Marta Minujin to Receive Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award

New York, March 14, 2018 — On Thursday, March 22, Americas Society will honor Argentine contemporary artist Marta Minujín for her accomplishments in an artistic career spanning nearly half a century. Minujín will receive the Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award at a presentation ceremony to take place at the Society’s landmark building in New York in front of an audience of over 100 guests from the culture, business, and political spheres. The evening will feature a conversation between Minujín and recognized Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera.

“Marta Minujín is an iconic figure and a major force in the Latin American and global art scene,” says Americas Society and Council of the Americas President and CEO Susan Segal. “We are proud to honor her with the third Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award and celebrate her career, which is as relevant today as it was when we presented her Minucode project in New York, precisely 50 years ago.”

Commissioned by the Center for Inter-American Relations—now Americas Society—in 1968, Marta Minujín’s Minucode broke new ground exploring the social codes of four groups of leading figures in the arts, business, fashion, and politics in New York through a series of cocktail parties/happenings recorded in films. Organized by Americas Society Visual Arts Director and Chief Curator Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet, the exhibition MINUCODEs revisited the project in 2010, shedding light on the original mythical event through recovered footage and documents. Learn more about MINUCODEs.

“Marta Minujín is one of the few artists who never stopped being radical: From the social environments of the 1960s in which she merged Pop art with Arte de los Medios, French Structuralism, and Marshal MacLuhan’s theories, to monumental events such as the Parthenon of forbidden books recently restaged at documenta 14,” says Gabriela Rangel. “Her work deals with art as a space of exploration without limits.”

In 2017, The Parthenon of Books was exhibited at documenta 14, the fourteenth edition of the prominent contemporary art exhibition taking place in Kassel, Germany every five years. The work, composed of as many as 100,000 banned books from all over the world, was erected as a symbol of opposition to the banning of writings and the persecution of their authors.

“Marta Minujín was ahead of her time,” says Tania Bruguera. “Very early on she understood what we are just trying to catch up with today.”