DENVER, CO.- The flailing legacy of Christopher Columbus suffered two pernicious blows in Denver in 2020. The first happened in public view when protesters, fired up by the anti-colonial furor of that spring’s Black Lives Matter movement, tied a rope around a 15-foot statue honoring the explorer and toppled it inside the city’s Civic Center Park.

The second was more discreet, and right across the street, at the Denver Art Museum, where the encyclopedic institution simultaneously obliterated all references to the canceled hero from its collections. Pre-Columbian Art was quietly renamed Art of the Ancient Americas. At the same time, Spanish Colonial Art morphed into Latin American Art.

The changes aligned the museum’s organizational structure with the sensibilities of its community, which, as Museum Director Christoph Heinrich points out, is more than 30% Latino.

How the museum would respond through its exhibitions program remained a work in progress. Until last month, that is, when the sprawling “Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail,” opened in the museum’s Hamilton Building. The exhibition features site-specific installations created by 19 millennial-aged artists from countries across Latin America. It is organized by Raphael Fonseca, a Brazilian, who was brought in as the museum’s first curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Heinrich said the show represented a reversal in the way the museum would display art from the region.

The Denver museum’s collection is strong in Mayan and Aztec artifacts, and it has, perhaps, the country’s deepest holdings of paintings and statuary created during the region’s colonial period. For decades, those older objects were the prominent feature in the museum’s Latin American galleries.

Going forward, however, it will give equal attention to contemporary work, tapping Fonseca to assemble a series of temporary exhibits by high-profile and emerging Latin American artists. These flashier, of-the-moment offerings are intended to draw wider audiences.

“We will keep doing these very scholarly exhibitions, that’s an important part of what we do. But we are also opening this new door,” said Jorge Rivas, who was hired in 2015 as curator of Spanish Colonial Art, and whose title is now curator of Latin American Art.

The new exhibitions will allow the museum to update the story of Latin American art it tells visitors — a tale it had confined largely to the first two chapters using objects made before and during Spanish rule. They will also shift the time frame of the entire art category, downgrading the Spanish conquest from the defining moment in history to one of many moments.

“I think it’s much easier to connect with this art if it talks about today, if it starts with the contemporary and maybe then dives back into the traditions, and into the history,” Heinrich said.

“Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail” is topical, addressing themes including technology, gender, immigration and, most prominently, the lingering impacts of colonialism. The artists, born from 1981 to 1996, have a generational connection, though Fonseca assembled a lineup with varied ideas and art-making approaches to show U.S. audiences the diversity of the region’s creativity.




“Looking to the south, you somehow have this unfortunate tendency of putting everything in the same box,” he said.

That exhibit is rich in digital art. Seba Calfuqueo, a Chilean, is presenting a cartoonlike video, titled “Ngüru Ka Williñ,” that twists a traditional folk tale about a fox and an otter into an exploration of contemporary sexual violence. Brazilian-Haitian artist Vitória Cribb contributes “Vigilante-Extended” starring a computer-generated character who delivers a melancholic, nine-minute monologue about the perils of spending too much time in virtual worlds.

There are interactive installations, such as Gabriela Pinilla’s “The Revenge of History,” which combines a large wall mural, books and newspaper clippings to recall the 1981 killing of Colombian guerrilla fighter Carmenza Cardona Londoño and to comment on the history of political violence in her native Colombia. Mexican artist Alan Sierra uses cafe tables, neon signs and microphones to create what the exhibition describes as “an intimate queer club” where visitors can listen to the homoerotic poetry, in Spanish, that plays from speakers.

There is traditional painting, including Dominican artist Hulda Guzmán’s series of lush, acrylic landscapes that examine connections between the human body and nature; and oils from Caleb Hahne Quintana — one of the few U.S. artists on the roster — that employ Western iconography to question notions of masculinity.

Ana Segovia investigates “Mexicaness” by recreating stills from old Western films that were once popular in that country. The artist painted close-up shots of a stereotypical charro, or cowboy, inviting viewers to consider the macho, violent movie-industry cliché through a more contemporary lens.

“There’s something about the cowboy that is very sexy, very compelling,” the artist said in an interview “I think that when I paint it, there’s a sort of romantic fetishization of the figure, while at the same time, there’s the repulsion to it because of its toxicity. It’s a contradiction.”

Contradiction is at the heart of “Who Tells a Tale.” Individually, the pieces challenge existing conventions in the artists’ home countries.

Taken together, the topics and media dispel myths about a monolithic, geographically based Latin American genre of art.

“To me, the whole idea of Latin American art is a big fiction,” Fonseca said.

Still, there is value in exhibiting the contemporary work in the context of its Latin American connections, Rivas said, because it allowed the Denver museum to show how centuries of history linked to one another. There were existing civilizations in the hemisphere, and then a brutal conquest by outsiders, and now there are centuries of cleaning up the trauma. All of those things impact the art that gets made in its time.

It is easier to understand objects created during the current downfall of Columbus and those who followed him, if you can see the art created before they arrived and while they reigned.

“Many problems that these artists are dealing with today originated with the first moment of contact,” Rivas said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.