Delia Solomons - Staging the Global

Carnegie International (1961), catalogue cover. Photo: courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art.

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Journal of curatorial studies Volume 3 Numbers 2&3

2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.3.2-3.290_1

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Jcs 3 (2+3) pp. 290319 Intellect Limited 2014

DELIA SOLOMONSInstitute of Fine Arts, New York University

Staging the Global: Latin American Art in the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals of the 1960s

AbstractThe Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals served as influential platforms for curators and critics to propagate their visions of the global art world in the 1960s. As Cold War tensions escalated, much was at stake in the branding of international art and Latin Americas position within it. In these US exhibitions, geopolitical discord and cultural specificity became sublimated in order to stage international-ism in terms of unity and harmony. The exhibition format forced critics and cura-tors to directly confront globalization, inciting attitudes ranging from progressive inclusivity to chauvinistic assertions of western arts supremacy, and sparking thorny debates regarding international style, formalism, objective quality in art, and cultural categorization.

Today the global 1960s has widespread currency as a cultural idea, one often invoked with nostalgia and romanticism. It conjures the illusion of a time when language barriers magically disappeared and a global community effortlessly emerged. However, in the 1960s, internationalism was a contentious phenomenon utilized for progressive and conserva-tive agendas alike. Mass media and increased access to travel indeed dispersed information and linked populations across the world at previ-ously unimaginable rates. Artworks and styles travelled just as quickly through art magazines, exhibitions and artists migrations. These growing networks were harnessed to give more people more opportunities, to

Keywords

Guggenheim International

Carnegie InternationalCold War politicsLatin American

exhibitionsexhibitions and cultural

diplomacyinternational styleglobalization

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further democratize access to information, and, contrastingly, to assert power and control. Distinct ideas of internationalism also proliferated: some envisioned a utopic, placeless universalism that fundamentally linked humankind, while others saw it as a reflection of the uneven, tumultuous geopolitical relationships among nations. Both concepts of internationalism could be marshalled to either challenge or defend established hierarchies in art and politics: as a pluralist phenomenon that decentred power or, conversely, as a reflection of a superpowers authority and influence over its neighbours. Even the term international style, ubiquitous in the 1960s, had the appearance of inclusiveness, but came to signify for many critics the dissemination of Euro-American styles rather than a reciprocal exchange. For the United States the self-perceived victors on economic, military and cultural fronts in the wake of World War II much was at stake in the way it positioned itself. The countrys struggles with globalism reflect anxiety over the potential loss of its newly inherited torch.

The Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals of the 1960s were powerful recurring opportunities for US curators to not only utilize the new international networks (importing art from around the world) but also to stage their interpretations of internationalism. While in most biennials each country controls its own pavilion, in the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals of this period a single curator determined which countries were represented and how, as well as who was left off the map altogether. Although the subject of far less study than Worlds Fairs and the Venice and So Paulo Biennales, the Internationals and their critical reception offer concrete case studies revealing how 1960s internationalism was conceptualized and utilized in the United States.

Latin American art played a particularly revealing role in these exhibi-tions, and patterns of its inclusion and exclusion elucidate institutional and curatorial biases. From roughly 195966, there was a sudden surge of interest in contemporary Latin American art in the United States, made evident by the wave of exhibitions and articles that appeared in major museums, newspapers and art magazines. The Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals were an important, but now forgotten, facet of the phenomenon. This boom was far from politically disinterested, since, by the mid-1950s, the US government and press were keeping a watchful eye on Cuba specifically and Latin America in general as territo-ries dangerously susceptible to becoming Communist strongholds in the western hemisphere. Once the Cuban Revolution erupted in 1959, fear heightened and policy intensified to prevent a second Cuba. The need to court favour in the Americas redoubled in the early 1960s in the wake of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the subsequent growing popularity of radical youth movements.

The Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals were privileged vehicles highly publicized in the local, national and global press to display for US audiences specific versions of internationalism concordant with US polit-ical agendas. By underscoring relationships between Latin American and US styles, art could be utilized as cultural diplomacy, directed toward two Cold War causes: (1) to stress hemispheric unity against the Communist bloc, and (2) to safeguard the United Statess newly acquired status as a


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centre of the art world. The Internationals reveal through rhetoric and the selection of artworks how internationalism was cast in terms of harmony rather than discord during a time of accelerating Cold War tensions and a wide spectrum of 1960s aesthetics; these exhibitions thereby staged a highly subjective theatre of globalization.

The history of art employed as cultural diplomacy during the Cold War has received uneven treatment. One side of the story is well known; Max Kozloff (1973), Eva Cockroft (1974), Serge Guilbaut (1983) and others have chronicled how the United States paraded its stylistic thor-oughbreds, namely abstract expressionism, across the globe. The other, less examined half of this story, the treatment of non-western art when

Guggenheim International Exhibition (1967), catalogue cover. Photo: courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.


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1. see carnegie Museum of Art (1961) and solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1956).

2. This separation persists today and has hindered scholarship on these exhibitions; no publication has compared the Internationals or considered them as a phenomenon. However, Alexander Alberro has examined the 1971 Guggenheim International and Javier Prez segura analyzed spanish art in the carnegie exhibitions. The museums have also published historical overviews of their own Internationals: the carnegies International Encounters (1996) and the Guggenheims Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now (2007) and Art of Another Kind (2012).

exhibited on US soil in the 1960s, is beginning to be told by scholars like Andrea Giunta (2007), Claire Fox (2013), Beverly Adams (2000), Rodrigo Alonso (2010), Luis Cancel (1988) and Mari Carmen Ramrez (1996). The Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals operated at the intersection of these histories, as venues that positioned local and foreign art side by side. The Internationals can also be viewed as remarkable precedents to the growing discourse on global art, as examined by Hans Belting (2013), James Elkins (2010) and others, which are largely rooted in post-Cold War case studies. The Internationals were early experiments that predated the development of the postcolonial and postmodern theories fundamental to global studies today. Analysis of the Internationals, their critical reception, and their curatorial agendas (ranging from pluralist to xenophobic), reveal the fumbles and breakthroughs in these nascent attempts to conceptu-alize globalism in the arts.

