Grants Awarded

18th Street Arts Center
A Universal History of Infamy: Virtues of Disparity

As part of its collaboration with LACMA on A Universal History of Infamy—an exhibition focused on alternative artistic practices in Latin America and the U.S.—18th Street Arts Center presented A Universal History of Infamy: Virtues of Disparity, a companion exhibition that featured smaller-scale works offering different perspectives on globalized contemporary art practice today. Virtues of Disparity was structured around themes of reproduction and deception. The works featured investigated the shortcomings of different systems of writing and transcriptions and their contested relation to authenticity. 18th Street Arts Center also hosted a series of residencies for artists and collectives—including Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan, Mapa Teatro, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, and NuMu—that served as the foundation for the larger Universal History of Infamy project. The artists and collectives in residence interacted with local artists, schools, museums, and community-based organizations, in some cases giving rise to new site-specific works.

Support for artists' residencies: $60,000 (2014); Implementation and artists' residencies support: $100,000 (2015)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
From Latin America to Hollywood: Latino Film Culture in Los Angeles 1967–2017

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented a series of film screenings, conversations with filmmakers, and online content that explored the shared influences of Latino and Latin American filmmakers and the work they created or presented in Los Angeles during the past half-century. From Latin America to Hollywood: Latino Film Culture in Los Angeles was centered on a period that began with the social, cultural, and political environment of the 1960s that sparked the Chicano and New Latin American cinema movements and extends to the present day. The Academy's programming was grounded in its extensive series of oral histories with notable Latino and Latin American filmmakers. Their films were presented together with public conversations about filmmaking and, in some cases, premiered new Academy Film Archive restorations. The Academy's programs offered a rare opportunity for audiences to experience first-hand the perspectives of filmmakers including Gregory Nava, Lucrecia Martel, Edward James Olmos, and Alfonso Cuarón.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2015)

Armory Center for the Arts
Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico

The art of the 1990s in Mexico has acquired an almost mythic status in recent years, coming to represent the moment that Mexican contemporary art assumed a place in the global arena. Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in Mexico in the 1990s added a new layer to the growing interest in this period by drawing attention to artists, such as Taniel Morales, Andrea Ferreyra, and Elvira Santamaría, who operated in the margins, away from the widening mainstream. The exhibition explored the alternative, often clandestine art practices that emerged during this period marked by increasing violence, currency devaluation, industrial pollution, and political corruption. Against this turbulent backdrop, artists in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and elsewhere devised alternative practices and new exhibition spaces to show work that often directly engaged the politics and economics of the moment.

Exhibition research support: $140,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $160,000 (2015)

Autry National Center for the American West
LA RAZA

Published in Los Angeles from 1967–1977, the influential bilingual newspaper La Raza provided a voice to the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. La Raza engaged photographers not only as journalists but also as artists and activists to capture the definitive moments, key players, and signs and symbols of Chicano activism. The archive of nearly 25,000 images created by these photographers, now housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, provided the foundation for an exhibition exploring photography's role in articulating the social and political concerns of the Chicano Movement during a pivotal time in the art and history of the United States. LA RAZA was the most sustained examination to date of both the photography and the alternative press of the Chicano Movement, positioning photography not only as an artistic medium but also as a powerful tool of social activism.

Exhibition research support: $115,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2015)

California State University Long Beach, University Art Museum
David Lamelas: A Life of Their Own

The University Art Museum (UAM) organized the first monographic exhibition in the U.S. on the Argentine-born artist David Lamelas. Best known as a pioneer of conceptual art, Lamelas gained international acclaim for his work in the 1968 Venice Biennale, Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels. After moving to Los Angeles in 1976, Lamelas participated in the Long Beach Museum's influential video arts program, and his ongoing conceptual practice influenced an emerging circle of L.A. artists. Since 1988, Lamelas has divided his time among various cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, and the nomadic nature of his practice has been an important influence on his creative production. The UAM exhibition showcased the extraordinary breadth of his practice—encompassing post-minimalist sculpture, photography, and video installations and films—presenting many of his key works in the U.S. for the first time.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

California State University Northridge (CSUN)
The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judith F. Baca's Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a 2,754 feet long mural that runs along the concrete wall of the Tujunga Flood Control Channel in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Conceived by artist Judith F. Baca in 1974, the mural depicts crucial moments in California, from its prehistory until the 1950s. CSUN's University Galleries presented The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judith F. Baca's Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete, an exhibition examining the largely unwritten history of Baca's innovations alongside the methodologies that she developed as a result of her residency at the Escuela Taller Siqueiros, a workshop for muralism founded by the legendary Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The exhibition showcased The Great Wall to tell the story of Los Angeles using preparatory drawings, paintings, photographs, and ephemera, drawn largely from the archives of Baca and the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), which oversees The Great Wall.

Implementation support: $65,000 (2016)

Chinese American Museum
Circles and Circuits II: Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art

Circles and Circuits II explored the art of the Chinese Caribbean diaspora from the early 20th century to the present day. By examining the contributions of artists of Chinese descent in Cuba, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and beyond, the exhibition revealed the hidden complexities of the transcultural art of the Caribbean. The exhibition was presented at two venues, the Chinese American Museum (CAM) and the California African American Museum (CAAM). The presentation at CAAM traced the history of Chinese Caribbean art from the 1930s through the period of the region's independence movements, showcasing the contributions of artists little known outside their own countries, such as Sybil Atteck (Trinidad and Tobago) and Manuel Chong-Neto (Panama), and providing a new context for understanding the better-known work of Wifredo Lam (Cuba). At CAM, the exhibition focused on the work of contemporary artists such as Albert Chong and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, as well as artists of the ongoing Chinese Caribbean diaspora. The contemporary works featured explored issues of post-colonial history, popular culture, personal history, and the body.

Exhibition research support: $55,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2016)

Craft & Folk Art Museum
The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility

Since the 1990s, the US-Mexico border has become an important site for creative exploration of issues related to emigration, immigration, labor conditions, hybrid identities, and transformation. The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility presented the work of contemporary artists who explore the border as a physical reality (place), as a subject (imagination), and as a site for production and solution (possibility). The inclusion of artists from various disciplines, including design, architecture, sculpture, painting, and photography, reflected the ways in which contemporary artists and designers themselves cross disciplinary borders. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition pursued a creative problem-solving process sometimes described as "design thinking," which involves invention, social engagement, and the task of making. The exhibition included work by artists and designers such as Teddy Cruz, Adrian Esparza, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, and Ana Serrano, who have engaged with the border region in their work.

