1st Edition

Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern Art The Power of the Canon

By Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide Copyright 2025
224 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

224 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book sheds light on an as-yet unstudied aspect of The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) preeminent role in establishing the definition of the problematic term “Latin American art” in the United States from the 1930s to the present through its collection displays. In examining the shifting categorization of Latin American works according to stylistic and geographic taxonomies, we gain a greater... Read more

Introduction: Collection Displays and Canon Formation; 1. “An Evolutionary Pedigree”: Modern Art in the 1930s–40s; 2. “National Representations and International Standards” The Latin-American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (1943) and The First General Exhibition of the Museum Collection of Painting and Sculpture (1945); 3. “Geographic Distributions”: The 25th Anniversary Exhibition, 1954–1955; 4. A “Missing Link”: Elaine L. Johnson’s Latin American Program and the 1967 Collection Exhibition; 5. Revising Modernism? The Place of Latin American Art in MoMA’s Collection Galleries, 2004–2023

Biography

Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at New York University (NYU). She was co-curator of Tempo (MoMA QNS, 2002), MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (2003), and Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (NYU Kimmel Windows, 2023). Her book Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Routledge) was published in 2013.