The Internationals

In the 1960s, the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals were the only major bi- or triennials in the United States dedicated to contemporary global art. They had similar names, sometimes coincided, exhibited many of the same artists, and employed a number of the same major art world figures, including Lawrence Alloway, Gordon Washburn, James Johnson Sweeney and Jos Gmez-Sicre. Both exhibitions were founded to at once exhibit the best contemporary art and spread international good will, as expressly dictated by Andrew Carnegie in the 1890s and Harry Guggenheim in the 1950s.1 Although confronted with the distinct political and cultural terrains of Gilded-Age versus postwar America, their founding principles were similar and, by mid century, incited complex dialogues about value judgments (i.e. what is the best?) and internationalism in the art world.

Despite their evident commonalities, the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals were practically never mentioned in the same articles or press releases. This is particularly shocking given the deluge of reviews each exhibition received and the fact that those reviews typically served as excuses for critics to decry large biennials in general. However, in these diatribes, critics listed the So Paulo Bienal and Venice Biennale, and sometimes Kassels Documenta, next to either the Carnegie or Guggenheim Internationals, but not both.2

The exhibitions mutual exclusivity within the press perhaps resulted from their substantial differences. The Carnegie International, housed in a stately American Renaissance-style museum, was valued for its rich history and consistency; since its founding in 1896 it was suspended only during the two world wars and one year of the Depression. In contrast, the Guggenheim International, with its brief run from 1956 to 1971, was a new, quite volatile undertaking that appeared sporadically sometimes biennial or triennial, often delayed, and during different times of the year. Its rules regarding prizes and juries changed with almost every exhibition, and in 1959 its venue shifted from temporary quarters on 72nd Street to the radical and divisive Frank Lloyd Wright building.

The Internationals related to their host institutions in divergent ways. The Carnegie Museum, at times deemed conservative, was updated and


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3. While the carnegie too awarded prizes overwhelmingly to European artists, their tradition of allocating one-third of the space to American artists likely warded off charges of Eurocentrism.

enlivened by the exhibitions contemporaneity and adventurousness. Many perceived its bestowal of a major art event to the small indus-trial city of Pittsburgh as exciting and generous, aided by the museums rigorous schedule of lectures and tours that educated the public about contemporary art. The Guggenheim, in contrast, staged its International in an epicentre of contemporary art, inciting several critics to question its necessity since Manhattans galleries could keep abreast of the constantly changing situation more effectively than a biennial exhibition (Hess 1964: 8; Battcock 1967: 50). This question of functionality also lay at the heart of the controversial new Frank Lloyd Wright building, condemned for its brash irreverence to operate as a museum even by those who admired its aesthetics. Since its inauguration in 1959, critics have stated that the archi-tecture overwhelms the art it holds, is totally irrelevant to its purposes, [] hurries the spectator past works of art in an efficient headlong rush (Kramer 1959: 48), drowns all art (Hess 1959b: 46), and instigates a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed (Canaday 1959: 1). The Guggenheims purported Eurocentrism also seemed to be confirmed and underscored by its Internationals, which over the years awarded major prizes to seven European artists and to only one American (Robert Motherwell) and one Cuban working in Europe (Wilfredo Lam).3 The museums reputation for glitz and ostentation increased every time its First Prize (a whopping $10,000) was splashed across newspaper headlines as the largest prize in the art world. Where

Jorge de la Vega, Music Hall (1963), installation view of the 1964 Guggenheim International. Published in Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), 25 February 1964. Photo: courtesy of the author.


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the Carnegie International contrasted with and amended its institu-tions relatively conservative reputation, criticisms of the Guggenheim International and its museum were identical and thus intensified one another. The compensatory nature of the Carnegie International has no doubt contributed to its longevity, a stark contrast to the short lifespan of the Guggenheim International.

Positioning Latin America

In light of such institutional differences, the expansion of Latin American representation that occurred simultaneously in the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals in the late 1950s becomes all the more mean-ingful. While the 1960s Internationals did not champion a single style, thereby offering no unified, identifiable image of Latin American art, both exhibitions presented the same wide range of contemporary styles and many of the same artists. Shared favourites of the 1960s included Alejandro Otero, Fernando de Szyszlo, Fernando Botero, Edgar Negret and Jorge de la Vega, among others. These artists promoted highly diver-gent aesthetics and concerns, from Oteros engagement with kineticism and optics, to Szyszlos blend of gestural informalism and Quechua titles, to Boteros serio-comic critique of pop and politics. While Negret and de la Vega both engaged with the industrial world, their methods and atti-tudes differed; Negret was fascinated with its formal properties and mate-rials, whereas de la Vega critiqued the surge of kitsch products flooding Buenos Aires. This new diverse generation of artists appeared along-side the popular modernists Matta, Wilfredo Lam and Rufino Tamayo, reflecting both Internationals convention of including new discoveries and familiar names. The lack of stylistic cohesion makes the fact that both Internationals selected many of the same artists all the more striking.

To say that these exhibitions offered similar profiles of Latin American art is not to say that it was an accurate reflection of the breadth and depth of 1960s art in Buenos Aires, Bogot, Caracas and other art capitals of Latin America. The curators of the Internationals knew little about Latin American art and overwhelmingly exhibited artists who had already proven themselves in New York or Paris. Shipping certificates in the Carnegie Museum of Art Archives and lists in the Guggenheim International cata-logues indicate that, from 195871, more shipments of Latin American art reached the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals from Europe and the United States than from Latin America. Many of the artists were living abroad and/or represented by galleries in France, Italy or the United States. Curators preference for artists with gallery representation reflects their need to work with institutional systems they understood, despite the fact that identical art infrastructures did not exist in every part of the world they wished to showcase. This is just one example of a larger problem that proliferated in the 1960s Internationals: curators operating according to specifically Euro-American systems, often blithely unaware of cultural particularisms. The Internationals displayed a version of Latin American art to its US audiences twice filtered by Euro-American institu-tions: first in the galleries and museums of Paris or New York, then by the Guggenheim or Carnegie curators.


