Global Contemporary Art

Sandra Zalman and Rachel Middleman, Co-Chairs

Are we there yet? Globalism and the Avant-Garde

Alison de Lima Greene, Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art,

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

As institutions continue to seek new means to open up the art historical canon, long-held ideas concerning the avant-garde and its global impact have come increasingly under fire. If Alfred Barr could envision the progress of Modernism as a torpedo in 1941—propelled from Paul Cézanne and hurling into the future—curators today embrace more flexible paradigms, fashioning new constellations that embrace artists whose production has been sidelined or ignored. This paper will highlight a series collection beacons that have defined the evolution of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston over the past six decades, from the high modernism of James Johnson Sweeney’s first acquisitions to the Museum’s most recent site-specific commissions. What histories are embedded in these objects? And how do they both confirm or confound our understanding of a global avant-garde?

Modernism and Contemporaneity’s Ultimate Divorce? Departments, Periodization, and Teaching the “Global” World in the MFAH’s Collection

Dorota Biczel, Executive Director, Houston Center for Photography

For better or for worse, the term “global contemporary” has taken hold both in the museum world and academia even if no consensus exists on what the phenomenon should encompass and how. Although its temporal frameworks are also debated, a global purview is taken as a distinct characteristic of contemporary art, i.e. art made some time after WWII. Leaving aside the interrogation of the notion’s varied iterations, this paper serves as a provocation to question the contemporaneity’s seemingly exclusive hold on globalism and to reflect on current collecting practices on the modern/contemporary divide and their implications. The starting point is my course on “global modernisms” (Modern art in Asia, Africa, and Latin America), and my students’ observations on the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and its distinct galleries’ geographic and temporal scopes. Does the proverbial “rise” of the global contemporary promise an expansion of the geographic reach of other periods? Will modernism and modernity remain exclusive domains of Western Europe and the United States as the collection currently asserts? If so, what will persist out of sight? Finally, what are the implications of the growing distance between the modern and contemporary, and their territories for art history?

México Profundo Rebooted: Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s Nahua-tronics

Sheila Scoville

Ph.D. Student, Florida State University

The Mexican artist Fernando Palma Rodríguez completes a picture of a twenty-first-century Nahua identity. Known for his “mechatronic art,” Palma Rodríguez reboots the visual language of Mesoamerica through kinetic sculpture assembled from organic and customary materials and salvaged commercial waste. His robots embody and reinvigorate the mythohistories, deities, and allegorical figures of Aztec culture. The artist also runs Calpulli Telcalco, an NGO based in his Milpa Alta barrio that seeks to preserve ways of living, speaking, and knowing that have endured colonization, but now face the threat of globalization. A presence in international art circuits, Palma Rodríguez’s gallery work and lesser-known social practice hail from México profundo, a socio-political dynamic described by the anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. “Deep Mexico” is an Indigenous, mestizo, rural, and urban majority demographic who resists de-Indianization by sustaining and evolving pre-Hispanic culture. Despite the global scope of his career, peer-reviewed scholarship has yet to be published on Palma Rodríguez. In an extended study, I draw from his artistic and social practices to reveal how he comprehends issues, including Nahua conceptual autonomy, language vitalization, food sovereignty, and environmental collapse, through a Mesoamerican lens. To specify his artistic imperatives, my guides are heather ahtone’s call for an Indigenous American aesthetics and the interdisciplinary approach of biocultural diversity. Palma Rodríguez’s practice exemplifies how Mexico’s orginarios (“original people”) have tethered their expressive and symbolic vocabularies to emergent technology to code and integrate their experiences with a changing world into their own conceptions of contemporary life.