Exhibition research support: $70,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $110,000 (2016)

Fowler Museum at UCLA
Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis

Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis explored the unique cultural role of the city of Salvador, the coastal capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia and one of the oldest cities in the Americas. In the 1940s, Salvador emerged as an internationally renowned center of Afro-Brazilian culture, and it remains to this day an important hub of African-inspired artistic practices in Latin America. The Fowler presented the most comprehensive exhibition in the U.S. to date of the African-inspired arts of Bahia, featuring the work of well-known modernists such as Pierre Verger and Carybé as well as contemporary artists such as Ayrson Heráclito and Caetano Dias. Including more than 100 works from the mid-20th century to the present, the exhibition explored the complexities of race and cultural affiliation in Brazil and the ways in which influential artists have experienced and responded creatively to the realities of Afro-Brazilian identity in Bahia.

Exhibition research support: $170,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $250,000 (2016)

The Hammer Museum
Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985

The Hammer Museum brought to light the extraordinary contributions of women artists from Latin America and those of Latina and Chicana descent in the United States working between 1960 and the mid-1980s, years of radical aesthetic experimentation in art and explosive activism in the women's rights movement. During this key period, women of the region produced pioneering artworks that, in many cases, were realized in harsh political and social conditions. The exhibition featured works in a range of media, including photography, video, and installation. Among the women included were emblematic figures such as Lygia Clark and Ana Mendieta, alongside lesser-known artists such as the Colombian sculptor Feliza Burztyn and the U.S.-based photographer Isabel Castro. With an expanded view of Latin America that includes Latina and Chicana artists working in the U.S., Radical Women explored how the different social, cultural, and political contexts in which these artists worked informed their practices. Featuring works by more than 100 artists from 15 countries, Radical Women constituted the first genealogy of feminist and radical women's art practices in Latin America and their influence internationally.

Exhibition research support: $225,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $425,000 (2015)

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin

Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin surveyed the connections among art, science, and the environment in Latin America, from the voyages of Columbus to the publications of Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century. The exhibition introduced audiences to new understandings of Latin American nature from a range of cultural perspectives: as a wondrous earthly paradise; as a new source of profitable commodities such as chocolate, tobacco, and cochineal; as a landscape of good and evil, as viewed through the filter of religion; as the site for an Enlightenment project of collecting and classifying; and, in the 19th century, as the reflection of a national spirit. Visual Voyages featured approximately 100 objects drawn from The Huntington's library, art, and botanical holdings, as well as from dozens of international collections, in a range of media including paintings, rare books, illustrated manuscripts, prints, and drawings. Importantly, the exhibition and its catalogue brought together indigenous and European depictions of Latin American nature and offered a strongly documented case for Latin America's own active participation in the production of excellent and influential scientific and artistic works during the early modern period.

Exhibition research support: $200,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

ICA LA (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
Martín Ramírez: His Life in Pictures, Another Interpretation

ICA LA (formerly the Santa Monica Museum of Art) examined the work of acclaimed outsider artist, Mexican-born immigrant Martín Ramírez, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1930s and confined to California state hospitals most of his adult life. During the three decades he spent institutionalized, Ramírez produced a monumental body of work consisting of intricate drawings and collages whose linear rhythm and spatial tension have been compared to the techniques of Wassily Kandinsky, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt. His subject matter included horses and riders, Madonnas, saints, trains, and tunnels. This first presentation of Ramírez's work in Southern California focused on the artist's iconography and mark-making, his formal connections to mainstream modern art, and the significance of his cultural identity as a Mexican-American. It also presented, for the first time, a 17-foot scroll that comprises a glossary of the artist's singular imagery and a complete visual narrative of his journey from Mexico to California in the 1920s. Recent examinations of Ramírez's psychiatric evaluations have called his diagnosis into question, allowing an opportunity to recontextualize his life and work and navigate the unsettled territory between outsider and mainstream art.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2016)

Japanese American National Museum (JANM)
Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo

Transpacific Borderlands expanded our understanding of what constitutes Latin American art by highlighting the work of 17 contemporary artists of Japanese ancestry from Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo. The exhibition explored the differing historical events and generations of diaspora that have shaped the work of these artists and the fundamental questions their work poses about migration, the fluidity of culture, and what it means to be Nikkei, Latin American, or Latino. In the 20th century, Japanese migrants arrived in large numbers in North and South America. Their experiences differed by country, ranging from strong assimilation in Mexico to cultural hybridity in Brazil to the trauma of wartime incarceration in the United States. Transpacific Borderlands presented artists whose works can be read with and against these histories, including Eduardo Tokeshi (Peru), Madalena Hashimoto Cordaro (Brazil), and Shizu Saldamando (US). Ultimately, Transpacific Borderlands contributed to a broader reconsideration of identity in a world where the meanings of race and ethnicity are constantly evolving, and where artists often inhabit dynamic transnational spaces.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2016)

LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and California Historical Society
¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege

¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege looked at how Chicana/o murals in the greater Los Angeles area have been contested, challenged, censored, and even destroyed. During the late 1960s and 1970s, murals became an essential form of artistic response and public voice for the Chicano Movement, at a time when other channels of communication were limited for the Mexican-American community. The alternative vision of community empowerment these works presented could be transformative for some and deeply unsettling for others. The exhibition examined a group of murals produced in the greater Los Angeles area in the 1970s and early 1980s that were subsequently threatened or destroyed, including murals by Barbara Carrasco, Roberto Chavez, Willie Herrón, and Sergio O'Cadiz, among others. By presenting this series of case studies, or "mural stories", LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, in collaboration with the California Historical Society, examined how the iconography, content, and artistic strategies of the muralists challenged dominant cultural norms and historical narratives.