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This modus operandi a search for the familiar dictated curators stylistic choices as well; they sought works that suited their taste in Euro-American art, latching onto the formally recognizable, looking for hints of abstract expressionism, neo-figuration and the other isms that proved successful in the art worlds they knew. Both exhibitions failed to show the more radical performances, installations and conceptual practices emerging throughout Latin America; on this very long list belong such pre-eminent figures as Len Ferrari and Marta Minujn of Argentina, Hlio Oiticica and Lygia Pape of Brazil, and collectives like El Techo de la Ballena of Venezuela. It remains unclear whether aesthetic or political conservativism, or a combination of the two, precipitated these exclusions. This problem was compounded by the fact that once the United States

Alejandro Otero, Colorhythm 62 (1960), installation view of the 1964 Guggenheim International, published in La Esfera (Caracas), 24 February 1964. Photo: courtesy of the author.


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Edgar Negret, Tower No. 2 (196566). Photo: courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.


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began to engage with conceptual art in the late 1960s, attention to Latin America had waned in both the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals (as I will discuss later).

The curatorial propensity to stress sameness and familiarity served, within the Cold War context, to underscore hemispheric or global unity to the Internationals US audiences. In these exhibitions, curators emphasized cohesion not only by selecting artists with visible links to Euro-American styles they recognized, but also by often grouping art based on style instead of geography. For example, as visitors to the 1964 Guggenheim International descended the spiral ramp, global neo-figuration was presented in a linear succession of works by Danish Cobra member Carl-Henning Pedersen, Canadian-Mexican artist Arnold Belkin, Spanish painter Antonio Saura, Argentine artist Ernesto Deira, Venezuelan painter Jacobo Borges, and Algerian-born French artist Marcel Pouget (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1964). Later, Perus Fernando de Szyszlo and US artist Philip Guston offered a pan-American gestural abstraction pair. A global geometric contingent also appeared in a line-up of paint-ings by Max Bill, Peter Stroud, Richard Lohse and Alejandro Otero. In the 1961 Carnegie International, the monochrome reliefs of Argentine Luis Tomasello and Greek-American Chryssa shared a room, forcefully asserting that styles were not determined by nation (Carnegie Institute 1961). By making formally related works friendly neighbours and failing to provide any explanatory text to elucidate conceptual or contextual differ-ences, the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals sublimated distinc-tions to create a picture of a tightly unified world devoid of aesthetic or political discord.

For these projects, the Director of the Arts Division of the Pan-American Union Jos Gmez-Sicre served as an ideal advisor. He supplied approved lists of artists and coordinated shipping for curators who knew little about

Left: Luis Tomasello, Reflexin No. 70 (1961). Right: Chryssa, Arrow No. 1 (1959). Photos: courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art.


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4. Gmez-Sicres role as the influential gatekeeper at the crux of Latin American arts reception in the United States has been explored by Fox (2013), Anreus (2000, 2005) and Michael Wellen (2012).

the region and had an entire globe to represent. In return, these exhi-bitions, which drew together a cross-section of international art, offered a propitious format for Gmez-Sicre to promote his taste for interna-tional formalism as a universal language that erased political conflicts and geographic divisions.4

The dominance of formalist methodologies during this period may have particularly emboldened curators to liken works with superficial similarities but conceptual differences. For example, the serial, white reliefs of Tomasello and Chryssa were visually related but conceptually distinct; Tomasello, working in Paris, sought to introduce light and movement into geometric abstraction whereas Chryssa responded to quotidian emblems and communicatory signage upon her arrival in New York. Staunch formalism, which relied on a utopian universalism and maintained that all relevant information about a work of art could be found on its surface, gave curators and critics an excuse to evade research into artists motives and contexts. As curators of the Internationals struggled to survey a vast field of activity within a relatively short period of planning, formalism permitted them to neglect their homework, to ignore distinctions, and to construct broad, unspecific categories that corralled disparate artists into a single aesthetic rubric. Of course, had curators exhibited artists in national groupings, they would have run the risk of ghettoizing, and discounting, many artists decidedly international gambits, circles and themes. Sixty years later, scholars continue to debate the values and dangers of the different possible ways to exhibit global art, and no consensus has been achieved. With hindsight, the sixties Internationals can be revisited as one model with clear advantages and pitfalls.

Rebelling Against the Frame: Latin American Art in the Internationals

While curatorial strategies and overall exhibitions are the focus of this article, it would be a mistake to subsume the artworks entirely into these frames. The Internationals, however problematic, circulated important artworks, some of which engaged dynamically with and even challenged the very issues at stake in the exhibitions premises. For example, the Argentine group Nueva Figuracin found an early, very public platform in the 1964 Guggenheim International, the same year the collective was prominently featured in the Walker Art Centers New Art of Argentina and an article by Terence Grieder in Art Journal (1964). The four members of the group Luis Felipe No, Jorge de la Vega, Ernesto Deira and Rmulo Macci submitted their work to the Guggenheim International having recently returned to Buenos Aires from their stint in Paris in 1962 and in the midst of Nos preparation for a trip to New York. They were keenly aware of the competing art-world capitals and their own roles as Latin American artists within them. Their works can be interpreted as interventions into notions of global harmony staged in the Internationals, reflecting the very real turmoil in Argentina and its relationship with the United States. Nos Charisma (1963) shows a desperate, teeming crowd subsumed under the profile of former Argentine President Juan Pern; the painting, marked with a dissident X, compels its viewers to resist polit-ical and cultural dictators, and to not lose ones humanity to charismatic,

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manipulative leaders or ideas as they rise to power. Perns identification and the leftist political message of the work were likely lost on US viewers, when the work became coalesced with a more universalist neofiguration. Nos colleague de la Vega likewise responded to the manipulative effects of power in his country; he collected the North American consumerist debris flooding Buenos Aires and integrated it into a bestiary of carnivalesque, distorted monsters. By exhibiting these works in New York and industrial Pittsburgh, de la Vega essentially mailed the products back to the United States, sending his critiques into the belly of the beast.

Luis Felipe No, Charisma (1963). Photo: courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.


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In 1961 the Carnegie International profiled Argentine and Venezuelan kineticists, four years before the Museum of Modern Arts controversial exhibition The Responsive Eye (1965). Although Jess Sotos Black on Black (1959), Carlos Cruz-Diezs Physichromie (1960), Luis Tomasellos Reflexin (1961), and Julio Le Parcs Dterminisme et Indterminisme (196061) were exhibited in separate rooms, thereby diluting the curatorial emphasis on the new trend, they would have left a powerful impression as a group. All four emphasized physical or optic instability catalyzed by the viewers movement. These works created a kind of universal viewer-in-motion, activated by a phenomenological encounter with the work. This common, fundamentally human experience proffered a type of internationalism distinct from the geopolitical power struggles and networks of travel at the heart of the Internationals.

