This fall, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), MASS MoCA in Massachusetts and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago will feature shows exploring Latinx art and history.
This fall, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), MASS MoCA in Massachusetts and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago intertwine fortuitously on the subjects of land and migration. Each of the art centers will showcase must-see exhibits that explore railroad building, ancestral ceramic making techniques, heritage and how Latinx communities relate to home and nature.
Massachusetts
It takes planning to get to MASS MoCA, the largest contemporary art museum in the country, and perhaps on the planet. Located in North Adams, Massachusetts, the art center is an hour’s drive from Albany, New York, or two-and-a-half hours from Boston. But once there, the trek seems worth it.
“Going to MASS MoCA is sort of a pilgrimage,” San-Juan independent curator Michy Marxuach says. “Which is something that’s interesting to propose at this time when everything is becoming fast food in the arts and cultural world. Spectators are part of this experience.”
Marxuach, one of the museum’s curatorial fellows, is putting together a show exploring mangroves in what she calls a “murky opera,” Indigenous ancestral ceramic practices and performance art. The shows will be rolled over the next year and a half beginning in September with “Bog School: Who Cares for Wetlands?” For the exhibit, she is bringing together artists from the U.S., the Caribbean and Latin America including Camila Marambio, Amara Abdal Figueroa, Jorge González, Gala Porras Kim, Merián Soto and Ernesto Pujol.
“I’m going to be presenting projects that propose a different way of relating to everything,” Marxuach says.
Los Angeles
“Grounded,” slated to open in September, is one of the major exhibitions of contemporary art from LACMA’s collection and features 40 works by 35 artists spanning the seventies to the present.
“The late Chicanx artist Laura Aguilar is a key to our framing of the exhibition,” co-curator of the show, Rita Gonzalez says. “We borrowed the exhibition title from her eponymous series. Aguilar positioned her own Queer Brown body at the center. She addresses the legacy of landscape painting and photography which has long been connected to observation, control and ownership.”
Gonzalez, the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Contemporary Art Department Head, says that many of the artists in “Grounded” “use performative strategies to intervene and play with materials. This is a strong impulse in the exhibition.”
Some of the artists featured in this multi-generational show include Ana Mendieta, Tania Candiani, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jackie Amézquita and Guillermo Bert who presents “La Bestia,” an “Encoded Textile” woven by Maya artisans and embedded with a QR code that links viewers to the testimony of migrants who traveled through the notorious network of trains that brings migrants from Central America and Mexico to the United States.
Chicago
The Xicágo Gallery at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago is slated to open “Rieles y Raíces: Traqueros in Chicago and the Midwest,” an homage to the traqueros, Mexican immigrants who were some of the main builders of this country’s railway system.
“I asked mi abuelo, ‘Did we ever have anyone who worked in the railroad?’” Ismael Cuevas, one of the show’s co-curators says. “He mentioned that one of my great uncles worked on it a hundred years ago.”
The show includes IDs, pay stubs, birth certificates, letters and photographs that have been handed down through generations. It also pays tribute to the boxcar communities, including a scaled-down replica of one of the abandoned carts that were used as housing for the rail workers and their families.
Among many items featured is the rich discovery of a guitar that belonged to a woman who was part of a trio of singers who performed at a boxcar church.
“It’s so important for the Latino community to make sure that we remember all these stories to remind ourselves how we’re an important part of this country,” says Cuevas.
