised its relationship to the collection to explore not only stylistic affinities but also the diverse cultural, historical, and socio-economic context. In the existing five galleries, the new arrangement presented the forerunners of modernism, geometric tradition, lyric abstraction, figuration, and folk art.⁶⁹ In March 1988, Venezuelan art historian and art critic Bélgica Rodríguez became the second permanent director of the museum. As President of the International Association of Art Critics, she brought an internationalist vision positioning the museum as a living one—an intellectual cultural space of exhibitions, conferences and seminars, and courses to highlight the various aspects of Latin American art.⁷⁰ Reflecting on Latin American art as a diversified art scene drawing from everyday life, political and social issues, and with a vocabulary of a historical past and traditions and freedom, she took the museum on a path of professional growth and activity.⁷¹ She understood at the moment the development of Latin American artistic production “as a process of a cross-fertilization that can be narrowly defined as combinations, influences, appropriations, and juxtapositions…as a concept that defines the influences and appropriations by artists, linking context and cultural heritage to create their own visual language.” ⁷² In a new engagement with the reality of a growing hemispheric political organization and with a wider geographical scope, the name of the museum was changed to the Art Museum of the Americas in 1991.⁷³ Rodriguez’s vision expanded the concept the museum had of painting and graphic arts to be inclusive of sculpture and installations giving new impetus to collecting. The exhibition Escultura de América en los Años Noventa yielded substantive gifts to AMA by Enrique Grau, Marta Palau, Marta Minujin, José Sancho, Tony Capellan, Melquiades Rosario, and Rolando Peña, among others. A similar action with photography and the exhibition Imágenes del Silencio: La Fotografía de América Latina en los Ochenta reinserted photography as an important medium in the art of Latin America after having hosted the first Inter-American Salon on photography in 1948. In 1995 a new director of AMA arrived a few months after OAS Secretary General César Gaviria, whose personal interest in contemporary art supported an active institutional engagement with emerging artists of the Americas.⁷⁴ In a new era in the museum’s history as the third permanent director, Ana María Escallón promoted a program of local visibility with major exhibitions such as the 1996 Botero in Washington at President’s Park: Monumental Sculpture, a group of eighteen public sculptures previously presented along major avenues in cities such as Paris, New York, and Chicago. However, in the years prior to the end of the twentieth century, the survey exhibition Mastering the Millennium: Art of the Americas, co-organized by AMA and the World Bank, became a dialog of AMA with a hemisphere preoccupied with the forces of globalization and artistic responses and reflections on identity and new shifting demarcations of space, time, and memory.⁷⁵ But in a new global circuit of contemporary art with biennials, art fairs, and galleries, AMA like other museums had to compete for attention and visitors. AMA then became interested in “stimulating artistic production and furthering cultural understanding and cooperation in the hemisphere.”⁷⁶ In other words, refocusing its attention to emerging talent and new expression and trends from the OAS member countries. In the twenty-first century, AMA’s engagement with Latin American art has followed more closely the directives of permanent and interim OAS Secretary Generals and institutional re-organizations of internal structures directly impinging on work in cultural affairs.⁷⁷ In the years 2006-2016, AMA’s directors Lydia Bendersky and Andrés Navia turned inwardly with an introspective look at the stewardship of the museum and its operations, its relationship with the OAS, and a wider national and international circulation of the permanent collection in collaboration with other multilateral organizations and museums.⁷⁸ The 2010-2011 exhibition Arte en América, featuring close to 100 works from AMA along with a similar number of works from the Inter-American Development Bank art collection, traveled to Chile for a showing at the Centro Cultural La Moneda.⁷⁹ Curated by staff from the cultural center, the relationship of AMA with the concept of Latin American art was seen through a third-party lens as a historical one in dialog with the diversity of identity over a period of 100 years.⁸⁰ However, new engagements with the permanent collection by guest curators have brought new perspectives and reinterpretations adding dynamism to AMA and eliciting encounters with new concepts. In 2012 AMA presented Constellations: Constructivism, Internationalism and the Inter-American Avant-Garde, an exhibition that explored the collection from a new institutional framework that recognized “the socially constructive role that the arts have played in fostering democracy and freedom of expression at intense historical moments of political and social change.”⁸¹ Following a similar arrangement, the 2013-2014 exhibition Libertad de Expresión: The Art Museum of the Americas and the Cold War Politics featuring works from the AMA permanent collection also reinterpreted the relationship of AMA with Latin American art during the Cold War. From a third-party view, AMA privileged abstract styles conversant with international and European cosmopolitan trends to emphasize its place in the art world. Thus, underscoring freedom of expression that excluded artists with socialist or communist sympathies and tints.⁸² More recently, AMA’s view of Latin American art has been from the perspective of the transformative nature of art on individuals and communities while aligning exhibitions and programs to the core values of the OAS on democracy, development, human rights, justice, freedom of expression, and innovation which resonate with themes in contemporary art. Now part of an organization with thirty-five member countries, the museum with Pablo Zúñiga as director has continued its conversation with emerging and established artists, exhibiting new art forms and expressions while promoting its unique permanent art collection, examples of which we see on the following pages.     