While the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals offered similar general profiles of Latin American art, each institution also had its favourites. Venezuelan-born artist Marisol, for example, was not included in a single Guggenheim International, but appeared in four of the five

Room B, Carnegie International (1964), installation view (left to right) of Jacques Lipchitzs Between Heaven and Earth (1964), Louise Nevelsons Big Black (1963), Burgoyne Dillers Color Structure No. 5 (1964), and Marisols The Visit (1964). Photo: courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art.


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Carnegie Internationals from 195870. The location of her work in each show proves revealing: where in 1958 she was clustered with the rest of the artists categorized as Latin American, by 1964, after securing solo exhibitions at Leo Castelli and Stable Gallery and representation by Sidney Janis in New York, she had apparently become either famous enough or American enough to exceed that label and was prominently featured beside Louise Nevelson, Burgoyne Diller and Jacques Lipchitz in one of the most exciting and critically acclaimed rooms of the exhibi-tion. While the installation identified her as a US artist, the catalogue still filed her under Venezuela. As an artist who defied geographic and aesthetic categorization, Marisol revealed the ineptitude of curatorial attempts to label and taxonomize itinerate artists and heterogeneous practices.

The Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals also served as conduits through which works by Latin American artists entered major US public and private collections. Fernando Boteros The Presidential Family (1967), previously confined to the artists New York studio, was sold at the Carnegie International to Warren Benedek, who in turn gave it to MoMA that year (Carnegie Museum of Art 1967b; Botero 1967). At the same exhibition, Joseph Hirshhorn purchased Jess Sotos Three and One (1966), which became part of his 1981 bequest to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Carnegie Museum of Art 1967b). In 1959, Pittsburgh-based collectors Mr and Mrs C.M. Lewis purchased Marisols Large Family Group from the Carnegie International and gave it to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1973 (Carnegie Museum of Art 1967a). The host museums themselves acquired a few important works: the Carnegie purchased Alicia Penalbas Grande Aile (1963) and the Guggenheim acquired major paintings by No and Macci. The Internationals oper-ated not only as temporary displays for Latin American art, but also as intermediaries ushering important artworks into major collections in the United States.

Critical Reception: The Crisis of Globalism

Serious consideration of these works in the context of the Internationals, as historically anchored episodes with much to offer current studies of global and Latin American art history and exhibition practices, has likely been hindered by the negative press surrounding the shows. Reviews largely reflected contemporary anxiety over the growing globalization and its impact on the art world.

The internationalization of styles which the Guggenheim and Carnegie exhibitions reflected, augmented and singularly put on display proved to be a constant source of discomfort to critics and viewers. Many journalists noted repeatedly and warily what Leslie Judd Ahlander (1964) described as a drastic leveling of national and cultural differences [thus] creating an international look to art in her review of the Guggenheim International aptly titled Art Today Knows No Boundaries. Robert M. Coates recognized that There is today in contemporary art a kind of lingua franca (1964: 129). Dorothy Adlow complained in her review of the 1961 Carnegie International, No


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5. Press coverage of the Internationals in Latin America tended to comprise briefer reports that stressed pride in the inclusion of their countrys or even their continents artists and citing positive remarks by Us journalists.

sooner is there evidence of individual creativity than there is almost an immediate reflection in art centres across the world. No longer is there an Oriental or Occidental division of thought and style []. Erstwhile divisions vanish (1961: 10). Kim Levin had a similar response to the next Pittsburgh instalment: National characteristics, as well as stylistic distinctions, are almost invisible, which can be attributed to the continuing crisis of globalism (1964: 63). As recurring exhibitions, Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals repeatedly exposed the inter-nationalization of a rapid succession of styles in the 1960s (gestural and geometric abstraction, pop, op, kineticism and industrial style sculpture), exacerbating critics distress when confronted with the artistic reflection of Marshall McLuhans global village (1962).5

The parade of successive artistic lingua francas, evident in galleries across the world but particularly on display in biennials, posed a daunting new challenge for postwar critical analysis. Instead of analyzing the phenomenon, its roots and its effects, many US critics regressed to assertions of their nations dominance. They envisioned internation-alism not as an exchange, but as evidence of unilateral influence exerted by the worlds superpowers on their impressionable neighbours. In reviews of the Internationals, critics like Thomas Hess reiterated the prominence of the United States, characterizing international gestural abstraction as beautiful colored nothings []. American-type painting from Japan, Spain, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, endlessly is spun out (1959a: 24). In The New York Times, Howard Devree stated that one comes upon picture after picture that show derivation from the work of such American painters as the late Jackson Pollock (1958: 36). To these critics, the US Internationals presented not only a unified world of aesthetic-political allies, but also the United States as that worlds leader. After all, New Yorks status as a potential rival to Paris as the centre of the art world was only newly won and required vigilant safeguarding. Formal relationships between works by US and foreign artists which were sometimes causal, sometimes coincidental, but rarely as simple as critics implied were used to retroactively impose cultural and stylistic imperialism.

US critics failed to recognize that curators only selected works by Latin American artists that, in their eyes, visually related to familiar styles of the United States or Western Europe. Upon viewing this parsed collection, US critics relying on a similar formalist perspective consist-ently complained that they did not see anything distinctly Argentine, Brazilian or Peruvian in the work. However, artists across the globe were eager to participate in an international exchange of ideas, enjoying the benefits of what the critics lamented: national borders did not limit ones scope or community. A cyclical crisis of nationalism and internation-alism ensued as artists became more itinerate and unclassifiable, cura-tors sought familiar styles and categories, and critics lamented the loss of distinctly national idioms.

