Displaying items by tag: latin american art

An Austin museum specializing in contemporary Latin American art has roughly 12 new pieces to display courtesy of a former Tyler couple.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin campus was gifted 12 modern and contemporary art pieces, including paintings, drawings and sculptures from college alumni Judy and Charles Tate, who now live in the Houston area.

Gary Nader has always felt Miami’s art and culture network was missing something: a museum dedicated to showcasing Latin American media. So he decided to create his own.

Nader, a local art collector with a gallery in Wynwood, revealed plans this week to build a Latin American Art Museum at a still-to-be-determined location in downtown Miami. The museum, he said, will feature about 600 paintings, drawings and sculptures from his personal collection. “The influence of Latin America in the U.S. is extremely prominent,” he said. “We want to tell the story."

After seven years in New York, Pinta, the Modern & Contemporary Latin American Art Show, is relocating to Miami to set up shop during Art Basel from December 3 to 7.  The Related Group, a South Florida real estate development firm founded by Jorge Perez (of Perez Art Museum Miami fame), will present the fair.

It will be housed in a tent on the undeveloped future site of the Hyde Midtown Miami (a Related Group development project).

Art Basel in Miami Beach has just released details about Survey, its brand new section devoted to “art-historical projects” (read: art that was made a few decades ago). The thirteen projects cover quite a bit of ground, ranging from a group show of female geometric abstractionists to a solo presentation of Chilean political artist Lotty Rosenfeld.

The Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting announces a new book series with the publication of its first volume, "Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals." This series, entitled The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Collecting, is co-published with the Pennsylvania State University Press, and will ultimately cover a broad range of art collecting, reflecting the Center's reach well beyond the parameters of the Frick's own scope to include topics on modern and non-western art. Comments Inge Reist, Director of the Center, “We aim to encourage new scholarship in this young field of art history through our annual acclaimed symposia and ongoing fellowship program, much of which leads to new publications. Complementing that activity is this series that enables the Center to make its own contribution to the growing bibliography on the history of collecting in America.” This and future volumes are drawn from papers given at the Center’s symposia. Upcoming books from recent events include "A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Painting in America" (February 2015), edited by Inge Reist; "Going for Baroque: Americans Collect Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries," edited by Edgar Peters Bowron; and "The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States," edited by Edward Sullivan.

Americans have long had an interest in the art and culture of Holland’s Golden Age. As a result, the United States can boast extraordinary holdings of Dutch paintings. Celebrated masters such as Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, and Frans Hals are exceptionally well represented in museums and private collections, but many fine paintings by their contemporaries can be found here as well.

A Houston couple has donated 120 modern and contemporary Latin American artworks valued at nearly $10 million to the University of Texas.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Charles and Judy Tate, UT alumni, selected the university's Blanton Museum of Art for the donation. They also gave more than $1 million to a university endowment that supports a Latin American curatorship.

The art includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and mixed-media works. Many are by artists who took part in the creation of modernism, such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, Carlos Merida, Wifredo Lam, Armando Reveron, Alejandro Xul Solar and Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced the two appointees who will inaugurate new curatorships within the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Both positions were established this spring through a generous gift from Daniel Brodsky, the Museum’s Chairman, and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky, an art historian and specialist in Latin American art.

Iria Candela will become the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in the fall, focusing on the art of 20th- and 21st-century Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And Beatrice Galilee, the new Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, began working at the Museum in late April. Both will work closely with the modern and contemporary curatorial team, under the leadership of Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, on researching and developing the collection and devising the program for both the main building and the Marcel Breuer-designed building that the Met will occupy once the Whitney Museum moves downtown in 2015.

Thieves have made off with valuables including priceless 18^th century oil paintings from a colonial-era Roman Catholic church in Bolivia. Located in the small town of San Miguel de Tomave, the church has been looted three times in the last five years.

Churches in remote areas of Bolivia and Peru have recently fallen victim to repeated robberies. Thieves have gone so far as to create tunnels under church walls to make their way inside the structure undetected. Since 2009, Bolivian churches have allegedly been robbed 38 times of 447 objects including jewelry and silver.

Authorities claim that the thieves are stealing from the churches for collectors in Europe and the United States, where there’s a considerable market for Latin American art. Modest churches in sparsely populated areas are easy targets for the looters.

Starting January 7, 2013, Antiques Roadshow will kick-off its 17^th season with three episodes filmed in Corpus Christi, Texas. While the series has a reputation for revealing hidden treasures to unassuming owners, the lost Diego Rivera painting that appears in the upcoming season is truly a rare find.

Earlier this year, Rue Ferguson inherited a painting bought by his great-grandparents in Mexico in 1920. He assumed it was worth some money, but when he took the piece to Antiques Roadshow during their stay in Corpus Christi, he was dumbfounded when he heard the painting was valued at $800,000 to $1 million.

Created by Rivera, one of the foremost Mexican painters of the 20^th century, in 1904 when he was only a teenager, El Albani spent decades out of the public eye. While it is recorded in Rivera’s personal archive, the artist’s family could never locate the painting as it was hanging in Ferguson’s great-grandparents home. For nearly 30 years after Ferguson’s parents inherited the painting, they believed it to be a fake and kept it in storage. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Ferguson’s father discovered the painting to be authentic and took it to be restored. The family donated the work to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX but Ferguson asked for the painting back when he learned it was no longer on public display.

After visiting Antiques Roadshow and learning just how important a work El Abani is, Ferguson decided to look for a museum that specializes in Rivera’s work and/or Latin American art to house the historic painting.