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1 Although initially named Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, in 1991 the OAS changed the museum’s name to Art Museum of the Americas to reflect on an expanded hemispheric focus inclusive of Canada which joined the Organization of American States in 1990 and other non-Hispanophone Caribbean nations.

2 For an analysis of the OAS and its visual arts programs between 1948 and 1968 see Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2013.

3 As part of the Pan-American Union—a supranational regional block of 21 republics founded in 1890 as the International Bureau of the American Republics and supported by annual contributions—the Division of Intellectual Cooperation concentrated its efforts in four areas of activity: education, science, art, and literature. This change from Education to Intellectual Cooperation was a result of the Sixth Conference in Havana of 1928 which in article 3 called for an Institute of Inter-American Intellectual Cooperation and the establishment of institutes of intellectual cooperation in each country. The concept of peace and moral disarmament had gained great currency in the inter-war years to bring culture and intellect together in a positive environment and international views of a shared humanity through conventions and treaties that called for the use of media such as press, cinema, radio, books, and scientific and cultural exchanges. See Anexos: El desarme moral, un programa de cooperación intelectual. Funciones de la oficina de cooperación intelectual (Washington D.C.: Unión Panamericana, Noviembre 1936).

4 The Division of Cultural Affairs established in 1948 became a specialized and technical assistance provider to address the needs through activities and projects through Inter-American cooperation. Asuntos Culturales, Informe Anual del Director General de la Unión Panamericana año económico 1 de julio de 1948-30 de junio de 1949 (Washington D.C.: Unión Panamericana, 1949), 62-72.

5 These were Correo, Panorama, Puntos de Vista, Correio, Boletin de Música y Artes Visuales and Boletín de Artes Visuales.

6 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the San Francisco Museum of Art, and others played equally important roles during the World War II years.

7 Although familiar with the transformative World War II years as the foundation for the activities of the Section, Gomez Sicre claimed that an exhibitions program started with the Visual Arts Section in 1948.

8 See Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War; Alejandro Anreus, “Últimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre” Arte Facto, 2000, n.p.; Michael G. Wellen, “Pan-American Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948-1976” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2012); Olga U. Herrera, José Gómez Sicre y la creación de un punto de encuentro del arte en los Estados Unidos (Casa de las Américas: Programa de los Latinos en los Estados Unidos, 2017), among others.

9  In 1931 Washington had a population of 504,000.  US Census Bureau. Online < https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&met_y=population&idim=state:11000&hl=en&dl=en>. Accessed May 27, 2017.

10 See The Pan-American Union in the field of Inter-American Cultural Relations: A memorandum prepared by Concha Romero James, Chief, Division of Intellectual Cooperation, June 1, 1938 (Washington D.C.: Pan-American Union,1938), 2.

11 The large exhibition featured 93 paintings by 41 artists from Rio de Janeiro and 11 from São Paulo. Online:  https://archive.org/details/bml-50000000612993. Accessed May 6, 2017.

12 See Report of the Director General of the Pan-American Union of the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1931(Washington D.C.: Pan American Union,1931) 54, and Actividades de la Sección de Cooperación Intelectual de la Unión Panamericana durante el año 1931-1932 (Washington D.C.: Pan-American Union, 1932), n.p.

13 The exhibition was presented from January 13 through March 12, 1933 at what was then the make-shift Foyer of the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. For image, see: https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_9532 Accessed May 28, 2017.

14 See Actividades de la Sección de Cooperación Intelectual de la Unión Panamericana durante el año 1931-1932 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union,1932), n.p.

15 Annual Report of the Director General of the Pan-American Union for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1936 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union,1936), 60.

16 Concha Romero James, A Bibliography on the Arts in Latin America (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union in 1932).

17 Annual Report of the Director General of the Pan American Union for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1934 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union, 1934), 75-76. By 1934 The Department of Intellectual Cooperation loan art reproduction program counted with 300 photographs of Argentine art thanks to a gift by Amigos del Arte, the National Museum of Fine Arts, and artists, as well with a good Uruguayan photographic collection. See Annual Report of the Director General of the Pan-American Union for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1935 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union, 1935), 93-94; and Memorandum Concerning the Art Collection of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation of the Pan-American Union, Its Origins and Present Needs (April 1943), Rockefeller Foundation Papers, RG 1.1, Series 200, box 265, folder 3162, Rockefeller Archive Center.  