It was against this background that in the 1960s critics became largely hostile to the big Internationals and biennials, begrudging these stodgy Leviathans (Tillim 1964: 61) and important exhibitions whose record this magazine is more or less duty-bound to note (Hess 1959a: 23). Major


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editors and journalists rarely passed the task to newer staff and used reviews as opportunities to brandish their swords and decry the phenom-enon as a whole. Thus, not only did the conservative press come out swinging against the unconventional art displayed, but art-world insiders lobbied their own critiques. For instance, Sidney Tillim wrote that For some time now no informed critic has been satisfied with the big interna-tional exhibitions []. No proper critic can accept the major biennial or triennial as a reliable index of events in the working of world art (1964: 57, 61). Whereas opinion about international exhibitions was mixed in the 1950s, it had almost universally soured by the mid-1960s. John Canaday celebrated 1965 as the year when everybody finally admitted to disil-lusion with the big international art fairs (1965a: X19). By 1967, Hilton Kramer acerbically lamented, Since its founding in 1956, the Guggenheim International has been one of the leading pseudo-events of the New York art scene []. [I]t quickly nominates itself as one of the most unnecessary exhibitions of the year (1967: 51). By the late 1960s, the Internationals had done their work too well; the globalization of the art world, which they so acutely touted, had become a platitude, something so obvious it did not need to be stated, let alone repeatedly displayed in high-profile shows every other year.

By 1966, Biennale syndrome a term used by Milton Esterow (1966: 28) had indeed taken hold of the art world. It was character-ized by the simultaneous boom and crisis of these exhibitions, and their omnipresence in the press. New biennials constantly popped up, further enraging the disillusioned critics, who in turn inundated the press with coverage of the shows, thus fuelling interest in them. In addition to the Venice Biennale (founded in 1895) and the Carnegie International (founded in 1896), new exhibitions included the So Paulo Bienal (1951), Documenta (1955), Guggenheim International (1956), Paris Biennale (1960), Cordoba Bienal (1962), and Bienal de Coltejer in Medelln (1968). Although largely forgotten today, efforts were made to establish a recur-ring New York Art International scheduled to begin in 1967. At the time, Canaday expressed his concerns that such a project was not only useless, but ripe for corruption.

The news of plans to establish a big international biennial art exhibi-tion in New York City comes at a time when disillusion with such shows is widespread and their value is much questioned or not at all questioned by people who have decided that the effect of such shows is worse than negative []. A New York biennial would be particularly vulnerable to corruption, since this town is the center of art marketing and, in fusion, taste marketing for the world.

(1965b: 26)

After scheduling delays and insufficient financial backing, the New York Art International was officially cancelled in 1968. The proliferation of biennials, increased access to travel, expediency of communications, and rising prices in the art market augmented critical outrage, while also intensifying the internationalization of style that so compelled curators and so discomforted viewers and critics.


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Structural Changes to the Internationals

Confronted with this onslaught of criticism, organizers of the Internationals examined and amended the structure and scope of their exhibitions throughout the 1960s. While it may come as no surprise that the relatively young Guggenheim International required revisions as it developed (changing its location, jury system, scale and catalogue format), the historic Carnegie International underwent an unusually intense period of alterations. In 1958, the Carnegie incorporated sculpture into what had been a painting competi-tion for a half-century. Where only two directors shaped the first fifty years of Carnegie Internationals (John Beatty between 18961921 and Homer Saint-Gardens between 192250), the 1960s saw a swift succession of directors, each with a vision of what the International should be. Gordon Washburn (director 19501962) profiled gestural abstraction as the hero of his Internationals, Gustave Von Groschwitz (director 19621968) embraced a broader range of aesthetics, and Leon Arkus (director 19681980) selected established artists over newcomers and reduced the number of artworks included.

Both institutions amended and eventually discontinued their prize systems over the course of the decade. While critics had always mocked the specific selections of prizewinners, by the 1960s the very process of prize-giving had become suspect. Even when Hilton Kramer offered a favourable review of the 1958 Carnegie International, he contrasted the exhibitions scope and brilliance [] supported by years of planning and deliberation with the awards, which were narrow and interested [] the result of a few days of astute politicking (1959: 30). Criticism reached an apex in 1964, when Alberto Giacometti won the Guggenheims $10,000 prize, hot on the heels of receiving the 1962 Venice Biennale Grand Prize in Sculpture and a $3,000 Carnegie International award in 1961. These successive, and exces-sive, awards called into question the utility of monetary prizes; after all, they were clearly given to established artists who did not need them, instead of younger artists they could have benefited tremendously. Also in 1964, Asger Jorn very publicly, dramatically rejected a $2,500 Guggenheim International Award. He begged his New York dealer Jon Street to vociferously decline the prize, as the hierarchical structure was wholly at odds with his core beliefs:

It is my opinion that there can bee no unifiedde and common judg-ment of two real works of art. A price giving is the establishment of an hierarchic distinction between artist []. I always refused to be placed at the top of others []. [I] am too lazy to accept it practically and find it ridiculous to doo it symbolically []. So get mee distin-guished from that mess please. [sic]

(Jorn 1964)

Jorns language intensified (to say the least) in a telegram to Harry Guggenheim:

Go to Hell with your money bastard. Refuse prize. Never asked for it. Against all decency mix artist against his will in your publicity. I want public confirmation not to have participated in your ridiculous game.

(quoted in Brns 2009: 69)


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Although Jorn was by far the most vocal in his refusal, many artists (including David Smith, Francis Bacon and Barnett Newman) rejected or requested to be excluded from consideration of prizes in the 1960s. Guggenheim and Carnegie curators likewise voiced their discontent H.H. Arnason declared that few responsible critics, if any, could be induced to say that such-and-such a work [] was the greatest painting or sculpture to be produced within the last two or three years and Washburn circulated a memo explaining that artists do not want to run for prizes in a kind of horse race for honors because art awards encourage chau-vinistic and commercial antagonisms and rivalries (Arnason 1964: n.p.; Washburn 1964: n.p.). The widespread acrimony toward the monetary prize systems incited their discontinuation by the Guggenheim in 1967, the Venice Biennale in 1968, and the Carnegie in 1970.

Although prizes fell out of favour due to general skepticism regarding the idea of objective quality, reviews of the Internationals often grounded their critiques in value judgments, which depended on objective quality as a viable concept. Critics enjoyed asserting extreme variations in quality, accusing curators of selecting some indisputably first-rate names, and play[ing] pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey thereafter (Canaday 1961: 66), declaring the Internationals a hodge-podge affair, an eclectic array of knick-knacks and gew-gaws (Hudson 1967: 57), and a gaudy display so uneven in quality and with such curious inclusions and exclusions that you would think the paintings had been selected at random (Canaday 1960: X12). The position of quality was in a state of crisis at this moment, a tension arrestingly revealed in the criticism surrounding the Internationals.

