Courtesy of Mia
Calaverita
Leo Chiachio & Daniel Giannone, Calaverita, 2014. Hand embroidery with cotton thread and jewelry effect on Alexander Henry fabric; 55 ◊ 43 in. Funds from the Ralph L. and Florence R. Burgess Trust, 2022.50. © Chiachio & Giannone. Photography courtesy Denver Art Museum.
When approaching the ReVisión: Art in the Americas exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the first thing noticeable is the sense of scale. Housed in one of Mia's largest gallery spaces, standing outside the first room, you could spend hours wandering through it.
A blurb on the wall at the entrance also adds to the sense of scale, The pieces in the exhibit span some 3,000 years of history and colonization in Latin America. The exhibit is a collaboration with the Denver Art Museum and is also the first of Valéria Piccoli, who was hired in 2022 as the first curator of Latin American art in Mia’s history. The museum guides visitors through the exhibition with descriptions in English and in Spanish.
In making the exhibit, Piccoli intentionally created juxtapositions of Indigenous and colonial art of the continent. In one stark contrast to the pottery and vinyl installation piece by Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin, a large painting depicting an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a freshwater spring hangs in solitude on the far wall in an ornate gold frame. While both works center around water, the differences in their execution are incredibly thought-provoking.
As you move from room to room, Piccoli has designed the exhibit to highlight the importance of different facets of Latin American culture and its complex tapestry of colonization, Indigenous cultures, and racial identity. Sections of the exhibit are dedicated to art focused on cultural aspects like race and migration and natural resources like corn, precious metals ,and feathers.
Housing both Indigenous and colonial uses of the same materials side by side highlights how these different groups viewed them at their disposal and how their uses changed depending on who was using them and when. Feathers, for example, were used in precolonial times as adornments to clothing and used as symbols of status. After the arrival of Christian Europeans, some of the same Indigenous artists used feathers to create intricate works of religious imagery.
Likewise, uses of silver and gold vary from precious Incan llama figurines of pure silver to golden tiaras and chalices. Holding both the European and Indigenous artworks in the same space also allows viewers to more deeply understand the real-time changes occurring in art back in Europe as a direct result of colonization. Pigments made from the red dye from the cochineal bug from Mexico created the vibrant carmine reds in portrait paintings of European nobility.
Identity in Latin America is featured in another section of the exhibit, where works from the colonial period (including a striking display of a painting from Black Venezuelan artist Rafael Ochoa) and more modern works from Black and LGBTQ artists that explore the complex diversity of what it means to be from there.
As you leave the exhibit, a curator’s note from Piccoli expresses her gratitude for the collaboration with the Denver Art Museum, and also that being able to use some works from Mia’s own collections highlights that while she is the first curator of Latin American art, it has always been a part of the museum, “ReVisión’ opens a new chapter in the relationship between Mia and the community that it serves, one that I am sure will be filled with an enriching and exciting dialogue that will unfold for years to come.”