Exhibition research support: $80,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2016)

LAXART
Video Art in Latin America

Video Art in Latin America was the first major U.S. survey of the subject from the late 1960s until today, featuring works rarely if ever seen in the U.S. and introducing audiences to groundbreaking achievements throughout Latin America. The exhibition began with the earliest experiments in South America, where video became an important medium for expressing dissent during an era dominated by repressive military regimes, and followed themes that emerged in multiple artistic centers throughout Latin America, from labor, ecology, and migration to borders, memory, and consumption. The exhibition also highlighted the ways in which contemporary video artists in Latin America continue to pursue the sociopolitical commitment of earlier work, exploring themes related to identity and the consequences of social inequality, without shying away from humor and irony. The single-channel video programs were complemented by a selection of environmental video installations.

Implementation and publication support: $95,000 (2015)

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and Pitzer College Art Galleries
Juan Downey: Radiant Nature

LACE and Pitzer College Art Galleries mounted a two-part exhibition on the early performance-based works of Juan Downey (1940–1993). Born in Chile, Downey moved to Paris in the 1960s and later settled in Washington, D.C., and then New York, where he developed a practice that included sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Although Downey has become known for his multi-channel video works such as Video Trans Americas (1973–1976) and The Thinking Eye (1976–1977), which critique Eurocentric perspectives regarding Latin American identity, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature considered his earlier artistic practice. Comprising interactive electronic sculptures, happenings and performances, as well as installation, these earlier bodies of work were explored for their progressive trans-disciplinary investigation of technology, energy, the environment, and politics. These experimental and ephemeral works had in many cases not been seen since their original presentations and were reconstructed and restaged based on groundbreaking new research.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
(For three exhibitions)

Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985

Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 was a groundbreaking exhibition and accompanying book about design dialogues between California and Mexico. Its four main themes—Spanish Colonial Inspiration, Pre Columbian Revivals, Folk Art and Craft Traditions, and Modernism—explored how modern and anti-modern design movements defined both locales throughout the twentieth century. Half of the show's more than 300 objects represented architecture, conveyed through drawings, photographs, films, and models to illuminate the unique sense of place that characterized California's and Mexico's buildings. The other major focus is design: furniture, ceramics, metalwork, graphic design, and murals. Placing prominent figures such as Richard Neutra, Luis Barragán, Charles and Ray Eames, and Clara Porset in a new context while also highlighting contributions of less familiar practitioners, this exhibition was the first to examine how interconnections between California and Mexico shaped the material culture of each place, influencing and enhancing how they presented themselves to the wider world.

A Universal History of Infamy

Referencing the title of a genre-bending collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy used multiple venues across Los Angeles, including the LACMA campus, to present new works by more than 15 boundary defying artists and collectives. Developed for the most part through residencies, the works represented artists who live and practice in several countries; adopt methods from disciplines such as anthropology, theater, and linguistics; mingle research with visual art; and work across a range of media, from installation and sculpture to performance and video. A Universal History of Infamy embraced the collaborative spirit of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, bringing together one of the largest partners, LACMA, with one of the smallest, the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, which organized the residencies. (See 18th Street Arts Center description for additional information.)

Playing with Fire: Paintings by Carlos Almaraz

Playing with Fire: Paintings by Carlos Almaraz was the first major retrospective of one of the most influential Los Angeles artists of the 1970s and 1980s. Arguably the first of the many Chicano artists whose artistic, cultural, and political motivations catalyzed the Chicano Art movement in the 1970s, Almaraz began his career with political works for the farm workers' Causa and co-founded the important artist collective Los Four. Although he saw himself as a cultural activist, Almaraz straddled multiple—and often contradictory—identities that drew from divergent cultures and mores, and his art became less political in focus and more personal, psychological, dreamlike, even mythic and mystical as he evolved artistically. The first to focus predominantly on Almaraz's large-scale paintings, the exhibition featured more than 60 works and included pastels, ephemera, and notebooks, mostly from 1967 through 1989, the year of the artist's untimely death at age 48.

Total exhibition research support: $335,000 (2013 and 2014); exhibition and publication support: $490,000 (2016)

Laguna Art Museum
California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820–1930

California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820–1930 explored how Mexico became California. Following the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), lands that had belonged for centuries to New Spain, and later Mexico, were transformed into the 31st state of the U.S. The visual arts played a strong role in this transformation, creating distinct pictorial motifs and symbols that helped define the new California while establishing dialogues and intersections with the land's previous identity as Mexico. Juxtaposing paintings with popular posters, prints, and some of the earliest movies made in Los Angeles, the exhibition revealed how this image of California spread worldwide. Objects ranged from picturesque landscapes of Alta California and still life paintings featuring fruits, flowers, and other plants that celebrated the state's agricultural growth, to works by early modernists such as the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820–1930 demonstrated how a unique amalgam of Mexican and Anglo visual traditions created a profile for California distinct from any other U.S. state.

Exhibition research support: $92,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $230,000 (2015)

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division)
Jose Dávila

LAND organized a mid-career survey of Guadalajara-based artist Jose Dávila (b. 1974). Trained as an architect, Dávila created sculptural installations and photographic works that use reproduction, homage, and imitation to explore and dismantle the legacies of 20th century avant-garde art and architecture. Referencing artists and architects from Luis Barragán to Donald Judd, Dávila explores how the modernist movement has been translated, appropriated, and reinvented in Mexican art. The exhibition included the artist's sculptural installations, photographs, drawings, and models, as well as a new interactive public sculpture that reveals Dávila's interest in ideas of play, urbanism, and social interaction. The sculpture began as a 20-square-foot grid made out of modular components, installed at West Hollywood Park, but was dismantled and reconfigured at other sites across Los Angeles during the span of the exhibition, taking on different functional shapes.

Exhibition research support: $70,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $90,000 (2015)

LA Phil
CDMX (Ciudad de México)

The LA Phil participated in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA with a kick-off concert at the Hollywood Bowl celebrating a variety of Latin American cultures and a ten-day festival exploring Mexico City's contemporary cultural life in depth through a broad spectrum of concerts and events. Under the direction of LA Phil's Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, the Hollywood Bowl concert stands as one of the major public events launching Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, while the CDMX (Ciudad de México) Festival opened a window onto the multifaceted contemporary cultural scene of one of Latin America's capital cities, with orchestral, jazz, and popular music concerts and multi-disciplinary events. The festival featured world premieres of new commissions, including innovative collaborations with celebrated composer Gabriela Ortiz, film musicians, and other performing artists based in Mexico City.

