Momentum: Art and Ecology in Contemporary Latin America

Momentum: Art & Ecology in Contemporary Latin America is a guide to the relationships between contemporary art and ecology, focusing in particular on the unique contributions of Latin America. The culmination of four years of research, conferences, and seminars conducted by the Cisneros Institute at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, it presents the perspectives not only of artists, art historians, and curators but also of intellectuals from a wide range of key disciplines. This anthology underscores the centrality of Latin American artistic practices that engage with the natural environment. The book includes discussions of how artists imagine innovative relationships with the nonhuman, how they reflect critically on land disputes and colonial legacies, and how they envision the future. Newly commissioned texts illuminate the work of artists who pioneered ecological approaches in the 1960s and ’70s, including Cecilia Vicuña, Frans Krajcberg, Juan Downey, and the artists of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC); further essays address artists and collectives working today across the region. The book also contains a compilation of vital preexisting texts by anthropologists, Indigenous activists, and architects, framing the work of the artists within the larger cultural and political discussion that defines the present.

This book is a project of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Distributed on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art.

Contributors. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, María del Carmen Carrión, Carla Macchiavello Cornejo, Jose Falconi, Arnaud Gerspacher, Julieta Gonzalez, Inés Katzenstein, Miguel A. López, Helena Chavez Macgregor, Camila Marambio, Joanna Page, Mara Polgovsky, Patricio del Real, Victor Manuel Rodríguez-Sarmiento, Irene V. Small, Patricio del Real, Graciela Speranza, Madeline Murphy Turner, Patricia Vieria, Carla Acevedo Yates

Inés Katzenstein is Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

María del Carmen Carrión is Project Manager of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA.

Madeline Murphy Turner is a former fellow of the Cisneros Institute, currently the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums.