The Pérez Art Museum of Miami (PAMM) launched this week a funding initiative to produce exhibitions of Latin American artists who wish to bring their works to that institution.
The initiative was launched on November 13, and is part of the institution’s effort to explore underexplored areas of art history, with an emphasis on non-European artistic expressions. The proposal takes into account that, although the interest in the creation of artists from peripheral countries has gained strength, their exhibitions remain difficult to produce.
“Financing exhibitions can be difficult everywhere. Add to that that we’re talking about artists who aren’t the ‘usual suspects,'” said Franklin Sirmans, director of PAMM.
Funding for the initiative will come from members of the membership board, including lead donor Jorge M. Perez. The amount is intended to ensure the museum’s production of exhibits as well as academic research on these topics in perpetuity, no matter who is in charge of the institution, Sirmans said.
This project will give continuity to other very successful initiatives of the PAMM: the one dedicated to the acquisition of works by African-American artists and a second dedicated to women artists.
Unlike the previous ones, the initiative for Latin American artists will support exhibitions and research, not acquisitions.
Over the past decade, the museum has devoted special attention to the work of Latin American artists. Between 2002 and 2012, the number of doctoral dissertations on the subject grew by 300%, according to art historian Adriana Zavala, a professor at Tuffs University.
2017 saw the launch of the Getty Foundation-funded “Pacific Standard Time: Latin America/Los Angeles” initiative in Southern California, and in 2016 MoMA in New York announced it would establish a research center dedicated to the study of Latin American art.
On the other hand, U.S. institutions have historically devoted less attention to the work of Chicano and Latino artists. The PAMM initiative aims to correct this imbalance.
The new project will officially begin with the Latinx Art Sessions, a two-day conference presented by PAMM and ArtCenter/South Florida on January 24 and 25. “We are still at the point of examining the term. Latinx as a gender-neutral noun, rather than Latino or Latina,” says Sirmans.
On December 4, coinciding with the Art Basel sessions in Miami Beach, PAMM will inaugurate the personal exhibitions of Peruvian artist José Carlos Martinat and New York-based Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Neves Marques.
The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), which is dedicated to collecting modern and contemporary art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was created by the developer and patron of art Jorge Pérez in 2013. It is named in recognition of Perez as the main donor to its establishment. The fortune of the businessman, of Cuban origin, is estimated at about 3,100 million dollars, according to Forbes magazine.
Source: https://www.diariodecuba.com/cultura/1541939842_42920.html
