Modernism & Migration

"Modernism and Migration in Latin American Art" Olivia Wolf, Chair

ABSTRACTS

Mariola V. Alvarez

Email: mariola.alvarez@temple.edu

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Art History, Temple University

Immigrant Artists’ Groups in São Paulo, 1930-1950

This presentation considers the history of immigrant artists’ groups in the city of São Paulo, in particular, Grupo dos 15, Grupo Guanabara, and Grupo Seibi. These groups nurtured a system of informal education and training for non-Brazilian artists. I give special attention to Grupo Seibi, a Japanese art group that offered professionalization and community, artistic and cultural, started in 1935 by immigrant artists Tomoo Handa and Walter Shigeto Tanaka. Focused on recruitment, critical exchange, education, and advocacy, the group shaped a sense of community for its members, especially in response to the broad disinterest by the Brazilian public as well as the internal lack of support by Japanese families for their children to become artists. In addition, I examine the Japanese artists who traveled the world and served as teachers to Japanese Brazilians Tomie Ohtake, Manabu Mabe, and Flavio-Shiró; these itinerant artists trace the contributions of Japanese artists to the global circulation of modern art. With a focus on artists arriving to Brazil between 1930 and 1950, I aim to study the ways they negotiated their place in the Brazilian art world and society. This historical period was shifting political ground for Japanese immigrants since the government first welcomed them and then turned towards more overtly nativist policies against minority groups. Though the artists would find eventual success this history of racism continues to impact their study in the present.

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Rachel Grace Mohl

Email: rmohl@mfah.org

Affiliations: Assistant Curator, Latin American & Latino Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; PhD candidate, Rice University

Politics at Play in Buenos Aires: Sociedad Hebraica Argentina and the Avant-Garde, 1940-1950

During the 1940s, the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (La Hebraica) in Buenos Aires established itself as a major cultural institution through the establishment of an art gallery, the commission of a series of murals, and the publication of Davar, a literary and cultural magazine. These endeavors promoted and disseminated artists, such as Juan Castagnino, Antonio Berni, and Lasar Segall, who represented a specific strain of leftist political thought as many of them identified, whether directly or tangentially, with communist ideologies. Simultaneously, La Hebraica’s contributions to the visual arts integrated the institution within a network of intellectual elite organizations, allowing the Jewish community to assert itself and obtain legitimacy within a privileged strata of the national fabric. This paper seeks to understand La Hebraica’s struggle during the 1940s to balance two seemingly opposed aspirations through their participation in constructing the avant-garde: on the one hand, its program inserted a communist leaning ideology into the larger concept of what constituted a modern Argentina. On the other hand, the gallery’s activities sought to influence taste-making and collecting thus acting as a vehicle for upper-middle class Jews to enter a specific social strata within the country. By examining how the La Hebraica acted as a cultural mediator between the Jewish community and the Argentinean elites, I assert that the Jewish diasporic impulse towards the avant-garde in Argentina goes beyond navigating identities and becomes the foundation for actively constructing their new home nation, particularly as this community pushed their respective countries to become more global and engage in certain modernist ideologies.

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Caroline “Olivia” Wolf

Email: owolf2@luc.edu

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Art History, Loyola University Chicago

Visibilizing Arab-Argentine Artists: Modernist Networks and Transnational Dialogues in the Southern Cone

Although their artistic activity has been largely understudied together as a whole, a distinct set of artists with roots in the Arab diaspora in Argentina emerged amidst leading modernist art movements and institutions in the southern cone in the twentieth century. Direct immigrants from Arab countries arriving with early waves of migration to Argentina, such as Lebanese-born painter Bibi Zogbé (1890-1973), activated immigrant spaces of sociability, like the Club Sirio-Libanés of San Juan, to initially exhibit her work. Moving from these clubs to prominent galleries and consular connections, Zogbé successfully entered into local and international markets and modernist circles spanning Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Levant, and thereby ultimately incorporated into major national art institutions of both modern Argentina and Lebanon. Other Arab artists arrived with later waves of mid-century migration and distinct aesthetic approaches, such as Egyptian-born photographer and painter Sameer Makarius (1924- 2009), who captured uncanny images of the Argentine capital while moving within surrealist circles and experimental collectives such as Otro Figuración. Following in these footsteps, Arab Argentine artists hailing from later mahjar generations, such as Ángel Alberto Fadúl (1924-1985), similarly engaged with surrealism during decades of intense political upheaval and turmoil both in Latin America and the Arab world. This project surveys and seeks to visibilize these Arab-Argentine artists active within major modernist movements and networks in the southern cone and beyond during moments of key South-South exchange, highlighting their contributions as well as transnational aspects of their work.

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Mey-Yen Moriuchi,

Email: moriuchi@lasalle.edu

Affiliation: Associate Professor of Art History, La Salle University

Circles and Circuits: Twentieth-Century Asian/Latin American Artists

The concept of Asian/Latin American identity has been elusive. Since colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese, interracial mixing in Latin America has predominantly occurred among European, Indigenous, and African people. The immigration and presence of Asians in Latin America is less well known outside the region, and contributions from Asian/Latin Americans to Latin American history and culture tend to be unrecognized, disregarded, or suppressed. David Palumbo-Liu argues the Asian in Asian/American tends to be ignored or muted. The slash, as in the construction ‘and/or’, implies both inclusion and exclusion. It at once indicates a choice between two terms that are supposedly equal in status, as well as points to an element of ambivalence and vacillation. Extending this concept to a Latin American context, to identify as Asian/Latin American acknowledges the distinction between these two disparate ethnic groups at the same time as it recognizes its vital inclusivity. This paper will examine several multicultural and multiracial artists, such as Pedro Eng Herrera, Tilsa Tsuchiya, and Luis Nishizawa, whose heritage and artwork speak to the confluences between Asia and Latin America. I will draw attention to visible and invisible cultural and artistic influences in the oeuvre of these Asian/Latin American artists. Their visual representations address the interweaving and intertextuality of these transpacific and transatlantic regions. As these artists negotiate the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, I contextualize and interpret their artworks within a framework of identity formation, transnationalism, modernism, and decoloniality.