New York, August 11, 2021 — Americas Society presents This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, a two-part group exhibition that explores the artworks, performances, and experimental practices of this generation of artists, as well as their involvement in the local art scene.
Diversifying the city’s artistic life, these artists helped shape New York into the global art center it is today. The artworks presented in this exhibition are central to understanding the social and political landscape in the Americas and the tensions and bridges between north and south, exploring issues of migration, identity, politics, exile, and nostalgia.
The show features over 40 artists from Latin America and the Caribbean. Additionally, the exhibition highlights the important contributions and solidarity initiatives of groups and collectives such as CHARAS, Taller Boricua, Latin American Fair of Opinion, An Evening with Salvador Allende Concert, Brigada Ramona Parra, Contrabienal, Cha/Cha/Cha, Young Filmmakers Foundation, Young Lords, and El Museo del Barrio.
To display the breadth of the artistic production in the period, the show will be presented in two rotating installations with the same list of artists but different works: the first display will go from September 15 through late December 2021, and the second from early January through May 2022.
“Their contributions revealed a more diverse and cosmopolitan scene than typically portrayed in the historiography of postwar American art,” says Americas Society Visual Arts Director and exhibition curator Aimé Iglesias Lukin. Actively participating in experimental artistic movements, including minimalism, conceptualism, and the Fluxus movement, they challenged folklorist understandings of Latin American artistic production promoted by most U.S. cultural institutions and the art market. “For these artists, ‘Latin American’ was not a label they necessarily identified with before arriving in New York, but rather one made relevant by shared experiences and a newfound sense of kinship,” says Iglesias Lukin.
The exhibition will be accompanied by two publications: an illustrated guide to the exhibition featuring a curatorial text along with the full exhibition checklist to be published in September 2021, and a standalone book that highlights the voices of the artists and documents of that time to be published in January 2022, for the opening of the second installation of the exhibition. This publication is co-published with Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).
Americas Society will host a series of public, in-person, and virtual programs accompanying the show, including panel discussions, performances, and regular free gallery tours.
This exhibition features HM&C artists Freddy Rodríguez and Raquel Rabinovich
