Explore a small sampling of the rich variety of works in the museum’s collection by artists who were born and worked in South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, including several artists who either studied in the United States or have made it their adopted home.
If you entered at Michigan Avenue, start at the top. If you entered through the Modern Wing, go in reverse order.
Please note that artworks occasionally go off view for imaging, treatment, or loan to other institutions. Click on the images to ensure the work is currently on view.
Unknown Guatemalan Artist(s)
This work reinterprets the famous life-size sculpture group of the Christ of Esquipulas, begun in 1595 for an altar in Guatemala and still venerated by millions of worshippers annually. While makers of the work here are unknown, the style of the carving and polychromy tie it to the Guatemalan school that was one of the most important centers for sculpture production in 18th-century Latin America. This scene of the Crucifixion features realistic bloody wounds and carefully painted, agonized expressions that bring the suffering of the figures to life. In addition, the eyes of the mourners are reverse-painted glass, giving them a lifelike sheen. The gilded decoration of the costumes incorporates the so-called estofado technique imitating gold embroidery. Small in scale, this group was likely intended for use in a private setting, such as a home, convent, or monastery.
On view in Gallery 212
Kukuli Velarde
Peruvian artist Kukuli Velarde (born 1962) creates ceramic works that both celebrate indigenous cultures and explore the consequences of colonialization by Spain. In this low-fired clay sculpture, she transforms the famous Christian statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in Cusco’s cathedral, called La Linda, into an ancient Nasca goddess. Crowned in a silver starred halo and adorned with iconography from ancient Nasca ceramics, La Linda Nasca creates a throughline from pre-Columbian traditions to the post-colonial present of contemporary Latin American art. In this way, Velarde explores the dual identities that many modern Andeans may embrace.
On view in Gallery 136
Ah Maxam
This Maya vessel from the Late Classic period was made by Ah Maxam, a member of the royal lineage of the kingdom of Naranjo, in the Petén region of Guatemala who was artistically active in the mid- to late eighth century. The vessel depicts, in three almost-identical panels, a Maya ruler dressed as the maize god, a crucial deity for the ancient Maya, who was connected with the cycle of death and resurrection. Wearing brilliant feathers, heraldic beasts, and related emblems on his back, the ruler/maize god dances with a person born with dwarfism. Among the Maya, little people were seen as special beings with powerful spiritual connections to the earth and the interior world below. This scene captures a rite of passage in which the soul of the deceased is accompanied into the domain of the dead, from which it would eventually be reborn in the royal lineage, just as maize sprouts again in the cycle of nature’s renewal.
On view in Gallery 136
José Clemente Orozco
Along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco was a leader of the Mexican mural movement that arose after the Revolution. Born in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1883, Orozco studied agricultural engineering before becoming an artist, having been inspired by the illustrator José Guadalupe Posada. In his painting of Emiliano Zapata, one of the revolutionaries who led an army of peasants and the dispossessed against the federal army, Orozco creates a sense of foreboding and ambiguity. He places the revered rebel in the background, framed in a doorway behind two armed soldiers and two figures who appear to be grieving. The violence and destruction perpetrated by both sides of the revolution had disturbed Orozco. In this claustrophobic scene, which defies the traditions of heroic portraiture, there is no sense of victory—instead a sense of the cost of war.
On view in Gallery 263
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera (1886–1957) is one of the most widely celebrated Mexican artists in the history of art. As a muralist, painter, and sculptor, he sought to construct a national visual identity, often through depictions of ancient Mesoamerican cultures as well as modern Indigenous people. This painting captures the master Nahua weaver Luz Jiménez at work on a traditional backstrap loom, an age-old technique she had learned from her mother. Jiménez was more than a model—she was a cultural historian. As she sat for Rivera, she taught him about the history and language of the Nahuatl people. By centering Jiménez in Weaving, Rivera embraces and celebrates her Indigenous traditions.
On view in Gallery 263
Jesús Ruiz Durand
Jesús Ruiz Durand is a Peruvian artist, designer, and educator. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ruiz Durand designed a series of posters as part of an initiative that sought a more just distribution of land for Peru’s Indigenous land-working populations, an initiative launched by the country’s military dictator General Juan Velasco Alvarado. Ruiz Durand used the graphic language of comic books and referenced Pop and Op Art and Peruvian Indigenous motifs, a style that became known as pop achorado (achorado is Peruvian slang for rebellious, vulgar, or insubordinate). Ruiz Durand’s posters circulated throughout the country to garner public support for the government’s agrarian reform. They also aimed to construct a modern national identity rooted in Peru’s Indigenous past, present, and future.
On view in Gallery 285
Raúl Martínez
Alongside his teaching at the University of Havana, Cuban artist Raúl Martínez is best known for creating a new mode of politically conscious Pop Art after the Cuban Revolution. This sculpture comes from his student days when he was attending Chicago’s Institute of Design. Unlike most students’ tentative exercises with wire, Martínez’s sculpture is large and assured, with X-shaped bracing that suggests an insect or fish form. After returning to his native Cuba, Martínez expanded his practice to include collage, graphic design, mural painting, and photography.
On view in Gallery 285
Roberto Matta
Born in Chile, where he studied to be an architect, Roberto Matta (1911–2002) moved to France in 1933 and eventually encountered and responded to the ideas of André Breton and the Surrealists. In Spain, he became friends with the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, whose assassination in 1936 by agents of dictator Francisco Franco inspired Matta to channel his anger and grief into a screenplay. Titled The Earth Is a Man, this emotional and apocalyptic text became the principal driver of his visual art over the next five years, culminating in a painting of the same name. Matta aimed to visually represent various states of consciousness in his paintings, calling the often turbulent forms “Inscapes” or “Psychological Morphologies.” Exhibited in New York City in 1942, where the artist had immigrated at the onset of World War II, Matta’s painting profoundly influenced American Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.
On view in Gallery 398
Teresa Burga
Teresa Burga (1935–2021) was one among a group of Peruvian artists responsible for reconcieving what modern art could be in her country. From the beginning, she focused on the female body, exploring the representations and expectations of women in Peruvian society. This work from Burga’s Pop-inflected period is a collaged and painted relief of a woman lounging in “mod” 1960s fashion—one of the only two figural reliefs by Burga that survive. Sin Título is also among the last works Burga made before traveling to the United States in 1968 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Fulbright Fellow, which was a transformative time of study for the artist. After her return to Lima, her work became more conceptual, focused on recording traces of her own physical body rather than the body of popular culture.
On view in Gallery 297
Lygia Clark
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark began her career in the 1950s as a painter committed to abstract geometric art. She created colorful works that treated pictorial surfaces as if they were architectural spaces. After moving to Paris to study painting, notably working with Fernand Léger, who had influenced Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral a generation earlier, she both simplified her palette and started to extend the visual field of painting beyond the canvas’s edge into the world of the viewer. Unidade no.1 is a perfect example. The square of wood, covered with black industrial paint and edged in white, is left unframed and hangs on a special cleat that allows it to project slightly from the wall. The subtle optical and spatial effects result in a work that has the properties of both painting and sculptural relief.
On view in Gallery 297
Topics
- Modern Art
- Contemporary Art
- Arts of Asia
- Textiles
- European Painting and Sculpture
- Architecture and Design
