Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors
John Beardsley and Jane Livingston, curators
Museum of fine Arts, Houston, and tour, 1987-89
“Both a survey and an act of connoisseurship”
—Mark Stevens, Newsweek
“Hispanic Art in the United States” was the first major museum exhibition to focus on the extraordinary variety and richness of creativity among artists grouped under the admittedly artificial designation “Hispanic.” It featured both academically trained and self-taught artists from the major Latino groups in the country—Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans—as well as descendants of the original Spanish settlers in the Southwest and recent emigres from Latin America.
Their work ranged from folk-inspired religious carving to political satire, modernist abstraction, ethnically-inflected neo-surrealism, and what was then called “new imagism,” with a preponderance of incisive, sometimes bitter, deeply expressive figurative paintings and sculptures.
The exhibition traveled for two years to museums in seven cities, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, and the Los Angeles County Museum. It received enthusiastic reviews in newspapers and magazines nationwide, including an essay by Mark Stevens in the September 7, 1987 issue of Newsweek. The exhibition was a case study in a 1988 symposium on the culture of representation in museum practice, which led to the 1991 Smithsonian Institution publication Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. It was accompanied by a catalogue by John Beardsley, Jane Livingston, and Octavio Paz.
Exhibition images
The images below are from “Hispanic Art in the United States”, Brooklyn Museum, June 09, 1989 through September 04, 1989 (Brooklyn Museum photographs, 1989)