A Surprising Turn of Events: When the Internationals Stopped Being International

By the end of the 1960s, the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals began to include significantly less art from Latin America. The early spot-lights they shone on such important styles as Argentine neo-figuration and Venezuelan kineticism were abruptly turned off. Several factors contrib-uted to the shift. The wave of major Latin American art survey exhibitions in the United States sparked in 1959 had begun to ebb. Also the barrage of criticism hoisted upon these exhibitions both the Internationals and the major Latin American surveys incited the museums to considerably revamp their shows structure and scope throughout the decade. Voices proposing less geographic inclusiveness met with readier audiences after the previous years of pluralistic chaos, which had incited critics diatribes.

The Carnegie Internationals became much smaller and less exciting by 1970 under Leon Arkuss directorship. He dramatically reduced the number of artists included and overwhelmingly selected established artists, thereby abandoning the Internationals tradition of affording newcomers opportunities to exhibit in the highly publicized shows. The geographic scope narrowed as well, restricted primarily to the United States and Europe. The changes did not go unnoticed. In Arts, Gordon Brown complained that Almost no examples of the real avant-garde are shown in Pittsburgh (1970: 53). Donald Miller echoed these


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6. The list included Marta Traba, Jorge Elliott, Alfredo Bonino, Guillermo Whitelow, Miguel Arroyo, Ins Amor and Rafael squirru, among others (Alloway 1964a). Alloway was also in contact with Jorge Romero Brest, but his name does not appear on this list because Greenberg already knew him through the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella.

concerns in Art International, expressing his frustration with Arkus for rather assiduously ignoring the newest art forms and for the fact that there is not a greater sense of adventure in the show (1971: 38, 40). The Guggenheim International also dramatically altered in the late 1960s when it was passed from Lawrence Alloway to Edward Fry in 1967. This shift is one of the most striking episodes in the history of both Internationals and merits extended investigation here.

From Alloway to Fry: Lessons in Pluralism and Xenophobia

While in their catalogue introductions curators of the 1960s Carnegie Internationals tended to espouse rather vague notions of universal values in art and humanity, when the Guggenheim International catalogues began to include essays in 1964, they served as serious position papers. The former typically expressed sweeping generalizations such as At all times it has been the aim of the creative artist to discover order []. Of all living men, the artist is the most positive in his action, the most optimistic (Washburn 1961). In contrast to this placeless, unanchored universalism, the Guggenheim curators approached internationalism as a very real, manipulable network of geopolitical relations in which artists and exhibi-tions operate. Alloway and Fry offered conflicting, compelling versions of internationalism and its effects on the art world.

One of Alloways first tasks upon his appointment as a Guggenheim curator in 1961 was a worldwide hunt for art for the museums International. His travels proved fruitful and he included fifteen works by artists from Latin America, more than any other curator of the Guggenheim Internationals. He profiled Argentine, Mexican and Venezuelan neo-figuration with work by de la Vega, Deira, No, Macci, Borges, Belkin and Francisco Icaza, as well as major abstract works by Otero, Szyszlo, Ricardo Yrarrzaval and Jos Fernandez-Muro and modernist favourites Matta, Lam and Siqueiros. Alloway conscientiously sought the advice of major critics in Latin America, and by the summer of 1964 was able to give an impressive list to Clement Greenberg, who was about to embark for Argentina.6

While Alloways extensive research and critical engagement with the challenges posed by global art distinguish him, his installation actually fell in line with that of other early and mid-1960s curators. His inclusiveness, exhibiting artists from around the globe side by side in the Guggenheim, made his International a co-conspirator in the curatorial suggestion of a unified world, highlighting formal similarities rather than contextual distinctions. Text proved to be the primary outlet through which Alloway promoted the very cultural specificity that his installation lacked. The curator clearly struggled with the International as a task, which demanded exclusions and inclusiveness, exhibited a united world but exposed cura-tors to cultural differences (whether they chose to acknowledge them or not). The essays and articles Alloway wrote in the years surrounding his 1964 International reveal fascinating precedents to contemporary concep-tualizations of global art.

Alloways approach to the Guggenheim International was informed by his work challenging rigid art historical hierarchies over the prior decade.


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Although they were friendly colleagues, Alloway found himself at odds with Greenbergs dogmatic distinction between avant-garde and kitsch as well as his teleological art history of selective winners and dominant artistic centres (first Paris, then New York). In contrast, Alloway cham-pioned the incorporation of so-called low culture into high culture (even coining the term pop art) and endorsed an art historical meth-odology that was synchronic (examining a cross-section of art in a single moment) rather than diachronic (which charts art over time) (see Alloway 1958, 1959, 1979). Touting abundance rather than exclusivity, he used the opportunity to curate a global survey of contemporary art to apply his emphasis on dehierarchization to not only materials, subject matter, artists and styles but now also to geography in the art world. He did not declare the United States or Europe superior to Latin America or Asia, but instead characterized artists from around the world as participating in a productive, complex non-hierarchical dialogue (Alloway 1964b: 1214). His position stood in stark contrast to his contemporaries fear that the internationalization of style heralded the end of creativity and their insist-ence that it reflected the dominance of a single nation.

In his catalogue introduction, Alloway addressed several other incipient issues for Latin American and global art. He declared context central to understanding an artwork (thus departing from formalism), and considered the importance of media networks and travel, reminding readers that International art styles have existed before and, indeed, art naturally spreads along all available channels of distribution []. What is new is the speed with which information is transmitted and the fullness of the message (Alloway 1964b: 1415). To underscore the significance of artists travels, Alloway included a rather anachronistic addition in his catalogue: a map of painter Georges Mathieus worldwide travels. The drawing reveals Mathieu as the exemplary itinerant artist, making readers question the relevance of defining artists by the country of their birth and underscoring global networks linking Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.

Alloway also confronted the problematic nature of asserting monolithic identities for geographic regions. His epigraph citing Henry James One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a whole of it [] rather it is a collection of many wholes (quoted in Alloway 1964b: 12) directly prefaces the following statement Alloway made about geographic categories and identity:

We speak and think of New York and Paris as units of cultural iden-tity, and not of the United States or France, but we still use Latin America as a comprehensive term. As information increases about the subject, however, such high-level generalization is bound to subside to closer references to countries and cities.

