Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: CIFO Art Space

Ricardo Brey, Luis Camnitzer, Regina Silveira and Valeska Soares included in Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art, curated by Jen Mergel and Liz Munsell, at CIFO Art Space, Miami, FL, 2013, traveled to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2014.

The institution's press release follows:

Power in balance. Exchange across borders. Freedom to occupy and participate. Vigilant witness to history. These ideals of a "global" world, one which values equal engagement across cultures, differ starkly from the unequal realities of globalization. For decades, artists across Latin America have addressed these disparities using visual strategies that resonate both within their local contexts, and internationally. Engaging critically with their practices permits U.S. institutions and audiences to examine the political motives and broad cultural impacts of globalization.

Permission To Be Global / Prácticas Globales interrogates what it means “to be global” today through a selection of works from the past six decades by 61 artists from over a dozen nations. Their experiences across generations and geographies are diverse, and their styles and media are varied. Yet they each share a discerning attention to restrictive political and aesthetic constructs: social hierarchies, physical boundaries, “pure” abstraction, and silenced voices. 

Organized in four thematic sections—Power Parodied, Borders Redefined, Occupied Geometries, and Absence Accumulated—their unique works defy institutional restrictions on expression in their own countries and abroad. The exhibition’s title provokes questions: What forces authorize or deny the flow of people and perspectives in the Americas? Who has the vision and capacity to promote expansive, “global” thinking? Permission To Be Global / Prácticas Globales confronts the problematic category of “Latin American art”—itself an invention of early globalization—by reflecting on its diversity, distribution, reception, visibility, and influence worldwide.

The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection includes major works by artists from across the world. This collection exhibition is CIFO's first to focus specifically on contemporary art from Latin America, a field that the Foundation has helped shape for over a decade. Developed directly with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), the presentation aims to expand U.S. reception and appreciation of this art's global influence, and traveled to Boston in March 2014.