Four San Diego arts organizations will be part of a major series of grants awarded this week by the Getty Foundation to support a chronicle of the Latino experience in art throughout greater Southern California.
Balboa Park’s San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Photographic Arts joined UC San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in receiving more than $600,000 in grants to create exhibits “about the relationships between Latin America and the rest of the world (and) about the history of exchange among Latin American countries,” according to the Getty.
Some of the exhibits will include collaborations with artists from abroad, including Mexico and South America.
The Getty’s awards to San Diego are for:
- $275,000, to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, to collaborate with Mexico City’s Museo Rufino Tamayo and the Museo de Arte de Lima, to examine how artists in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico redefined the avant-garde. Work from Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape, as well as lesser-known artists in Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru, is expected to be included.
- $175,000, to the San Diego Museum of Art for an exhibit called Indigenismos, expected to include 19th-century figurative painting, early 20th-century representations of the Indian as a symbol of national identity, and the Surrealists’ fascination with Indian imagery.
- $100,000, to the Museum of Photographic Arts for the exhibit, Displacement: Mexican Photography, 2000–2012,
which will look at the work of photographers Karina Juarez, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Luis Arturo Aguirre to explore “the fracturing of personal and cultural identities in the new Mexico,” marked by political upheaval, massive migration and drug wars. - $58,000 to the University of San Diego for the exhibit, Xerox Art in Brazil and Argentina, 1970–1980, including artists Nelson Leirner, Paulo Bruscky, Regina Silveira, Carmela Gross, Eduardo Kac and León Ferrari and their work to create “a truly democratic form of art” using copiers, faxes and teletext machines.
The project is called Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and is meant to extend a series of exhibitions launched in 2011 to document the roots of art in Southern California. The awards are to help the arts groups fund planning and research to mount the shows.
The bulk of the 40 Getty grants went to Los Angeles-area institutions, but other awards went to Riverside, Irvine and Newport Beach. Grants of up to $335,000 were handed out by the foundation.