Programming planning support: $68,000 (2014); Implementation support: $450,000 (2016)

Library Foundation of Los Angeles
Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A.

The Library Foundation of Los Angeles (LFLA) presented Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A., an exhibition, and associated public programs, that celebrated the Zapotec language as a key lifeline sustaining shared cultural experience in Mexico, Los Angeles, and beyond. Zapotec is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca, and Los Angeles is home to the largest population of indigenous Oaxacans outside of Mexico. Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A. recognized the importance of the Oaxacan presence in Southern California and explored contemporary realities of indigenous culture. The project included an installation in the Los Angeles Central Library's Rotunda by Oaxacan artist collective Tlacolulokos, a short documentary by Oaxacan filmmaker Yolanda Cruz, and a series of 60 public programs across Los Angeles with visual artists, scholars, poets and writers. Programs, many of which were multi-lingual, were presented as part of LFLA's acclaimed ALOUD literary and performance series and as community workshops in select locations of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Exhibition research support: $42,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $275,000 (2016)

Los Angeles Filmforum
Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America

The film series Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, organized by Los Angeles Filmforum, showcased experimental time-based media made by Latin American artists and in Latin America during the 20th century, including small-gauge films, recorded performances, ethnographic works, and rigorous formal experiments. Ism, Ism, Ism was intended to expand the understanding of Latin American experimental cinema to include key works from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, and movements including the social documentaries of El Centro Experimental de la Universidad de Chile and the punk films of Mexico's Superocheros. Presented at theaters, partner museums, and community spaces throughout Los Angeles, the programs offered a unique opportunity for audiences to learn about the history, aesthetics, and circulation of independent and experimental filmmaking in the Americas and to see works largely unknown in the United States.

Research support: $150,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Learning from Latin America: Art, Architecture, and Visions of Modernism

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery brought together the work of 30 contemporary artists from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and beyond who have responded critically to the history of modernism and, more specifically, modernist architecture in Latin America. In work produced during the last two decades, these artists explore the effects, contradictions, and contested legacies of modernism as expressed through ambitious construction of government buildings, public housing, schools, universities, and even new cities during moments of radical political and social change. The architecture and urban planning of these moments continue to serve as critical reference points for artists including Jonathas de Andrade (Brazil), Leonor Antunes (Portugal/Germany), Alexander Apostol (Venezuela/Spain), Felipe Dulzaides (Cuba) and Melanie Smith (Mexico). Together, these artists provide an anthropological exploration that connects architecture with political ideologies, social values and contemporary reality, while engendering dialogue about the role of government and public policy on the development, preservation and use of the built environment.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $220,000 (2016)

MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
How to Read El Pato Pasqual: Disney's Latin America and Latin America's Disney

In 1941, Walt Disney and a group of 18 artists, musicians and screenwriters traveled to South America looking for inspiration and content for The Three Caballeros and other animated features produced as part of the U.S. government's "Good Neighbor" policy during the Second World War. These films initiated a long and complex history in which Latin Americans frequently criticized Disney as a representative of North American imperialism. Joint exhibitions at the MAK Center and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles explored the history of Disney's engagement with Latin American imagery and the ways in which Latin American artists responded to, played with, re-appropriated and misappropriated Disney's iconography.

Exhibition research support: $140,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $250,000 (2016)

MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles)
Anna Maria Maiolino

The Museum of Contemporary Art presented the first major survey exhibition in the US of Anna Maria Maiolino, one of the most influential Brazilian artists of her generation. Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and emigrated with her family to Venezuela as a teenager. In 1960 she moved to Brazil to attend the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, where she began to develop a body of work in dialogue with abstraction, minimalism, and conceptualism. Her work was profoundly influenced by the aftermath of the Second World War, the military dictatorship in Brazil, and her experience as an artist during the period when what could be called art changed dramatically. The exhibition covered Maiolino's entire career, from the 1960s until the present, bringing together early experimental prints, drawings, films, performances, and installations, including her recent large-scale ephemeral installations made with unfired, hand-rolled clay. Maiolino's work is uniquely capable of tracing the course of the movements that define Brazilian art history, channeled via a personal, psychologically charged practice that charts her own introspective path as much as it opens on to large philosophical questions of repetition and difference, the transient and the permanent, and aesthetic problems such as solid and void and the intimate relationship between drawing and sculpture.

Exhibition research support: $225,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2016)

MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art)
Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago

Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago called attention to a region of the Americas that is difficult to categorize and often overlooked: the island nations of the Caribbean. The exhibition proposed an "archipelagic model"—defining the Caribbean from the perspective of its archipelago of islands, as distinct from the continental experience—to study issues around race, history, the legacy of colonialism, and the environment. The exhibition featured artists from the Hispanophone, Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch Caribbean. Relational Undercurrents emphasized the thematic continuities of art made throughout the archipelago and its diasporas, challenging conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America. This approach drew particular attention to issues arising from the colonial legacy that are relevant to Latin America as a whole, but which emerge as central to the work of 21st-century Caribbean artists, including Janine Antoni (Bahamas), Humberto Diáz (Cuba), Jorge Pineda (Dominican Republic), and Allora & Calzadilla (Puerto Rico).

Exhibition research support: $95,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $225,000 (2016)

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD)
Memories of Underdevelopment

In collaboration with Museo Jumex in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte de Lima, MCASD presented an exhibition examining the ways in which Latin American artists from the 1960s to the 1980s responded to the unraveling of the utopian promise of modernization after World War II, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. In the immediate postwar period, artists had eagerly embraced the "transition to modernity," creating a new abstract geometric language meant to capture its idealistic possibilities. As modernization failed, and political oppression and brutal military dictatorships followed, avant-garde artists increasingly abandoned abstraction and sought new ways to connect with the public, engaging directly with communities and often incorporating popular strategies from film, theater, and architecture into their work. Memories of Underdevelopment was the first significant survey exhibition of these crucial decades and highlighted the work not only of well-known artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape but also lesser-known artists from Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay.

