Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection

Americas Society and the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil will co-present the exhibition Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection. A Postgraduate Seminar and Exhibition by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from November to December 2010. This project originated with the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil in collaboration with the Programa de Estudios de Posgrado en Historia del Arte de la UNAM (Art History Postgraduate Program at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).

Through an academic seminar, a renowned group of scholars and post-graduate students developed the curatorial proposal resulting in the Shattered Glass exhibition, which brings new scholarship to the work of Mexican modernist artists, particularly in regard to their influence on contemporary art. Through the study of recent Mexican, Latino, and Latin American art and Mexican high modernist masterpieces in the collection of the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art, the curatorial team reexamined a series of important pieces to reveal how bodies and ruins, placed together, relate to an established colonial narrative, making it possible to reassess the significance of images of violence in contemporary Mexican art and rewrite some of that narrative. Extremely brutal images, such as José Clemente Orozco's landscapes of New York, were frequently designed as a commentary on metropolitan modernity. They form the core of the curatorial focus of the exhibition, which, along with the catalogue essays, will present these concepts from four vantage points, each represented by a section in the exhibition.