The Guggenheim’s “Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today,” presented by the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, is a sweeping survey of 37 contemporary artists and collaborators from 15 Latin American countries — but the strength of the individual works is diminished by the framework of the exhibition’s regional focus.
Featuring nearly 50 art works that range from installation to painting and sculpture to performance, “Under the Same Sun” — which will travel on to Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo and Museo Jumex in Mexico City — explores a variety of social and theoretical topics, including the erasure of indigenous history and culture, oppressive regimes, social inequality, multisensory perception, and the social construction of time, with mediums like video and performance dominating the field.
Curator Pablo León de la Barra has placed emphasis on participatory art works in the exhibition. At the press preview, museum director Richard Armstrong said, “We’re not looking at something, we’re engaging with something,” and that sentiment is indeed reflected in many of the show’s highlights. Carlos Amorales’s suspended mobile of Zildjian cymbals that viewers are encouraged to play breaks the silence of the gallery space with a cacophony of reverberating clashes. Gabriel Sierra has built an armature of unfinished plywood into the passageway between galleries for visitors to walk through, calling attention to the unseen supports beneath the museum’s walls and offering visitors a choice of how to move through the space. And Jonathas de Andrade’s “Posters for the Museum of the Northeastern Man” is a project in the style of an anthropological study, in which visitors are encouraged to rearrange poster portraits produced by the artist, picking and choosing which images best represent the look of an average man from the Northeastern region of Brazil.
De la Barra creates a laboratory-like environment in the museum’s second and fourth floor annex galleries. The flow of the exhibition allows visitors to weave in and out of installations, like Luis Camnitzer’s “Art History Lesson no. 6,” a series of slide projects set up on the floor. Overall, the show feels more like a playground than a traditional gallery exhibition — a welcome contrast to the “Futurism” show just around the corner in the museum’s rotunda.
The exhibition’s ultimate flaw, however, is its geographic bundling of artists, a number of whom explore formalist ideas and not the social politics of the region. And the presence of significant historical works — like Juan Downey’s “The Circle of Fires” (1979) and Alfredo Jarr’s seminal “A Logo for America” (1987) — amid a majority of pieces produced after 2000 muddies the exhibition’s angle on the contemporary scene. Meanwhile, tricky loose ends, like the addition of American-born conceptual artist Paul Ramirez Jonas, get in the way. “Under the Same Sun” features some strong individual works — and the exhibition rightfully spotlights artists who are lesser known in the United States — but it suffers from the same broad and vague categorization that its predecessor, “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,” did, by lumping together works that are conceptually wide-ranging, created by artists’ whose experiences, geography, and identity can’t be easily mapped.