Exhibition research support: $275,000 (2013 and 2014); Implementation and publication support: $310,000 (2016)

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB)
Guatemala from 33,000 Kilometers: Contemporary Art from 1960-Present

Guatemala from 33,000 Kilometers: Contemporary Art from 1960-Present was the first survey of modern and contemporary art from Guatemala, much of which is little known outside the country. The exhibition explored a rich period of artistic production that began during the "long civil war" of the late 1950s and extends to the present day. It demonstrated the surprising extent to which artists in Guatemala participated in the broader movements and practices of Latin American art, such as geometric abstraction, performance and conceptual art, and new media. Even during the worst years of war and political repression, artists such as Grupo Vértebra members Roberto Cabrera, Marco Augusto Quiroa, and Elmar Rojas produced work, sometimes covertly, that directly engaged the country's socio-political realities. The exhibition also included a younger generation of Guatemalan artists who came to international prominence following the 1996 peace accords, revealing an artistic history still largely unknown, and showcasing the country's vibrant contemporary art scene today. The two-part exhibition was presented at MCASB's galleries and at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art at Westmont College in nearby Montecito.

Exhibition research support: $65,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA)
Displacement: Mexican Photography, 2000–2012

The most recent generation of photographic artists in Mexico came of age in an era of profound political and social change, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ceded power after seven decades. Drug wars, outward migration, and changing attitudes toward religion and traditional gender roles characterized this "post-nationalist" period. Inheriting the social reforms of the 1990s, artists such as Karina Juarez, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Luis Arturo Aguirre used a range of practices, from "straight" photography, to manipulated photographs, installations, and videos, to explore the fracturing of personal and cultural identities in the new Mexico—displacements that were both disorienting and liberating. Located in San Diego's Balboa Park, MOPA drew on its strong relationship with artists and organizations across the border for this project, and also contextualized this work within broader international developments in photography.

Exhibition research support: $100,000

The Music Center, Los Angeles
Cuba: Antes, Ahora / Cuba: Then, Now

The Music Center presented a celebration of traditional and contemporary Cuban music and dance, incorporating educational, family-friendly, and participatory programs alongside traditional performing arts events. This festival's focus on Cuba stemmed from the international arts community's intense interest in engaging Cuban artists following the restoration of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba and the gradual removal of barriers that have long prevented true exchange among artists in the two countries. Attracting a diverse and dynamic Southern California audience, the festival featured some of the most original performing artists working today in Cuba, including the Malpaso Dance Company, an emerging powerhouse in the field of contemporary dance, and a group of distinctive musicians and bands representing the best of contemporary music in Cuba, such as Yissy García, Pancho Amat, and Telmary Díaz. Festival activities included live performances, community classes, and educational programs for K-12 students.

Programming planning support: $65,000 (2014); Implementation support: $300,000 (2016)

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at University of Southern California (USC)
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.

Organized by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. mapped the intersections and collaborations among a network of queer Chicano artists and their artistic collaborators from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. This period was bookended on one side by the Chicano Moratorium and the gay liberation and feminist movements and on the other by the AIDS crisis. Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. marked the first historical consideration of these artists in the context of broader artistic and cultural movements: mail art, the rise of alternative print media, fashion culture, punk music, and artists' responses to the AIDS epidemic. The exhibition was presented at the ONE Archives' gallery in West Hollywood and the nearby MOCA Pacific Design Center gallery.

Exhibition research support: $95,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2015)

Otis College of Art and Design, Ben Maltz Gallery
Talking to Action

Presented at the Ben Maltz Gallery of Otis College of Art and Design, Talking to Action investigated contemporary community-based social art practices in Latin America and Los Angeles. The exhibition featured a range of practices that blurred the lines between object making, political and environmental activism, community organizing, and performance art, through the work of contemporary artists and collectives from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the U.S. The social practice artists included in Talking to Action addressed critical issues such as migration and memory, mapping, environmental problems and policies, gender rights and legislation, indigenous culture, and violence. The exhibition featured a diverse array of projects, such as an exchange of correspondence between Buenos Aires-based artist Eduardo Molinari and Los Angeles artist Sandra de la Loza about social activism in their respective cities, and the work of the Mexican collective SEFT (Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada), which created a playfully futuristic vehicle to explore disused railroads. Talking to Action built upon the scholarship of Otis's Graduate Public Practice MFA program.

Exhibition research support: $160,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2015)

Palm Springs Art Museum
(For two exhibitions)

Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969

Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969 examined the influential and visually stunning work of South American kinetic artists. While Southern California was becoming the North American epicenter for Light and Space art in the 1960s, separate yet closely related technical experiments had been unfolding in a handful of major cities of South America, as well as in Paris, the European center for kinetic art. Kinesthesia highlighted the broad differences that emerged among the two principal South American centers of activity: Argentina, where kinetic art grew out of local debates about painting; and Venezuela, where pioneering notions of modern architecture stimulated a synthesis of art and design. Kinesthesia told this story through 50 works—primarily kinetic sculptures and sculptural installations—by Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Martha Boto, and others.

Exhibition research support: $170,000 (for Kinesthesia—to the Orange County Museum of Art, 2013); Implementation and publication support: $250,000 (2016)

Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture

Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture was an unprecedented exploration of two visionary architects who critically expanded the meaning and practice of modern architecture. Bo Bardi (1914–1992) emigrated from Italy to Brazil in 1946 and Frey (1903–1998) from Switzerland to the United States in 1930. Though the two did not meet, Bo Bardi translated Frey's treatise "Living Architecture" for Domus, and their personal and professional odysseys are representative of the emergence of São Paulo and Southern California as architectural and cultural laboratories in the middle of the 20th century. They each created modernist houses, furniture, public buildings, and approaches to urban design that move beyond strict rationalism to embrace the social and environmental contexts specific to their adoptive homes in Brazil and Southern California. Bo Bardi and Frey shared a belief in architecture as a way to connect people, nature, building, and living. As they embraced modern technologies, they responded to the climate and terrain of the local environment and the people whose personal and social experiences were touched by those conditions.

