Art, identity, propaganda. Devising Latin America through art exhibitions

SERVIDDIO, LUISA FABIANA

Washington DC

Conferencia; Third Triennial Conference of the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA). Cities, Borders and Frontiers in Ancient, Colonial, Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art.; 2013

Association for Latin American Art (ALAA)

On the edge of its engagement in World War II, the United States government executed a program of cultural and commercial interchanges with Latin America in order to protect its interests in the Western hemisphere and to counterattack the influence exerted by the Axis. The agency responsible for this mission was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter American Affairs, leaded by Nelson Rockefeller. To meet this goal, OCIIA engaged, as advisers or members of staff, representative and influential citizens from a variety of spheres. A strong Pan-American net expanded towards Latin America and established ties with artists, intellectuals and politicians that shared the same common enemy: Nazism and its credo on ethnic superiority. In the visual arts section, OCIIA dedicated mostly to organize, to promote and circulate Latin American art exhibitions. The proposal for the ALAA Meeting is to work on the national, regional and hemispheric representations of Latin American art and culture in International Exhibitions during 1940. The focus will be put on the Latin American section of the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco, curated by Dr. Grace McCann Morley -director of the Museum of Fine Arts at the time-; the Latin American art exhibition at the Riverside Museum in Manhattan organized as a parallel event to the New York World Fair; and the IBM Hemispheric Collection of Latin American Painting, Sculpture and Engravings which was established at the beginning of the 1940s accompanying the official political propaganda. Comparing these three shows will allow me to underscore the different meanings that were developed at the same time to imagine Latin American people, habits and places through its art and to produce alternative discourses on its changing identities and consequently, on US-Latin American relations. Museum studies propose thinking about exhibitions as objects of study, discourses over imposed to artworks that imply authority criteria and give away, through their organization, to identities? representations. Therefore, they are considered key agents in the artistic field. During the Second World War, exhibitions utilized artworks for both their esthetic and documentary capacities and were able to articulate an official cultural policy that targeted several (sometimes contradictory) aims. On one hand, there was a constant claim coming from artists, politicians and intellectuals that the cultural and historical specificities of Latin America were not acknowledged and taken into consideration in the United States, so this was one of the most important demands exhibitions were in charge to respond. It was crucial to demonstrate that the United States government and people were tolerant and democratic towards cultural and racial diversity. On the other hand, there was a concrete necessity to strengthen the geopolitical ties with Latin America through the Western hemisphere ideology, in order to secure protection from any European pretension in the Americas. The common cultural inheritance that both Latin and North America, as European colonies, could exhibit, had to be underlined to establish the basis for a continental identity. These ambiguous representations of different cultural identities for Latin America -national, regional, hemispheric- served nonetheless at this time to put in the first place the fact that Latin American artists were also contributing to artistic modernity.