18 See report, La oficina de cooperación intelectual de la Unión Panamericana en 1935-1936 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union, 1936), 1; and Annual Report of the Director General of the Pan-American Union for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1935 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union,1935), 93-94.

19 Correo was a newsletter of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation first issued in August 1935 when Romero James became its chief.  In promoting the arts of the hemisphere, it noted in its pages the artistic interchange beyond Washington in the period of 1933-1936 as were the successful presentation in Argentina of exhibitions of José Cuneo, Olga Mary Pedroza and Marina Nuñez del Prado; in Brazil and Argentina of Carlos W. Aliseris; and in Mexico and New York of Julia Codesido. Similarly, it reported on the first prize award to José María Vides at the Exposición Centroamericana de Artes Plásticas of 1935 in Costa Rica, and successful solo exhibitions of Enrique Riverón, Antonio Gattorno, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jean Charlot, Emilio Amero, Rufino Tamayo, José Clemente Orozco, Antonio Pujol, and an exhibition of Cuban artists. See Concha Romero James, “La cooperación intelectual en América – 1935 a 1936,” Alcance al Correo 10 (August 1937): 9-10.

20 See Lewis Hanke, ed., Handbook of Latin American Studies, Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941).  This initial relationship between the Division and the Library continued with the AMA in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, Bélgica Rodríguez, director in 1988-1995 became the scholar in charge of Latin American art section in 1992-1994. 

21  Lewis Hanke, ed. Handbook of Latin American Studies, 59-60.

22 Article I and II of the seven articles in the convention stipulated the granting by each of the signatory nations of “all possible facilities for the holding within its territory of artistic exhibitions of each other Parties,” and in Article II, that “the facilities referred to in Article I shall be granted to Government agencies and to private enterprises which are officially authorized by them and shall be extended, as far as possible, to customs house formalities and requirements, to transport on communication lines belonging to the respective States, to rooms for exhibition or storage, and to other matters related to the object referred.” Charles Irving Bevans, Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776-1949: Multilateral, 1931-1945,  Vol. 3 (United States: Department of State Publication 8484, Released November 1969), 385.

23 This was the very competition that awarded Cândido Portinari an honorable mention and witnessed the participation of a number of the future masters of mid-century modernism. Concha Romero James, The Pan American Union in the Field of Inter-American Cultural Relations.  Memorandum (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, November 9, 1939), 4; and repeated in memorandum of same name in January 1941, 4.

24 The local sponsoring entities included the Brazil-United States Institute, the Argentine-America Cultural Institute, The Chilean Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, and the University of San Marcos in Lima. See Annual Report of the Director General of the Pan American Union for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1939 (Washington D.C.: Pan-American Union,1939), 71-72.

25 Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Art, Analysis and Digest of the Conference Proceedings, January 1940 (Washington D.C.: Department of State, 1940), 7-8. Online: <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015073412747;view=1up;seq=1>. Accessed May 27, 2017.

26 Chaired by Robert Wood Bliss, the Continuation committee members included major figures of the modern art and museum world in the United States including George Biddle, Holger Cahill, John E. Abbott, René d’Harnoncourt, Grace McCann Morley, and Concha Romero James among others, Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field, 5-6.  See: The Continuation Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Art, Minutes of Meeting of February 15-16, 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Department of State, 1940). Among the recommendations was the publication of guides to museums and collections in Latin America which Romero James’ successor José Gómez Sicre eventually completed in the mid-1950s as Guía de las colecciones públicas de arte en la América Latina (Washington, D.C.: Pan-American Union, Organization of American States, 1956).

27  Informal conversation between William Berrien and Concha Romero James in April 1943. See William Berrien to L.S. Lowe, May 3, 1943. Rockefeller Foundation Papers, RG 1.1, Series 200, box 265, folder 3162, Rockefeller Archive Center. 

28 Correspondence William Berrien to L. S. Rowe, November 4, 1943. Rockefeller Foundation Papers, RG 1.1, Series 200, box 265, folder 3162, Rockefeller Archive Center. 

29 Title of the proposal presented to the Rockefeller Foundation by Concha Romero James on April 29, 1943. Correspondence David H. Stevens to L. S. Rowe, May 25, 1943. Rockefeller Foundation Papers, RG 1.1, Series 200, box 265, folder 3162, Rockefeller Archive Center. Memorandum Concerning the Art Collection of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation of the Pan-American Union, Its Origins and Present Needs. April 1943. Rockefeller Foundation Papers, RG 1.1, Series 200, box 265, folder 3162, Rockefeller Archive Center.