Share

“Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978″

This robust exhibition at Americas Society highlights how in postwar Latin America, modern design was a national enterprise endorsed by governments undertaking grand schemes of industrialization and urbanization.

In postwar Latin America, modern design was more than a look—it was a national enterprise, endorsed by governments undertaking grand schemes of industrialization and urbanization. This robust exhibition highlights the ways in which Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan designers imbricated art, architecture, manufacturing, and craft, first in domestic objects (including the covetable wooden furniture of Venezuela’s Miguel Arroyo), then at the grand scale of Brasília. Moderno usually meant Bauhausish, but, given national ambitions, tradition had a role to play, too; the Mexican furniture-maker Clara Porset integrated woven agave fibres into her designs, and Roberto Burle Marx, the landscape architect behind Rio’s famed modernist gardens, produced bowls and plates painted with folkloric landscapes....

Read the full review here.

Related

Explore