[Many thanks to María Acosta Cruz for bringing this item to our attention.] Within the “Reworking Areas” column—The New York Occasions sequence about girls driving change in typically surprising locations—Robin Pogrebin brings consideration to the primary Puerto Rican curator on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, Marcela Guerrero. Pogrebin writes, “In her 5 years on the museum, Marcela Guerrero has helped broaden the scope of artists and audiences because the Hispanic inhabitants continues to develop and museums attempt to mirror extra various audiences.”
Marcela Guerrero had simply began as a curator on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in 2017 when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, the place she was born and raised. “I used to be pondering, ‘How can I assist?’” she recalled in a latest interview. “I’ve an necessary platform. There’s something I can say.’”
The result’s “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Artwork within the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” which opened Nov. 23 on the museum, in New York, and payments itself as “the primary scholarly exhibition targeted on Puerto Rican artwork to be organized by a big U.S. museum in almost half a century.”
5 years after changing into the Whitney’s first curator specializing in Latino artwork, Ms. Guerrero has made a significant influence on the sector because the nation’s Hispanic inhabitants continues to develop and museums attempt to mirror and appeal to extra various audiences.
“As the primary Puerto Rican curator on the Whitney, she is on the proper place at a time when Latinx artwork is rising as a pressure to be reckoned with,” mentioned Mari Carmen Ramírez, who in 2001 turned the primary curator of Latin American artwork on the Museum of High quality Arts, Houston, when it established a division of Latino artwork. “All of us anticipate her to contribute to this transformation in a major approach.”
That transformation has been noteworthy, although a lot of the eye round range has been targeted on Black artists and curators within the wake of the Black Lives Matter motion. [. . .]
The Smithsonian is within the early levels of planning a Nationwide Museum of the American Latino for the Nationwide Mall, a location that members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus had urged President Biden to assist.
And in 2021, the Andrew W. Mellon Basis and the Ford Basis established the Latinx Artist Fellowships, awarding 15 artists $50,000 every.
The adjustments that Ms. Guerrero has helped advance on the Whitney are evident all through the museum — bilingual wall textual content and catalogs; new advertising and marketing strategies to achieve various audiences; acquisitions and exhibitions that combine Latino artists.
Final 12 months, she was promoted from an assistant curator to an affiliate curator, an endowed place.
“She is an actual visionary,” Scott Rothkopf, the museum’s senior deputy director and chief curator, mentioned. “She’s had a very transformative influence on the museum by way of this system, how we take into consideration Latinx, round translations, round viewers, round our partnerships and round who we take into account our group to be.”
Ms. Guerrero — who’s 42 and holds a Ph.D. in artwork historical past from the College of Wisconsin, Madison — got here to the Whitney from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the place as a curatorial fellow she was concerned within the 2017 exhibition “Radical Girls: Latin American Artwork, 1960-1985.” [. . .]
On the Whitney, Ms. Guerrero in 2020 helped arrange “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Artwork, 1925-1945.” She additionally curated the 2018 exhibition “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Area, Fashionable Structure, New Artwork,” which featured the work of seven rising Latino artists. [. . .]
Ms. Guerrero mentioned she felt the assist of curators at different establishments, reminiscent of Susanna V. Temkin at El Museo del Barrio, Carmen Hermo on the Brooklyn Museum, and Vivian Crockett on the New Museum. [. . .]
Different curators, in flip, say they’ve been impressed by Ms. Guerrero. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, an artwork historian and curator who organized the “Radical Girls” present on the Hammer, mentioned Ms. Guerrero’s function “has been one in all critical analysis and dedication to the fields of Latin American and Latinx artwork.”
“Her contribution to ‘Radical Girls’ was key, as we labored collectively to analysis Latina and Chicana artists, and she or he single-handedly researched Puerto Rico,” Dr. Fajardo-Hill added. “Her work on the Whitney to date has been necessary for selling an expansive conceptualization of what Latinx artwork means in the present day.”
On the identical time, Ms. Guerrero acknowledges the burden shared by many curators of colour: shifting enterprise as traditional in an entrenched operation. “It means asking all of the departments in an establishment to do issues they haven’t performed earlier than, understanding what advertising and marketing to a Latinx viewers means, not simply doing Latinx exhibits,” she mentioned. “Folks within the Bronx additionally wish to find out about Edward Hopper or Andy Warhol.” [. . .]
She desires to share the enjoyment she has lengthy taken in experiencing artwork with a wider inhabitants, to assist individuals who would possibly really feel intimidated by museums to really feel welcome and to see themselves represented on the partitions. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/arts/whitney-museum-latino-art-marcela-guerrero.html
[Shown above, photo by Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times: Marcela Guerrero, an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is leading the way in the field of Latino art. She stands in front of a favorite painting, Robert Henri’s “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney” (1916).]