Words/Matter: Latin American Art and Language at the Blanton

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin will present Words/Matter: Latin American Art and Language at the Blanton from February 17, 2019 to May 26, 2019. The exhibition examines how modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx visual artists have engaged written language to make personal, political, and poetic statements. Words/Matter is drawn primarily from the Blanton's extensive collection of Latin American art and curated by Beverly Adams, curator of Latin American art and Florencia Bazzano, assistant curator of Latin American art. The collection began in 1963; since then, the Blanton has continued to focus on collecting, researching, and exhibiting Latin American art. In 1988, it was the first museum in the US to establish a curatorial position devoted to this field. The collection now includes 2,500 works of modern and contemporary painting, prints, drawing, conceptual art, installation, video, and sculpture. "We are very proud to shed new light on the museum's Latin American art program with exhibitions opening simultaneously at the Blanton and at the Reina Sofía in Madrid this winter," said Blanton Director Simone Wicha. Words/Matter highlights the depth and breadth of the Blanton's Latin American collection, featuring approximately 150 works in a variety of media, dating from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition will also debut recent gifts to the museum, including several works donated to the museum by the late Jacqueline Barnitz, an internationally recognized scholar of Latin American art and UT Professor Emerita, and a group of Chicanx prints given to the Blanton by Gilberto Cardenas, a collector of Latinx and Chicanx art and professor at UT from 1975 to 1999. The exhibition has six sections that examine the varying ways artists made written language a key aspect of their work: Alphabets, the artists explore the experience of bilingualism by inventing new languages and designing alphabets—calling attention to what makes languages unique and sometimes untranslatable. Between Poetry and Prose, this section foregrounds the diverse and enduring collaborations between visual artists, writers, and poets in Latin America during the twentieth century. Concrete Poetry, the exhibition also includes an impressive collection of Concrete Poetry, a type of poetry that conveys meaning through visual arrangement of words and letters in space. The Shape of Language, this section includes works that take their form from the vehicles used to circulate printed language, such as codices, newspapers, magazines, and books. Fighting Words Artists invested in the social power of art have produced some of the most iconic work in Latin America. And Between the Lines this section features works by artists who used conceptual strategies to evade censorship and form coded, yet urgent, political statements.