(Alloway 1965b: 72)

While Alloway understood the utility of the category Latin American art, he recognized that it imposed a faade of uniformity discordant with the actual situations complexity.


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Problems of Communication and Nationality: The Principal Travels of Georges Mathieu, published in Guggenheim International Award 1964. Photo: courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Alloway was acutely cognizant of the challenges this new global art world posed for art critics. He repeatedly declared the popular extant models insufficient, perhaps most directly at the 1965 American Federation of Art Conference: Critics, by and large, are not tempted to try and handle the abundance of the scene. Their tendency, on the contrary, is to work out drastically simplificatory strategies to reduce the hectic scene to congruence (Alloway 1965a: 109). New methodologies needed


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to be developed and Alloways essay in the Guggenheim International catalogue offered a forceful advance. In recent symposia and publications, scholars have begun to recognize Alloways brand of criticism as a prec-edent to the pluralism that dominates today, underscoring his dehierar-chization of artists, subjects and materials (Kalina 2006; Whiteley 2012; Tate Papers 2011). To this I would add that the geographic pluralism he advocated in the catalogue of his 1964 Guggenheim International and in his article Latin American and International Art is an equally impor-tant and topical precursor to the art historical methods employed in the twenty-first century.

Shortly following his prescient experiments of 196465, Alloways rela-tionship with international biennials became tumultuous. Reception of his Guggenheim International was bound up in the general disenchantment with large international shows; he later recalled that it was considered a flop (1971b: 6364). In 1965, Alloway began to curate the American pavilion of the 1966 Venice Biennale on behalf of the Guggenheim. However, only months before the opening, Guggenheim director Thomas Messer overturned his selections, causing the museum to exceed its budget, miss the deadline, and lose the opportunity to curate the pavilion. The fallout led to Alloways resignation from the museum, after which he authored the first history of the Venice Biennale (Alloway 1968), and the Guggenheim International was passed off to another curator.

Edward Fry, who replaced Alloway as Guggenheim curator in 1966, employed the International format toward ends radically different from those of his predecessor: namely to assert Euro-American dominance over the international art world. He narrowed the field both aesthetically and geographically, limiting the art to sculpture primarily from the North Atlantic regions. Frys exhibition constructed a lineage of twentieth-century US and Western European sculptors like Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and David Smith, arranged to herald the triumph of American minimalism (Alberro 1997: 64). Frys exhibition coincided with other major sculpture surveys American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1967), Scale as Content (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1967), and Sculpture in Environment (New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967). His use of the International format to host a Euro-American sculpture show was at once voguish and redundant.

When, in preparation for his show, Fry embarked on the same world-wide search as Alloway, he returned not with art, but with a largely dismissive memo on cultural production beyond the United States and Europe. He significantly diminished Latin American representation from fifteen (in 1964) to only one in 1967. His pick, Colombian sculptor Edgar Negret, was already well known in New York, and even the specific sculp-ture selected, Tower No. 2 (196566), was a familiar, safe choice, nearly identical to Tower (1965), which was shown in the 1965 So Paulo Bienal and reproduced in the pages of Art News (Baker 1965: 31).

In his catalogue introduction, Fry reasserted textually what his selec-tions claimed visually: his belief that [w]ith few exceptions the English-speaking peoples exert a sculptural hegemony over the rest of the world (1967a: 14; see also 1967b: 27). If this were not narrow enough, Fry went on


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to state, Undoubtedly there is a more intense experimentation with new materials, forms and stylistic ideas in the United States than may be found elsewhere (1967a: 15). In a twist of irony, Fry declared US art superior in the very exhibition that abolished the Internationals prize system due to skepticism regarding objective quality as a valid concept. Messers expla-nation for the lack of prizes the best is a vague concept and so becomes a personal and, therefore fallible choice conflicted with Frys prejudiced value judgments (Messer 1967: 1011, emphasis in the original).

In the next and last International, Fry exacerbated the position he asserted in 1967; he characterized Eastern Europe, South America and Asia as the artistic third world, declared New York the capitol of capitols, and

Antonio Dias, Work in Progress: The Word and Work in Progress: The Image (1970). Photos: courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.


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confined the concentration of innovative contemporary art in a narrow, North Atlantic, predominantly English-speaking area (1971: 3234). The 1971 exhibition, co-curated by Fry and Diane Waldman (she was in charge of the European and American selections), included only one Latin American artist (Antonio Dias) and two artists they labelled Japanese (Jiro Takamatsu and On Kawara). The show focused on experimental art from Europe and particularly the United States, including Dan Flavins fluo-rescent tubes, Richard Longs mud tracks, Donald Judds torqued circle, Michael Heizers slide projections, and Robert Rymans white paintings. Alexander Alberro has pointed out that the Guggenheim positioned this work as informed by US minimalism and, thus, as the rightful successors to the previous Internationals victors (1997: 6465). Frys approach reinsti-tuted teleology and exclusivity, toppled Alloways experimental pluralism, and established a new colonialism that shrank the daunting, expanding network of global art back down to a manageable map.

Although Diass works in the 1971 Guggenheim International fit the elegant, minimal style of conceptual art favoured by Fry, one should not interpret them as submissive to Frys overall program. Rather, closer inspection casts them as dissident rebels that perhaps critique the way Internationals portray international styles. In Work in Progress: The Word (1970) and Work in Progress: The Image (1970), exhibited next to each other in the International, two identical squares contain two identical xs. However, one x is titled the word and the other the image. Dias there-fore underscores that context (knowing that one is linguistic and the other pictorial) shifts the meaning of the sign; formally related images are not necessarily conceptually identical. Although in the International, these pieces by Dias were likely facilely coalesced with text-based canvases by Kawara and the minimal white paintings of Ryman, Diass works them-selves insist that formal similarities be viewed with skepticism and a desire for more information.

Responses and Rebuttals to a Shrinking Internationalism

Few critics caught on to the fact that the Guggenheim International was no longer international. However, there were a few exceptions. Gregory Battcock noted this somewhat timidly:

The new show is supposed to be an international survey. One assumes, because there is little evidence to the contrary, that there must be some interesting artwork going on in faraway places []. The Guggenheim shows us work we are already, by and large, familiar with. Is that all there is? Well, maybe, but I find it difficult to believe.

