Curating Architecture Across the Americas: Spaces of Contact MX-US

Date: 

Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 4:00pm to 7:30pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S030, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speakers: 
José Esparza Chong Cuy, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Storefront for Art and Architecture
Ruth Estévez, Co-founder, Executive Director and Curator, LIGA and Senior Curator-at-Large, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Julieta González, Artistic Director, Museo Jumex
Sarah Herda, Director, Graham Foundation
Michelle Millar Fisher, Curator, Contemporary Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Zoë Ryan, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, The Art Institute of Chicago
Paola Santoscoy, Director, Museo Experimental El Eco, UNAM
Mary Schneider Enriquez, Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums
Tania Tovar Torres, Co-founder, Director and Chief Curator, Proyector
Moderator: 
Patricio Del Real, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University*

Program:
4:00-4:30 pm: Welcome Coffee
4:30-4:32 pm: Welcome remarks DRCLAS
4:32-4:45 pm: Curating Architecture Across the Americas Presentation by Patricio del Real
4:45-6:30 pm: Speakers Presentations
6:30-7:15 pm: Discussion session moderated by Patricio del Real
End of Symposium

7:30-8:00 pm: Working session

Image of Opening Exhibition

Organized by the Harvard David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies' ARTS @DRCLAS and Mexico programs and the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture, Curating Architecture Across the Americas: Spaces of Contact MX–US is the first symposium of a series that will bring together institutions, curators, and scholars from across the American continent to discuss the role of architecture exhibitions and collections in the expanding world of curatorial practices and cultural debates of the 21st Century.

Architecture exhibitions have been integral to the promotion of architecture. In the 20th Century, they helped imagine, construct, and order a modern world under the hegemony of modernism. Today, a growing interest in historical architecture exhibitions as cultural tools and weapons challenge the presentism of architectural practice and question the role of museums and galleries in the every-growing culture industry. International and regional biennials and triennials, continue to multiply, contributing to well-established professional associations that routinely survey contemporary architecture and landscape architectural production. The recent emergence of experimental spaces offers on the ground perspectives of timely local and transnational critical practices with the promise of building alliances and break institutional formations.

Curated by Patricio del Real, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Carolina Sepulveda, Master in Design Studies student with a concentration in Art, Design and the Public Domain, and Marcela Ramos, Program Manager for ARTS@DRCLAS the first version of this series will highlight Mexican and U.S. voices and experiences. Bringing together art museums, architecture galleries, and experimental spaces the symposium will trigger questions on the place of architecture in these spaces, the state of curatorial practices today, the role of history, canon formation, cultural politics, regarding the exhibition of architecture and collections, and will examine ongoing cultural exchanges and dialogues between Mexico and the United States.

*Patricio del Real works on modern architecture and its transnational connections with a focus on Latin America. His current book project: Inventing Latin America. Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art examines how postwar politics and modern architecture came together at MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design to construct an idea of Latin America. He co-edited the anthology, Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012); was Visiting Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Program of Latin American Studies at Princeton University, and worked in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art on several exhibitions, co-curating "Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980," which received the 2017 Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award, recognizing excellence of architectural history scholarship in exhibition catalogues.

Presented in collaboration with the Department of History of Art and Architecture