Exhibition research support: $75,000 (2015); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2016)

Pomona College Museum of Art
Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco

In 1930, José Clemente Orozco completed his Prometheus fresco at Pomona College, the first mural painted in the United States by one of Los Tres Grandes of Mexican muralism. Drawing on the Greek myth of the Titan Prometheus bringing fire to humanity, Orozco's mural goes beyond the story's traditional symbolism to present a complex political work that questions the very idea of enlightenment in a modern world steeped in conflict. The exhibition Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco reexamined Orozco's mural through the lens of four contemporary women artists from Mexico—Isa Carrillo, Adela Goldbard, Rita Ponce de León, and Naomi Rincón-Gallardo—who are producing a variety of socially-engaged artworks. These four contemporary Mexican artists share Orozco's interest in the relationships among history, storytelling, and power, but navigate their own 21st-century approach to political causes and personal mythologies. In turn, these artists activate Orozco's mural by reinvigorating Prometheus for a diverse, contemporary audience.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $175,000 (2015)

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)
The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War

REDCAT explored the work of acclaimed Argentine artist León Ferrari, who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two. The voice of a generation, Ferrari is best known for his politically charged work that challenged authoritarianism of all types, from the Argentinian dictatorship and the Catholic Church to the U.S. war in Vietnam. REDCAT focused on Ferrari's literary collages using appropriated texts, which represent a kind of experimental writing at the intersection of visual arts, performance, theater, literature, and activism. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a series of restagings of Ferrari's landmark 1966 work Palabras Ajenas (The Words of Others). Previously staged only twice, in 1968 and 1972, this literary collage is an imaginary dialogue among 160 historic figures, composed of fragments from contemporary news-wires and historical texts. For its staging of The Words of Others, REDCAT produced a new English translation based on intensive research in Ferrari's archives.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $140,000 (2015)

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)
Pacific Standard Time: Live Arts LA/LA Festival

REDCAT organized an international festival of Latin American and Latino performance art, engaging local and international artists and audiences, as a lively closing event to Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in January 2018. The ten-day festival reflected the most recent developments in contemporary performance and time-based art, as well as explorations of important historic works that are representative of key sociopolitical and cultural movements, the art of protest and activism, and the pageantry and spectacle of religious or community celebration. With programs ranging from large-scale site-specific works or participatory happenings to multi-artist evenings of solo and small-ensemble performances, the festival offered audiences a unique opportunity to experience a wide range of historic and current performance art from across Latin America.

Implementation support: $600,000 (2016)

Riverside Art Museum
Myth & Mirage: Inland Southern California, Birthplace of the Spanish Colonial Revival

The Spanish Colonial Revival has been part of the aesthetic fabric of Southern California for 100 years. While claiming ties to Colonial Spain and Mexico via their cultural and design traditions, the style was based largely on myth and invention. Influenced by such diverse sources as the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and the popular Ramona novel and pageants, Californian architects and designers adapted Spanish Colonial, Mission, ecclesiastical, and native elements to create romanticized perceptions of California for a burgeoning tourism industry. The Riverside Art Museum presented the first survey of the Spanish Colonial Revival style in the architecture and the decorative arts of the Inland Empire, where this style flourished. Landmarks such as Myron Hunt's First Congregational Church of Riverside (1912–1914) and the historic Mission Inn Hotel are spectacular amalgamations of the historic and the imagined. The exhibition used architectural and archival materials, decorative arts, paintings, and photographs to explore the style's origins and continuing popularity.

Exhibition research support: $75,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2015)

San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA)
The Making of the Modern: Indigenismos, 1800–2015

Indigenismos—the representation of indigenous people and cultures for social and political aims—has primarily been studied as a defining characteristic of Mexican modernism. SDMA expanded this definition by investigating the multiple ways in which indigenismos was a persistent force across Latin American art over more than two centuries. From the first appearances of indigenismos in 19th-century figurative painting, to early 20th-century representations of the Indian as a symbol of national identity, to the Surrealists' fascination with Indian imaginaries, artists have linked indigenismos to political and social concerns and, above all, to what it means to be Latin American. The exhibition examined these and later avant-garde practices of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the re-appearance of indigenismos in the second half of the 20th century in such forms as land art, early performance art, and video. The varied works of art presented in The Making of the Modern— from large academic paintings and sculptures to contemporary installations—traced indigenism as a "hidden path" of political and cultural imagination over the past two centuries and the catalyst for modern Latin American art.

Exhibition research support: $175,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $350,000 (2016)

Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art organized a major mid-career survey of the New York-based Brazilian artist Valeska Soares. Trained as an architect, Soares creates unique environmental installations based on sensorial effects of reflection, light, entropy, and even scent. Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now represented a more than 25-year span in the artist's career, combining installations, sculptures, photography, video, and performances integrating notions of memory, time, and the senses. Soares's work expands upon the languages of post-minimalist and conceptual art. She was profoundly influenced by an earlier generation of Brazilian artists, including Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who turned their attention from the physical properties of the work of art to the perceptions and actions experienced by the viewer. This mid-career survey included early works such as Sinners (1995), along with later works not yet presented in the U.S., such as the sound installation (Shhhh...), prelude (2009), and marble sculptures from her series Et Aprés (2011). The programming also included Soares's interactive public performance work Push Pull (2013).

Exhibition research support: $95,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero

Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero brought together works by representative figures of three generations of photographers in Mexico, their careers spanning 100 years. Castrejón, the least known of the three, was one of the few female photographers who documented the Mexican Revolution. Iturbide is known best for her photographs of the daily lives of Mexico's indigenous cultures, while Parcero, a contemporary photographer, splices images of her own body with cosmological maps and Pre-Columbian Aztec codices. By bringing their work into conversation, Revolution and Ritual invited visitors to consider how photography has been transformed over the past century in Mexico and how it continues to respond to artists' interest in representing present and past, self and other. The exhibition drew on Scripps College's academic strength in feminist and gender studies and the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery's expanding photography collection, with its special emphasis on women who have shaped the photographic field.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $90,000 (2015)

Self Help Graphics & Art
Día de los Muertos, A Cultural Legacy: Past, Present, and Future

Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is an integral part of the cultural and artistic landscape of Los Angeles. Today's interpretation of the sacred indigenous tradition has been remixed and recycled into a commercial holiday blending Mexican, Latino, and American pop culture iconography with the spiritual aesthetics of the event's indigenous and Catholic influences. Self Help Graphics (SHG) traced the evolution of Día de los Muertos in Los Angeles and beyond through an exhibition and publication documenting its four-decade history of art, ritual, and celebration. Since 1972, when SHG organized its first public ritual for Día de los Muertos, its annual commemoration has developed into a complex and unique public observance. Día de los Muertos, A Cultural Legacy: Past, Present, and Future included historical prints, photographs, and ephemera representing each decade of SHG's commemorations, as well as three newly commissioned altars from artists Ofelia Esparza (Los Angeles), Gerardo "Acamonchi" Yépiz (Tijuana), and Marco Vera (Mexicali).

