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
Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo is renowned for portraying modern Mexican subjects through a mixture of international avant-garde styles and local sensibilities. His portrait of the celebrated painter María Izquierdo presents her with eyes closed; a transparent fish outlined in red appears behind her, almost as if emanating from her mind, projecting a sense of the unreal or the fantastic. Tamayo’s portrayal likely references the imaginative quality of Izquierdo’s own work. In 1932 she began creating allegorical compositions that moved beyond the direct representation of nature into a more poetic realm. By depicting her in a dreamlike manner in his portrait, Tamayo acknowledged the significance of invention in her artistic practice. The limited and contrasting palette that Tamayo employed emphasizes Izquierdo’s mestiza identity (of both Indigenous and European descent)—and possibly, by extension, Tamayo’s own Zapotec heritage.
On view in Gallery 262
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
UNKNOWN MEXICAN Artist(S)
Beginning in the 16th century, makers in the central Mexican town of Puebla became known for a special kind of tin-glazed earthenware known as talavera poblana. The name likely refers to the majolica-producing city of Talavera de la Reina in Spain. Talavera emulated the designs of fashionable imported Spanish ceramics that blended influences from Islamic, Chinese, Italian, and French ceramics. This chocolate jar with an iron cover, collar, and lock would have been used to store valuable commodities like cacao beans. The blue-and-white ornamentation features panels composed of fringed curtains and scrolled leaves that frame long-tailed birds, a popular motif that may recall exported Chinese ceramics.
On view in Gallery 165
Edra Soto
Edra Soto (born 1971) is a Puerto Rican-born, Chicago-based artist and educator. Her work blends architecture and sculpture to explore identity, cultural heritage, memory, and displacement. por la señal (2023) is part of her ongoing Graft series that uses the patterns and materials found in Puerto Rican architecture to examine colonial histories and diasporic identities. The work mixes religious and architectural elements to explore Soto’s loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s. A viewfinder at the center of the work reveals the garden outside of Soto’s mother’s bedroom window during her illness.
On view in Gallery 285
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
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
