New Art Exhibition Featuring Latin American Art And Artists Opens In Museums And Galleries Across Southern California

You are listening to KPBS Midday Edition. I am Michael Lipkin. This is a sweeping series of art exhibit showcasing Latin American and Latino art. LA LA kicked off this month and the show is more than 70 museums. There will be pieces from pre-Columbian Americas but most of the work will feature modern artist, including the Chicano artist you kept -- they were kept out of the most prestigious museums if you decades ago. Joining me is Joan Weinstein. Welcome to the program. I am glad to be with you. Pacific standard Time has exhibits and 65 private galleries which is a staggering amount of art. How closely are they tie together? What is the goal? It is wonderful that this is not a top-down enterprise and that the museums and galleries chose the shows that they wanted to do. They are passion projects. It is not comprehensive in the coverage but it is extensive. One of the goals is to introduces the audience to the richness and the complexity and the diversity of Latin American and Latino art. That is not exhibited often enough in this country. Coming up, we will hear a piece about a retrospective at the Museum of art from Carlos, which is part of a series. The milk are working on a documentary says the battle over artistic diversity is not just about movies or television. It is moving into large museums. How do the museums have They like this that have kept them out the past and how did they approach this? They have done a terrific job in recent years. They were one the first museums that did exhibit Chicano artists. In the first Pacific standard Time in 2011 comedy did a wonderful show on [ Indiscernible ]. This time, they are doing shows that integrate Latin American and Latino art. This is a stunning retrospective of the work of Carlos. It does go to the larger issue of the inclusion of Latin American and Latino artists. For that matter, artist of color in his Iams in the United States. We see this as a wonderful opportunity to introduce many artists who do not get the attention they deserve to the audiences. This project has been in the work for five years. Long before the recent election but given the protest we have seen since November, what do you think people can learn from the activist art that is featured in Pacific -- Pacific standard time. We began at five years ago. It was different circumstances. What we are saying now is that this is a wonderful opportunity to build bridges, to show connections between our cultures and not to erect walls pick Can you tell us about the offerings? Yes. There is fantastic exhibitions in San Diego that I cannot wait to see. One of them is memories of underdevelopment, which is the Museum of contemporary Art in Cindy go. Is a far-reaching collaboration with partners in Mexico and Peru in developing this exhibition. It is about artist working in the 1960s through the 1980s in Latin America. It is the response to the unraveling of the utopian promise of modernization after World War II in South America. Many artists worked under political oppression and military dictatorships. There was a great promise of modernization in Latin America. What it led to, it was not freedom. Artist abandon abstraction and its association with modernism. They sought new ways to create art that would correct directly with Publix and they used theater and architecture in the work. I am looking forward to that show. There is a small show at the University Gallery at the University of San Diego, which is based on new research. It is about copy art in Brazil known as Xerox art. Audiences may not know that there was a here is a huge Xerox movement around the world. You know, you can put objects on a Xerox machine as they did in the 1970s and it leads to distortion in the object or you had the distance of the cover from the glass which will reflect the image and the light reflects the image. Some artists are showing in this exhibition at the University as indigo, they used unconventional materials such as metal or wood or glass in this Xerox art. There are not names that are familiar in the United States. They are really incredible artists. Anyone who is interested in the development will be interested in this copy art. What shows would you urge people to make a trip to Los Angeles to see? Back there are terrific exhibits to see. There is a spectacular show of pre-Columbian luxury arts which shows not just the exquisite gold and silver but also jade, spondylosis and feather art. There for anyone who is interested in a show of memories and development, there is a terrific show at the Los Angeles municipal art gallery that is called condemned to be moderate. It is a group of, I think 21 contemporary artists who are responding critically to the history of modernist architecture in Latin America. I had been speaking with Joan Weinstein. Thank you so much for your time . Thank you.