Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern Art

The Power of the Canon

Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide (New York University, USA)

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English

Routledge
12 June 2025

Art styles not defined by date; Exhibition catalogues & specific collections

Series: Routledge Research in Museum Studies

This book sheds light on an as-yet unstudied aspect of The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) preeminent role in establishing the definition of the problematic term “Latin American art” in the United States from the 1930s to the present through its collection displays. In examining the shifting categorization of Latin American works according to stylistic and geographic taxonomies, we gain a greater understanding of the organization of the Museum’s collections as a whole during the 1940s and 1950s. This book is the first to document these institutional precedents, crucial for the understanding of the articulation of a Modernist canon and its contested legacy today.

The MoMA is widely recognized as the preeminent institution that defined 20th-century art through its collection – shaping our understandings of the history of art, with its hierarchies and exclusions, as they sediment over time. MoMA’s holdings of art from Latin America shed light on a key period when the stylistic categories that have since come to be accepted by many today as the Modernist canon developed. MoMA’s collection displays suggest ways in which artists from areas of the world formerly excluded can be incorporated within today’s increasingly global museums. MoMA’s approach may be compared to initiatives adopted by several museums since the 2000s, creating geographically defined curatorial positions as a way to redress gaps in collecting art from Latin America and other areas of the world. In this book, author Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide offers a closer study of the history of collection displays as a means to understand canon formation in modern art museums.

This work will be of interest to those researching Latin American, American, modern, and contemporary art, and curatorial and museum studies.

By: Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide (New York University USA)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 570g
ISBN: 9780415843669
ISBN 10: 0415843669
Series: Routledge Research in Museum Studies
Pages: 212
Publication Date: 12 June 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education , A / AS level
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction: Museum Collection Displays and Canon-Formation 1. The First Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in 1945: Alfred H. Barr’s Evolving Canon 2. The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, 1954-1955: Debates About the Definition of American Art 3. The 1960s: Elaine Johnson’s Latin American Department Proposal and the 1967 Latin American Collection Exhibition Conclusion: Displaying Latin American Art in Museums Today

Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at New York University (NYU). She was co-curator of Tempo (MoMA QNS, 2002), MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (2003), and Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (NYU Kimmel Windows, 2023). Her book Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Routledge) was published in 2013.