Implementation and publication support: $36,000 (2016)

Skirball Cultural Center
Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner's Mexico

Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner's Mexico at the Skirball Cultural Center offered a new perspective on the art and visual culture of Mexico and its relationship to the United States as seen through the life and work of the Mexican-born, Jewish-American writer Anita Brenner (1905–1974). Brenner was an integral part of the circle of Mexican modernists in the 1920s and played an important role in promoting and translating Mexican art, culture, and history for audiences in the U.S. Brenner was close to the leading intellectuals and artists active in Mexico, including José Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti. An influential and prolific writer on Mexican culture, Brenner is best known for her book Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (1929). The Skirball's exhibition provided an immersive experience of historic discovery and underscored Brenner's importance as a Jewish woman in Mexico who inspired artists and was instrumental in introducing the North American public to Mexican history and culture.

Exhibition research support: $125,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $230,000 (2015)

University of California, Irvine, University Art Galleries
Aztlán to Magulandia: the Journey of Chicano Artist Gilbert 'Magu' Luján

UC Irvine's University Art Galleries (UAG) presented the first survey of one of the most iconic figures of the Chicano art movement, Gilbert 'Magu' Luján (1940–2011) and an accompanying publication. One of the founding members of the Chicano artists collective Los Four, Luján is known for his colorful and visual complex explorations of Chicano culture and community that drew upon and brought to life various historic and contemporary visual sources with startling results: Pyramid-mounted low riders driven by anthropomorphic dogs traversing a newly defined and mythologized L.A. He was part of a small group of dedicated artists and intellectuals who set about defining a Chicano identity and culture as part of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The UAG's retrospective focused on creativity and invention in Luján's work in a myriad of sketches and drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Luján combined two world-making concepts, Aztlán, the mythic northern ancestral home of the indigenous Mexican Aztecs that became a charged symbol of Chicano activism; and Magulandia, the term Luján coined for the space in which he lived and produced his work, and for his work as a whole. Together, Aztlán and Magulandia represented both physical spaces and the complex cultural, geographic, and conceptual relationships that exist between Los Angeles and Mexico and served as dual landscapes for Luján's artistic philosophy and cultural creativity.

Exhibition research support: $75,000 (2014); Implementation and publication support: $150,000 (2015)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
Home–So Different, So Appealing: Art from the Americas since 1957

Home–So Different, So Appealing: Art from the Americas since 1957, presented at LACMA and organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, featured U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the late 1950s to the present who have used the deceptively simple idea of "home" as a powerful lens through which to view the profound socioeconomic and political transformations in the hemisphere. Spanning seven decades and covering art styles from Pop Art and Conceptualism to "anarchitecture: and "autoconstrucción," the artists featured in this show explored one of the most basic social concepts by which individuals, families, nations, and regions understand themselves in relation to others. In the process, their work also offered an alternative narrative of postwar and contemporary art. The show included works by internationally known figures such as Daniel Joseph Martinzes, Gordon Matta-Clark, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Guillermo Kuitca, and Doris Salcedo, as well as younger emerging artists such as Carmen Argote and Camilo Ontiveros. Including a wide range of media that often incorporated material from actual homes, the exhibition also featured several large-scale installations and an outdoor sculpture. Exhibition research support: $210,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $325,000 (2015)

UCLA Film & Television Archive
Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930–1960

Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930–1960 recreated the Spanish-language film culture of downtown Los Angeles with an extensive program of film screenings. Between 1930 and 1960, Los Angeles played host to a vibrant Latin American cinema culture centered on North Main Street's Mexican-American neighborhoods, where nearby venues such as the Teatro Eléctrico, the California Theatre, and the Million Dollar Theater showed films originating from Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba. Los Angeles was also a center of production and distribution for Spanish language films. Not only have a number of the downtown cinemas been destroyed or fallen out of use, but virtually all of the films have also fallen out of history, often unpreserved or tragically lost. With Recuerdos de un cine en español, audiences and film historians rediscovered Los Angeles as one of the most important hubs in the Western hemisphere for the production, distribution, and exhibition of films made in Spanish for Latin American audiences.

Research support: $80,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $200,000 (2015)

University of California, Riverside ARTSblock
Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas

In a wide-ranging survey exhibition, UCR ARTSblock brought together contemporary artists from across the Americas who have tapped into science fiction's capacity to imagine new realities, both utopian and dystopian. Science fiction offers a unique artistic landscape in which to explore the colonial enterprise that shaped the Americas and to present alternative perspectives speculating on the past and the future. In the works featured in the exhibition, most created in the last two decades, artists employed the imagery of science fiction to suggest diverse modes of existence and represent "alienating" ways of being in "other" worlds. Mundos Alternos brought into dialogue the work of international artists from across Latin America with Latino artists from throughout the U.S., including local Chicano and Chicana artists. Drawing on the University's strong faculty and collections in this area, UCR ARTSblock offered a groundbreaking account of the intersections among science fiction, techno-culture, and the visual arts.

Exhibition research support: $125,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $225,000 (2015)

University of San Diego, University Galleries
Xerografia: Copyart in Brazil, 1970–1990

Xerografia: Copyart in Brazil, 1970–1990 revealed the innovative uses of ordinary commercial copying practices by artists working in Brazil across two politically fraught decades. The exhibition introduced Southern California audiences to this unfamiliar and often overlooked work, including not only the innumerable images made on standard copy paper but also works machine-printed on unconventional materials such as metal, wood, and glass. The low cost of production and unique formal qualities of photocopies, including imperfections that the machine introduced, initially attracted artists like Paulo Bruscky to the medium. Later on, artists including Hudinilson Jr. and Mário Ramiro performed actions in front of the photocopier, using it as a sort of camera. Eventually, this experimentation led to work in fax, videotext, and other forms of early new media. In essence, photocopy became a new artistic medium, offering exciting possibilities for performance, documentation, publishing, and even international exchange through mail art strategies.

