Pan American Modernism: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America and the United States

Pan American Modernism: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America and the United States highlights the rich visual dialogue that exists between objects produced by artists working in thirteen countries in North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean in years between 1919 and 1979.

Pan American Modernism showcases many important works of art, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photography, and mixed media works.

Rather than perpetuating a discourse centered on modern art in the United States (a bias that tends to polarize works from Latin America), Pan American Modernism instead uses thematic sections to analyze how artistic exchange processes contributed to the expansion of modernism as an intercontinental phenomenon across the Americas in the twentieth century. Dialogues among the Cuban avant-garde, Mexican muralism and its legacy and counterpoints, Abstract Expressionism, modernist photography, and geometric abstraction explore commonalities and disconnects throughout the Americas. Artists documented in the exhibition include Eduardo Abela, Wilfredo Lam, Man Ray, Amelia Peláez, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacob Lawrence, Hans Hofmann, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Roberto Matta, among others.

Using pointed juxtapositions of artists from different countries and cultural backgrounds, the pieces explore how artistic practices across two continents in the twentieth century were interrelated. Pan American Modernism presents modernism as intercontinental, decentralized, and interdisciplinary.

Text credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Image Credit : Untitled, ca. 1945, by José Mijares (Cuban, 1921–2004); oil on wood; 10 ½ x 8 ? inches. Courtesy of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami.