How to Spot Latin America's Tropical Art

Latin America is a diverse, multifaceted, heterogeneous region and The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative’s Under the Same Sun: Art From Latin America Today exhibit at Museo Jumex in Mexico City hopes to expand that art conversation globally. The traveling exhibition, includes more than 40 works of painting, installation, performance, photography and video, from Latin American artists representing 13 countries. It focuses largely on the political turmoil that has shaped those countries and renders visible the aesthetic contributions of Latin American artists to contemporary art and culture.

“I could not ignore the presence of politics, that’s something that most of the artists deal with in one way or another," Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for Latin America, Pablo León de la Barra tells The Creators Project. De la Barra organized the works around conceptualism, modernism, participation, and what he calls “the tropical,” which is an acknowledgement of the uniqueness each country has on cultural production. “It was really important for me to show that aesthetics are present but also the great contributions of most of these works and artists act as critical tools to rethink the realities.”

Wilson Diaz’s neon light text work, Movement of the Liberation of The Cocoa Plant, draws attention to the complex history Latin America has with agriculture corporations. Alfredo Jaar’s Times Square, April 1987: A Logo for America, visually rethinks the geographic and political landscape that is referred to as “America” to include not only the United States but also the countries of Central and South America. And Carlos Motta’s Brief History of US Interventions in Latin America Since 1946 lists off more than a dozen times the United States forcibly shaped the political histories of many other countries in the region.