Americana
December 4, 2013 – August 3, 2014
Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL.
Pérez Art Museum Miami began to acquire international modern and contemporary art in 1996. The need for expanded spaces to store, conserve, and display the growing collection was a principal driver in the creation of this new PAMM facility. The museum features six large galleries conceived for permanent collection displays. These “overview galleries” run from the first through the second floors forming a spine that joins the remaining ten changing exhibition and project spaces.
To inaugurate these overview galleries, PAMM has brought together key loans and recent gifts from some of Miami’s most significant private collectors with highlights from its own young collection to create a two-year cycle of changing thematic installations collectively titled AMERICANA. An English and Spanish word that broadly describes images and objects produced in the Americas and typical of American cultures, here it is specifically intended to evoke both North American vernacular art collecting traditions and a unique hemispheric perspective that reaches across national borders.
In this first exhibition cycle, AMERICANA includes art produced in South America, North America, and the Caribbean presented in the form of six short visual essays, each offering a critical perspective on a set of related issues in modern culture and society of particular interest to progressive artists. These thematic presentations—Desiring Landscape, Sources of the Self, Formalizing Craft, Progressive Forms, Corporal Violence, and Commodity Cultures—are not organized chronologically but rather juxtapose works from a range of pivotal historical moments since the late 1930s.