Video: Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection.

Watch a video of Guest Student Curators Bertha Aguilar, Alejandra Olvera, and Sandra Zetina alongside Professor Déborah Dorotinsky as they discuss the process of putting together the exhibition. The three curators also give a tour of selected pieces in the exhibition. Video produced by David Gacs.

About the exhibition: Americas Society and the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil will co-present the exhibition Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection. A Postgraduate Seminar and Exhibition by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from November to December 2010. This project originated with the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil in collaboration with the Programa de Estudios de Posgrado en Historia del Arte de la UNAM (Art History Postgraduate Program at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).

Through an academic seminar, a renowned group of scholars and post-graduate students developed the curatorial proposal resulting in the Shattered Glass exhibition, which brings new scholarship to the work of Mexican modernist artists, particularly in regard to their influence on contemporary art. Through the study of recent Mexican, Latino, and Latin American art and Mexican high modernist masterpieces in the collection of the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art, the curatorial team reexamined a series of important pieces to reveal how bodies and ruins, placed together, relate to an established colonial narrative, making it possible to reassess the significance of images of violence in contemporary Mexican art and rewrite some of that narrative. Extremely brutal images, such as José Clemente Orozco's landscapes of New York, were frequently designed as a commentary on metropolitan modernity. They form the core of the curatorial focus of the exhibition, which, along with the catalogue essays, will present these concepts from four vantage points, each represented by a section in the exhibition.

Shattered Glass: Rethinking the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Collection. A Postgraduate Seminar and Exhibition by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México will be a central part of the celebrations in the United States in 2010 to commemorate the bicentennial of the independence of Mexico and the anniversary of the Mexican revolution.

The exhibition is co-presented by Americas Society and the Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil with the collaboration of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Dirección General de Cooperación Educativa y Cultural de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (México), and the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York.
 

Americas Society gratefully acknowledges the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation for their generous support of this exhibition, which is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. We are also grateful to the following organizations for their in-kind support and collaboration which helps make this exhibition possible: Consulate General of Mexico in New York; Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes (México); Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (México); Centro Nacional de Conservación y Registro del Patrimonio Artístico Mueble (México); La Asociación de Amigos del Museo Carrillo Gil A.C.; and Café Frida.

Americas Society’s Visual Arts Program is supported by Sharon Schultz Simpson and in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. We are also grateful to PINTA Art, LLC for their collaboration and in-kind support

^{Image: Pablo Vargas Lugo, Saludo, 1998, Collection of Museo Arte Carillo Gil.}