“Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond” opens tomorrow, April 30, and will be on view until September 9, 2023, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 11 West 53^rd Street.) The exhibition also features new acquisitions, loans, and commissions that address the themes of history, heritage, and remembrance.

Included in this exhibition are artists from the Caribbean region such as Firelei Báez (Dominican Republic), José Bedia (Cuba), Sofía Gallizá Muriente (Puerto Rico), and Las Nietas de Nonó (Puerto Rico), among others.  [See MoMA for related events and gallery talks.]

Chosen Memories brings together contemporary works by Latin American artists who have been investigating history as source material for their work. “History is a living organism,” said the Brazilian artist ​​Rosângela Rennó, one of the 40 artists featured in the exhibition. Bringing together videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures made over the past four decades, the exhibition reveals how some of today’s most relevant art is conceived through investigating and retelling history in new ways.

Anchored by a transformative gift of works from trustee Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and shown in dialogue with other Latin American works from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition presents work by some of the region’s most important artists, including Rennó, Alejandro Cesarco (Uruguay), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Mario García Torres (Mexico), Leandro Katz (Argentina), Suwon Lee (Venezuela), Gilda Mantilla (Peru) and Raimond Chaves (Colombia), and José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia). From reframing long histories of colonialism in the region and exploring the different ways in which artists revisit undervalued cultural heritages, to looking at the ways in which kinship and belonging are strengthened, the exhibition offers us new ways of looking at the past to better understand, and shape, our current moment.

PUBLICATION: Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that brings together a diverse array of artworks whose mobilization of Latin America’s varied histories animates both their politics and their poetics. An essay by curator Inés Katzenstein examines how artists working in video, photography, painting, and sculpture over the past four decades have investigated and reimagined the region’s legacies, including long histories of colonialism, undervalued cultural and visual heritages, and inherited and elective kinships. 128 pages, 105 color illustrations. Hardcover, $45. ISBN: 978-1-63345-138-4. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and available at MoMA stores and online at store.moma.org.

For more information, visit https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5528

[Shown above: “Purple Haze” by Venezuelan artist Suwon Lee.]