Space of Time: Contemporary Artists from the Americas

The exhibition featured painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media works by 17 young artists working and living in many different parts of the Americas.

Space of Time: Contemporary Art from the Americas considered the way in which artists of disparate ethnic, cultural, and geographic backgrounds participated in artistic dialogues current in the major art centers of the United States and Europe. By establishing parallels between the work of artists of varied ethnicities from within the United States, as well as between artists from the United States, Canada, and several Latin American countries, the exhibition sought to demonstrate how a new generation of artists created work that, while reflecting local realities and concerns, transcended national or ethnic definitions of culture.

The exhibition was curated by Sandra Antelo-Suárez and Alisa Tager. The curators proposed that the artists’ work expressed an “American condition,” which existed whether one lived in Mexico City or Buenos Aires, New York or Los Angeles. Throughout the Americas, cultural and historical identity had been shaped for the last 500 years by the marginalization and destruction of indigenous cultures, by continuous waves of immigration from many parts of the globe, and by intermarriage between people of different races and ethnicities. As a result, cultural plurality was the consistent factor defining the American experience.

The hybrid quality of contemporary American identity was continuously reflected in the work of the artists in the exhibition. While engaging history, popular culture, and commonly understood symbols, these artists frequently recontextualized their subject matter or created unexpected configurations of everyday objects in order to reflect such qualities as ambivalence, doubt, anxiety, contradiction, and displacement. By embracing paradox and arbitrariness, their work embodied conditions of life at the end of the century.

The show included work by artists:

Carlos Altamirano, María Fernanda Cardoso, Saint Clair Cemin , Meg Cranston, Kim Dingle, Victor Estrada, José Gabriel Fernández, Felix González-Torres, Ken Lum, Lari Pittman, Marcelo Pombo, Paul Ramírez-Jonas, Rosángela Rennó, Pablo Siquier, Jana Sterbak, Diego Toledo, and Meyer Vaisman.

An exhibition catalogue is available.

^{This exhibition was made possible by grants from the Charles del Mar Foundation, the Fundación Angel Ramos, the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.}