Our America : the Latino presence in American art

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Title:

Our America : the Latino presence in American art

Author:

Smithsonian American Art Museum.

ISBN:

9781907804441

9780937311943

Physical Description:

xi, 365 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm

General Note:

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 25, 2013-March 2, 2014."

Abstract:

""On the one hand, the affirmation that Latino art is American art is simply a fact. Latino artists are American by birth, citizenship, residence, education, experience, and even sacrifice-a factor made clear by the large number of Latino artists that have served in the United States armed forces. On the other hand, the statement poses a challenge to the ways in which we traditionally think about what constitutes American art." Is Latino art an integral part of modern American art? Presenting one hundred major artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Our America seeks to "recalibrate" enduring concepts about American national culture by exploring how one group of artists-those of Latin American descent and heritage-express their relationship to American art, history, and culture. Highlights include an installation altar by Amalia Mesa-Bains, the "recycled" films of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and a 1960 geometric painting by Carmen Herrera. Other notable artists include Olga Albizu, Melesio "Mel" Casas, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Margarita Cabrera, Enrique Chagoya, Teresita Fernández, Ken Gonzales-Day, Luis Jiménez, Ana Mendieta, Pepón Osorio, Sophie Rivera, Freddy Rodríguez, and John Valadez, among many others. Author and curator E. Carmen Ramos is the Smithsonian American Art Museum's curator of latino art. She has organized numerous shows, including the fifth biennial at El Museo del Barrio in New York City in 2007. Dr. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, the "grandfather" of this subject, and formerly associate director for creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, has written and published extensively on US/latino cultural issues"-- Publisher information.

Contents:

Primeros pasos: first steps toward an operative construct of Latino art / What is Latino about American art? / Commentaries on the artworks / E. Carmen Ramos, with Jennifer L. Bauman, Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg --

Subject Term:

Hispanic American art -- Exhibitions.

Art -- Washington (D.C.) -- Exhibitions.

ART -- American -- Hispanic American.

ART -- History -- Contemporary (1945- )

ART -- Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions -- General.

SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Ethnic Studies -- Hispanic American Studies.

Art. (OCoLC)fst00815177

Hispanic American art. (OCoLC)fst00957333

Hispanos. (DE-588)4240086-7

Kunst. (DE-588)4114333-4

Added Author:

Ramos, E. Carmen What is Latino about American art?

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Aurora Downtown	Reference Book	N6538 .H58 S65 2014	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

Is Latino art an integral part of modern American art? Presenting over one hundred major artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Our America seeks to "recalibrate" enduring concepts about American national culture by exploring how one group of artists--those of Latin American descent and heritage--express their relationship to American art, history, and culture.

E. Carmen Ramos addresses the whole issue of the definition of "Latino art" and how this emerged within the context of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as American artists of Latino descent (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and, more recently, Dominican) began to give a tangible face to their culture and history.

Highlights include an installation altar by Amalia Mesa-Bains, the "recycled" films of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and a 1960 geometric painting by Carmen Herrera. Other notable artists include Olga Albizu, Melesio "Mel" Casas, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Margarita Cabrera, Enrique Chagoya, Teresita Fernández, Ken Gonzales-Day, Luis Jiménez, Ana Mendieta, Pepón Osorio, Sophie Rivera, Freddy Rodríguez, and John M. Valadez, among many others.

Winner of first prize in the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) award for excellence, 2014

Author and curator E. Carmen Ramos is the Smithsonian American Art Museum's curator of Latino art. She has organized numerous shows, including the fifth biennial at El Museo del Barrio in New York City in 2007.

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, PhD , the "grandfather" of this subject, and formerly associate director for creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, has written and published extensively on US/Latino cultural issues.

Accompanies an exhibition with the following venues:
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 25, 2013-March 2, 2014
The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, FL,March 28, 2014-June 22, 2014
Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, September 21, 2014-January 11, 2015
Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, UT, February 6, 2015-May 17, 2015
Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, AR, October 16, 2015-January 17, 2016
Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington, DE, March 5, 2016-May 29, 2016

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

This book, the catalogue for an ongoing exhibition, situates Latino art within more general art practices in the US by using as its basis the holdings of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Offering two introductory essays and presenting a variety of artists' works, the volume succeeds as an introduction to Latino art. The texts not only historicize the artistic production but also begin to define its character in relationship to broader artistic trends. Themes of reclamation, collaboration, and categorization are used to articulate similarities and differences and also the divergences and developments that ground the work within particular social and historical moments in the US, specific places of production, and the personal and communal interests, history, and struggles of its producers and their communities. The bulk of this book by Ramos (SAAM) and colleagues is a very complete alphabetical catalogue of the most prominent and important Latino artists and groups. Images of the varying modes of art are provided, along with brief historical descriptions, commentaries, and information about the artists. --Luis E. Carranza, Roger Williams University

Library Journal Review

This large-format catalog produced to accompany a traveling exhibition of the same name contains two powerful essays, an exhibition checklist, and a detailed bibliography. An introductory essay by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, an independent scholar of Latin American and U.S. Latino arts and cultures, elaborates on the exhibition's conceptual premise, the construction and instability of the category of Latino art, and the advocacy for a framing of Latino art within the canon of American art. The second essay by Ramos, curator of Latino Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, articulates the impossibility of divorcing identity politics from the monumental task of representing Latino art as a singular and monolithic movement. The pages called "commentaries," complied by Ramos and colleagues Jennifer L. Bauman and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, among others, offer brief biographies of key artists followed by succinct discussion. These are accompanied by small black-and-white or full-color reproductions of selected works. Artwork included in the catalog and featured in the exhibition represents the Smithsonian's collecting efforts, largely begun in the 1990s, marking a nearly 200-year legacy of absence in permanent collections and American cultural patrimony. The title serves as a handsomely produced souvenir of the Smithsonian's efforts at this inclusive exhibition but represent only a fraction of the public debates generated by the show. VERDICT This useful, generalized introduction to the diaspora of Latino artists may be helpful for students of art history.-Toro Castano, Roski Sch. of Fine Arts, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.