Improvised Continent

In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States and shows how Latin American artists and writers challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow.

How does a country in the process of becoming a world power prepare its citizens for the responsibilities of global leadership? In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith answers this question by illuminating the forgotten story of how, over the course of the twentieth century, cultural exchange programs, some run by the government and others by philanthropies and major cultural institutions, brought many of the most important artists and writers of Latin America to live and work in the United States. Improvised Continent is the first book to focus on cultural exchange inside the United States and how Americans responded to Latin American writers and artists. Moving masterfully between the history of ideas, biography, institutional history and politics, and international relations, and engaging works in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States. The stories behind Diego Rivera's murals, the movies of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the photography of Genevieve Naylor, and the novels of Carlos Fuentes—these works and artists, along with many others, challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow. Improvised Continent provides a profoundly compassionate portrayal of the Latin American artists and writers who believed their practices might create a more humane world.

Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains.

What is Pan-Americanism? People have been struggling with that problem for over a century. Pan-Americanism is (and has been) an amalgam of diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural projects under the umbrella of hemispheric cooperation and housed institutionally in the Pan-American Union, and later the Organization of American States. But what made Pan-Americanism exceptional? The chapters in this volume suggest that Pan-Americanism played a central and lasting role in structuring inter-American relations, because of the ways in which the movement was reinvented over time, and because the actors who shaped it often redefined and redeployed the term. Through the twentieth century, new appropriations of Pan-Americanism structured, restructured, and redefined inter-American relations. Taken together, these chapters underscore two exciting new shifts in how scholars and others have come to understand Pan-Americanism and inter-American relations. First, Pan-Americanism is increasingly understood not simply as a diplomatic, commercial, and economic forum, but a movement that has included cultural exchange. Second, researchers, political leaders, and the media in several countries have traditionally conceived of Pan-Americanism as a mechanism of US expansionism. This volume reimagines Pan-Americanism as a movement built by actors from all corners of the Americas.

In 1959, the very year the Cuban Revolution amplified Cold War tensions in the Americas, museumgoers in the United States witnessed a sudden surge in major exhibitions of Latin American art. Surveying the 1960s boom of such exhibits, this book documents how art produced in regions considered susceptible to communist influence was staged on U.S. soil for U.S. audiences. Held in high-profile venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibitions of the 1960s Latin American art boom did not define a single stylistic trend or the art of a single nation but rather attempted to frame Latin America as a unified whole for U.S. audiences. Delia Solomons calls attention to disruptive artworks that rebelled against the curatorial frames purporting to hold them and reveals these exhibitions to be complex contact zones in which competing voices collided. Ultimately, through multiple means—including choosing to exclude artworks with readily decipherable political messages and evading references to contemporary inter-American frictions—the U.S. curators who organized these shows crafted projections of Pan-American partnership and harmony, with the United States as leader, interpreter, and good neighbor, during an era of brutal U.S. interference across the Americas. Theoretically sophisticated and highly original, this survey of Cold War–era Latin American art exhibits sheds light on the midcentury history of major U.S. art museums and makes an important contribution to the fields of museum studies, art history, and Latin American modernist art.

"Border Witness offers a surprising catalogue of films dealing with the US-Mexico border and released during the past 100 years. It compares these screen visions with what was happening on the ground at the time in both countries. From revolution through to the present global crisis, the films are left to speak for themselves, but their stories are measured alongside the author's experience following decades of research, writing, and activism along the line. Taken together, this book outlines a unique Border Film genre just now entering its Golden Age. This book also comes with a message to both nations that they should learn more from borderlanders about how to conduct cross-border lives"--