Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey

The Davis Museum’s groundbreaking curatorial project, Art__Latin__America: Against the Survey, reconsiders conventional frameworks for understanding, exhibiting, and discussing Latin American and Latinx art. This illustrated volume, published with the exhibition, features 70 essays by leading scholars and specialists from across the Americas on an exceptional selection of art works, many never before seen or published.

The Davis collection includes more than 550 works connected to the region known as “Latin America”—as site of production, place of origin, or point of reference. The exhibition features 150 highlights, in all media, by over 100 artists from across the Americas, including the US. The works are organized into eight compelling themes that reveal particular strengths of the collection: Identity and Territory, City and Country, War and Loss, Protest and Resistance, Workers and Farmers, Models and Mothers, Saints and Rituals, and Geometry and Gesture.

Contrary to familiar museological conventions of the chronological survey or geographic overview, Art__Latin__America includes works from radically different times and places, juxtaposing the familiar and the unknown, the expected and unexpected, generating new visual conversations and challenging viewers and readers to rethink preexisting canons and narratives. In fact, the project proposes an expansive definition of the very term “Latin American.” The result is unlike any other book on the topic.