A new Denver Art Museum (DAM) exhibition will highlight the work of emerging artists from across Latin America and the Caribbean.
This July, Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art will take over the museum's Modern and Contemporary Art galleries on level four and other areas throughout the DAM's campus. The exhibition will feature mostly site-specific artworks by 19 millennial artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and the U.S. Each artist was commissioned to create pieces engaging with the architecture of the museum's Frederic C. Hamilton Building, which was designed by Daniel Libeskind.
"Each of the participating artists has an incredible body of work, and their site-responsive installations for Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail will activate the Hamilton Building with their own voices and lenses on the contemporary Latin American experience," Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM, said in a statement. "This one-of-a-kind exhibition demonstrates the DAM's commitment to shaping the museum into a space where multiple voices and perspectives are presented in our galleries, encouraging open-spirited conversations inspired by the works on view."
This is the first major exhibition curated by DAM's new (and first ever) Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, Raphael Fonseca, who is currently based in Brazil. The title of the exhibition, Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art, was inspired by a Brazilian proverb, "Quem conta um conto, aumenta um ponto," or, "who adds a tale, adds a point." Per a DAM release, the proverb stresses the importance of "pushing a momentum forward by continuing a conversation."
The participating artists, who represent diverse backgrounds, identities and disciplines, were all born between the years 1981 and 1996. For the exhibition, they will work in a range of media - including painting, sculpture, textile, video, sound, digital and performance art - to explore topics like technology, identity, climate change, violence, colonialism, and other social and political issues.
The exhibition also incorporates storytelling to highlight historical narratives and stories from artists' own lives, and invites visitors to share their own experiences and responses to the work as a means of facilitating dialogue about the various themes addressed in the exhibition.
"The power of this exhibition is in the combination of what ties the artists and their works together, as well as what separates and distinguishes them," Fonseca said in a statement. "In spite of this geographical and generational umbrella, the works in the show are much more extensive than anyone could expect. These artists show how the same generation related to a geography can have so many different approaches to art, the idea of fiction, the use of existent images to invoke new ideas and the appeal to the human body are topics explored throughout."
Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art will run at the DAM from July 31, 2022 through Mar. 5, 2023. The participating artists are listed below.
Featured artists:
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (Los Angeles, b. 1990)
ASMA (Mexico - Ecuador)
Sebastián Calfuqueo (Chile, b. 1991)
Gabriel Chaile (Argentina, b. 1985)
Vitória Cribb (Brazil, b. 1996)
Juan Fuentes (México/Denver, b. 1995)
Claudia Martinez Garay (Peru, b. 1983)
Juan Pablo Garza (Venezuela, b. 1980)
Hulda Guzmán (Dominican Republic, b. 1984)
Caleb Hahne Quintana (Denver, b. 1993)
Randolpho Lamonier (Brazil, b. 1988)
Tessa Mars (Haiti, b. 1985)
Andrés Pereira Paz (Bolivia, b. 1986)
Antonio Pichillá (Guatemala, b. 1982)
Gabriela Pinilla (Colombia, b. 1982)
Ana Segovia (México, b. 1991)
Alan Sierra (México, b. 1990)
Yuli Yamagata (Brazil, b. 1989)
