RENO, NEV.- The Nevada Museum of Art presents a wide-ranging and diverse survey of artwork in collaboration with New York’s El Museo del Barrio—the leading Latino cultural institution in the U.S. dedicated to Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean art. Voces y Visiones: Highlights from the Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York features over fifty objects including sculpture, painting, prints, photographs, and mixed media installations addressing themes such as identity politics, colonialism, emotional connections to homeland, and contemporary visual culture. On view March 2 through July 7, 2013, lively contemporary artworks created by living artists are contextualized with a concise selection of ancient Taίno stone carvings.
Voces y Visiones is a collaboration between El Museo and the Nevada Museum of Art designed to expand West Coast and national awareness, access, and visibility to El Museo’s significant permanent collections of contemporary and historical art and to provide new recognition opportunities for mid-career El Museo-affiliated artists. The initiative also aims to advance cultural understanding and engagement through sustainable, community-focused partnerships with rapidly-growing Latino and Hispanic populations in northern Nevada.
“El Museo del Barrio is an institution devoted to celebrating and promoting Latino culture, an undertaking that is increasingly relevant to Americans across the country,” said JoAnne Northrup, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives, Nevada Museum of Art, and co-curator of the Voces y Visiones exhibition. “The Nevada Museum of Art views this collaboration as an opportunity to share El Museo’s outstanding collection with Nevada audiences while deepening and strengthening the Museum’s ties to northern Nevada community members from all backgrounds.
“Staff from both institutions worked in concert to include works that describe the richness of Latino culture, created by living artists. The work is engaging, colorful, provocative, and touches upon artists’ enduring connection to their national, cultural and ethnic heritages. In bringing their stories to Reno, we hope to engage Museum visitors in thinking about their own familial roots, and how their backgrounds have made them the individuals they are today.”
“As the only art museum in Nevada, we recognize the importance of engaging all our citizens in the dynamic programming of ideas at the Nevada Museum of Art,” said David B. Walker, Executive Director | CEO, Nevada Museum of Art. “Although we have a history of presenting exhibitions and education programs featuring Hispanic and Latino artists, this has admittedly been sporadic. Voces y Visiones, presented in collaboration with New York City’s El Museo del Barrio, is aimed at developing a sustainable conversation with our growing Hispanic and Latino populations. We believe this is critically important.
“We have gotten to know El Museo and respect their curatorial and educational programming expertise, and extraordinary collection. A flagship program of El Museo is its biennial, The (S) Files, a popular survey of the most innovative and cutting edge art created by Latino artists working in the Greater New York area. Many of the artists featured in past biennials have gone on to become internationally renowned, including Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla who represented the United States in the 2011 Venice Biennale. Because the Nevada Museum of Art has made a strategic commitment to collecting and presenting art of our time, a collaborative relationship with El Museo is synergistic and timely.”
Voces y Visiones: Highlights from the Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York, was jointly organized by El Museo del Barrio and the Nevada Museum of Art.