(1967: 50)

In 1971, Grace Glueck observed without judgment that the museum has reduced the shows international spread (1971: 26). James Monte asserted more critically that one must remember that the exhibition is avowedly international in its scope, and so it must be what it says, or forgo its title (1971: 30). Decades later, this model of the so-called international show,


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which contains overwhelmingly US and European art with a few additions tacked on for good measure or tokenism, remains remarkably prevalent.

In 1971, conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer issued a more complex critique of the Guggenheim Internationals restricted scope. In a letter to the editor of the Village Voice, Camnitzer revealed the colonialist attitude embedded in the show and in John Perreaults positive review. Perreault condoned and propagated Frys chauvinistic premise, stating, Since quality and originality and breadth of accomplishment seem to have been the only criteria, most of the artists represented are from the United States (cited in Camnitzer 1971: 26). In response, Camnitzer explained that to defend the Guggenheims preference for US and Western European art is to prais[e] the best players of a game without analyzing who made the rules (1971: 24). He further insisted that so-called international stand-ards were not international, but of course defined quite narrowly by those in power. And even if one accepted the standards imposed by US critics and curators, the exclusion of global art from the 1971 Guggenheim International, which focused on site-specific installations, conceptualism and process art, was particularly egregious given the exciting work of this kind being produced in Latin America (Camnitzer 1971: 2426).

Lawrence Alloway and Daniel Buren, likely having read Camnitzers piercing critique, echoed his charge of cultural colonialism in their own responses to the 1971 International. Alloway quoted Ruben Gerchmans International Art is not International Art but Cultural Imperialism (1971a) and insisted that perhaps it is time to drop the international from the exhibitions title. He pointed out that of 21 artists, 8 were represented by the Dwan Gallery (New York), 5 by Leo Castelli (New York), and 9 by Konrad Fischer (Dusseldorf), and condemned the fact that In the Guggenheim exhibition, certainly, internationalism is identified precisely with one section of the market (Alloway 1971a: 41314). Buren likewise expressed his shock and outrage:

[I]n the sixth Guggenheim International there were no less than twelve American artists as against eight representing the rest of the world! Without making any hasty judgments as to whether these practices are more current in the United States than elsewhere, any-one can work out the political and economic causes which lie behind them. Art is not above ideologies, but a part of them. In the case of the avant-garde, art is a reflection of a dominant ideology in our society, that of the bourgeoisie. What this means in the case of American society is the expression and affirmation of imperialism.

(1971: 246)

Although Camnitzer, Alloway and Buren certainly had personal reasons to criticize the Guggenheim International Camnitzer for his exclusion from an exhibition in which his text-based conceptual art fit remarkably well, Alloway for his troubled past with the museum, and Buren for the censorship of his work in the 1971 International these motives should not undermine the persuasive attacks they unleashed.

Other critics were blind to the 1971 Internationals lack of interna-tionalism. Although perhaps in part due to nationalistic revelling in the


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proposition that US artists could so blatantly dominate a survey of global art, most critics in the spring of 1971 were simply too preoccupied. A major scandal unfolded when Guggenheim officials removed Burens work from the International the day before the opening; only months later they cancelled Hans Haackes solo exhibition (see, for example, Reise 1971). These two events in quick succession sparked an intense debate about censorship in the art world.

The last Guggenheim International seemed to essentially self-destruct. It was no longer international, thus defying its very reason for existence. Furthermore, it showcased conceptual art described in reviews as a direct threat to the gallery and museum system (Green 1971: 78) and by mani-festo antipublic, antiart and antimuseum (Canaday 1971: 23). With Burens work as their symbolic (and literal) banner, this art of institutional critique rather poetically contributed to the demise of an institutions tradition.

Postlude

By 1971, the Internationals were indeed in a troubled state; the Carnegies regressed into conservativism (temporarily) and the Guggenheims ended amid scandal. That very year, a distraught Alloway seemed ready to give up on the whole endeavour; he stated exasperatedly, The fact is that global shows are obsolete (1971a: 413). However, today, large exhibi-tions of global art abound in the United States. Like their mid-century predecessors, they incite varied critical reception: some deemed triumphs and others rife with racial and cultural insensitivity. Rather than ignore the troubled history of international exhibitions, they should be revisited for their instructive methodological lessons and the history and context they give to contemporary challenges posed by global art. For example, scholars should seek to treat international stylistic relationships care-fully, to neither eradicate nor overstress cultural specificity, depending upon its relevance. Since the number, strength and criticism of bien-nials has intensified exponentially since the 1960s biennial syndrome, one might consider anxiety to be an inherent part of their structure, akin to a marketing strategy grounded in cyclical provocation. Scholars also continue to grapple with the chaotic abundance of contemporary art, confronting the very dilemma put forth to Alloway and Fry: to either embrace pluralistic inclusivity or reduce the art world to a more restricted cartography. While the latter is more comforting and comprehensible, the chauvinistic worldview at its core is all too obvious and dangerous. Today, as scholars work to address the curatorial and conceptual challenges of Latin American and international art, it proves instructive to look at the experiments, successes and failures of these controversial examples that took place half a century ago.

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Suggested Citation

Solomons, Delia (2014), Staging the Global: Latin American Art in the Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals of the 1960s, Journal of Curatorial Studies 3: 2+3, pp. 290319, doi: 10.1386/jcs.3.2-3.290_1

Contributor Details

Delia Solomons is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts special-izing in twentieth-century art of the Americas and Europe. Her disser-tation examines the reception and exhibition of Latin American art in the United States from 1959 to 1966, the years directly following the Cuban Revolution. She has worked as an Adjunct Professor at New York University, co-curator of Sari Dienes (The Drawing Center, 2014), and Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Gallery. Her writings have been published in In the Distance (2011), Art=Text=Art (2012), Notation: Contemporary Art as Idea and Process (2012), and Encuentros con los 30 (2012). In 20132014, she was also a graduate fellow at the Humanities Initiative at New York University.

Contact: Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th Street, New York, NY, 10075, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Delia Solomons has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format it was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


Delia Solomons - Staging the Global

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