Art and Myth in Ancient Peru: The History of the Jequetepeque Valley
September 13 - October 22, 2010
Guest Curator: Cecilia Pardo Grau, Museo de Arte de Lima

This exhibition organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) presents an important selection of pre-Columbian objects that span from the time of the Cupisnique Culture to the Inca conquest. The pieces exhibited were produced in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru for over 3,000 years. This region maintained a unique character, which distinguished it from other areas along the northern coast.

At different times in its history, the Jequetepeque Valley formed part of the Mochica, Lambayeque, and Chimú states, and finally, of the Inca Empire. The societies that flourished there maintained certain autonomy with respect to these great developments. Their social organization and pottery styles thus preserved specific and differentiated cultural characteristics and represent a system of beliefs based on a universe of images and symbols that are expressed in the pieces exhibited, many of which are considered masterpieces of pre-Columbian art.

This unique exhibition features pieces from the Oscar Rodriguez Razzetto Collection in Pacasmayo, recently acquired by MALI, complemented by artifacts from recent archeological excavations in the Jequetepeque Valley. Together, they provide an overview of the valley’s development over time and bring new meaning to the pieces by focusing on the region, contributing important and innovative scholarship on the subject.

This exhibition is presented by Americas Society in collaboration with the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI).


Americas Society gratefully acknowledges the following donors for their generous support of this exhibition: ING and AFP Integra, Hunt Oil Company of Peru, Ilender Peru, S.A., Conduit Capital Partners, LLC, and Arias Resource Capital Management LP.

We are also grateful for the generous collaboration of the Permanent Mission of Peru to the United Nations.

The Visual Arts Program is also supported in part by Sharon Schultz Simpson and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection. A Postgraduate Seminar and Exhibition by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
November 6 – December 18, 2010
Guest Curators: Bertha Aguilar, Alejandra Olvera, and Sandra Zetina

Americas Society and the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil will co-present the exhibition Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection. A Postgraduate Seminar and Exhibition by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from November to December 2010. This project originated with the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil in collaboration with the Programa de Estudios de Posgrado en Historia del Arte de la UNAM (Art History Postgraduate Program at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Through an academic seminar, a renowned group of scholars and post-graduate students developed the curatorial proposal resulting in the Shattered Glass exhibition, which brings new scholarship to the work of Mexican modernist artists, particularly in regard to their influence on contemporary art.


Through the study of recent Mexican, Latino, and Latin American art and Mexican high modernist masterpieces in the collection of the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art, the curatorial team reexamined a series of important pieces to reveal how bodies and ruins, placed together, relate to an established colonial narrative, making it possible to reassess the significance of images of violence in contemporary Mexican art and rewrite some of that narrative. Extremely brutal images, such as José Clemente Orozco's landscapes of New York, were frequently designed as a commentary on metropolitan modernity. They form the core of the curatorial focus of the exhibition, which, along with the catalogue essays, will present these concepts from four vantage points, each represented by a section in the exhibition.

Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection. A Postgraduate Seminar and Exhibition by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México will be a central part of the celebrations in the United States in 2010 to commemorate the bicentennial of the independence of Mexico and the anniversary of the Mexican revolution.

This exhibition is co-presented by Americas Society and the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil with the collaboration of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Americas Society gratefully acknowledges the following organizations for their in-kind support and collaboration which helped make this exhibition possible: Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes (México), Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (México), Dirección General de Cooperación Educativa y Cultural de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (México), Consulate General of Mexico in New York, Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, and La Asociación de Amigos del Museo Carrillo Gil A.C.

The Visual Arts Program is also supported in part by Sharon Schultz Simpson and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Arturo Herrera
2011

Americas Society is proud to introduce Arturo Herrera’s groundbreaking installation Les Noces, the artist’s first work to incorporate music and moving images to New York audiences. Herrera is internationally renowned for his explorations of a wide variety of different media, including collage, sculpture, photography, prints, and, more recently, video. His practice is deeply informed by the history of modernist abstraction.

Les Noces is a two-channel video projection based on the 1923 ballet of the same name, scored by the composer Igor Stravinsky for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Herrera has digitally reworked fragments of his own works as well as leftovers gathered from his studio into an ever-shifting dance of abstract black-and-white images set to Stravinsky’s music. This chance-based process intentionally invokes the mutable nature of performance as well as the transformative power of collage: no dance is ever performed exactly the same way twice. The use of Stravinsky’s complex music score in conjunction with fragmented materials animated and projected as moving images also addresses the difficulty to make abstraction an intelligible process.

The exhibition will also feature works on paper, sculptures, reliefs, collages, photography, and felt wall-hangings in which Herrera’s deconstructive process becomes transparent and links to the moving images. The exhibition reconsiders Herrera’s approach to collage and abstraction as one of the most important experimental work to have emerged after the 1990s.

The Visual Arts Program is also supported in part by Sharon Schultz Simpson and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.