Exhibition research support: $58,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $125,000 (2015)

University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Musical Interventions

Vibrant soundtracks of musical and sonic performance have always accompanied and shaped Los Angeles' history as a city with sustained geographic, cultural, political, demographic, and economic ties to Latin America. Musical Interventions celebrated music's role in forging the Los Angeles/Latin America relationship and in constructing identities, communities, and new artistic languages. Curated by Josh Kun, a historian of popular music and recent MacArthur Fellow, Musical Interventions consisted of six public programs that functioned as a multi-part "musical exhibition," exploring the musical histories and networks that move between Los Angeles and various Latin American communities and cultures. The programs ranged from multi-artist tribute concerts and outdoor dance parties to experimental sound installations and intimate performances of newly commissioned work. Musical Interventions intersected with the themes of several major Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions and also engaged with Latin American music in Los Angeles as its own subject of artistic and historical inquiry and study.

Planning support: $54,800 (2015); Implementation support: $240,000 (2016)

Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College
Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell

The Vincent Price Art Museum presented the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laura Aguilar, shedding new light on a Los Angeles-based artist who garnered significant critical attention for her contributions to performative, feminist, and queer art. With approximately 95 photographs, as well as examples of Aguilar's work in video, the exhibition spanned more than three decades of the artist's career. Show and Tell highlighted themes of class, literacy, and the body in Aguilar's work and demonstrated how these themes challenge prevailing notions of beauty, gender or sexuality, and cultural or ethnic identities. The presentation of Aguilar's retrospective at the Vincent Price Art Museum was particularly fitting, as she was an alumna of the East Los Angeles College, where she studied photography.

Exhibition research support: $50,000 (2013); Implementation and publication support: $100,000 (2015)

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Education Grants

Foundation grants to the LA Promise Fund and the Arts Education Branch of the LA Unified School District (LAUSD) extended the reach of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA with education programming that served students, teachers, and families across Los Angeles County. The two organizations worked together to reach these target groups through teacher professional development programs and field trips to the numerous exhibitions that were on view in the southland from September 2017 through January 2018. The majority of the LA Promise Fund program was focused at a county level, so that LAUSD could concentrate on increasing access to the district's most underserved schools. The LA Promise Fund program also included a juried art-making contest to engage students creatively in the themes of LA/LA.

Implementation support to LA Promise Fund: $450,000 Implementation support to LAUSD: $205,000

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As part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA there were four exhibitions at the Getty:

J. Paul Getty Museum
Photography in Argentina, 1850–2010: Contradiction and Continuity

Contradiction and Continuity emphasized crucial historical moments and aesthetic movements in Argentina in which photography had a critical role, producing, and at other times dismantling, national constructions, utopian visions, and avant-garde artistic trends. The exhibition examined the complexities of Argentina over the past 150 years, stressing the heterogeneity of its realities, the creation of contradictory histories, and the power of constructed photographic images in the configuration of a national imaginary. With significant works dating from the decade of Argentina's first constitution to the bicentennial of its independence, the exhibition included almost 300 photographs representing the work of more than sixty artists.

J. Paul Getty Museum
Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas

This major international loan exhibition explored the idea of luxury in the pre-Columbian Americas, particularly as seen in the associations between materials and meanings, from about 1000 BC to the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century. The exhibition traced the development of metallurgy in the Andes and its expansion northward into Mexico. In contrast with people in other parts of the world, ancient Americans first used metals not for weaponry, tools, or coinage but for objects of ritual and ornament, resulting in works of extraordinary creativity. In addition to objects of gold and silver, the exhibition featured works of art made from shell, jade, and textiles, materials that would have been considered even more valuable than noble metals. The exhibition cast new light on the most precious works of art from the ancient Americas and provided new ways of thinking about materials, luxury and the visual arts in a global perspective. The exhibition was co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which hosted the exhibition following the Getty's presentation.

Getty Research Institute
The Metropolis in Latin America (1830–1930)

Drawing on the Getty Research Institute's special collections, this exhibition proposed a visual survey of the unprecedented growth of Latin American capital cities following the seasons of independence, observing how socio-political upheavals activated major changes in the city scale and the architectural landscape. The Metropolis in Latin America examined how imported models were reinterpreted into diverse forms of re-appropriation of the national colonial and pre-Hispanic past, ushering these cities into a process of modernization. During a decolonization progression of longue durée, centuries—old colonial cities were transformed into monumental modern metropolises, which by the end of the 1920s provide fertile ground for the emerging of today's Latin American megalopolis.

Getty Research Institute and Getty Conservation Institute
Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

In the years after World War II, artists in Argentina and Brazil experimented with geometric abstraction and engaged in lively debates about the role of the art work in society. Some of these artists experimented with novel synthetic materials, creating objects that offered an alternative to established traditions in painting. They proposed these objects become part of everyday, concrete reality and explored the material and theoretical limits of that proposition. Combining art-historical and scientific analysis, experts from the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute collaborated with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a world-renowned collection of Latin American art, to research the formal strategies and material decisions of artists working in the concrete and Neo-concrete vein, resulting in the first comprehensive technical study of these works. Visitors saw a selection of works by artists including Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, Rhod Rothfuss, Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Judith Lauand alongside information about the now-invisible processes that determine the appearance of the works: supports, hanging devices, methods of paint application, and techniques of painting straight edges. A selection of historical documents shed further light on the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of these artistic propositions.

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Grants Outside of Los Angeles in support of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

The following four grants were awarded to organizations outside of Los Angeles to support archives and research related to Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.

Fundação de Desenvolvimento da Pesquisa (Federal University of Minas Gerais), for research and technical study of concrete art in Brazil, $245,000 (2015)

Fundación Espigas, for the processing of key archival documents related to modern Latin American art, $180,000 (2015)

Museum of Fine Arts Houston, for the International Center for the Arts of the Americas' Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, $200,000 (2014)

Universidad Nacional de General San Mart¡n, for research and technical study of concrete art in Argentina, $240,000 (2015)