Contemporary art flights from Lisbon to Chicago

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In the varied and highly inflated panorama of contemporary art exhibitions, the winning combination of 6 out of 6 exhibitions to be promoted, and also cum laude, is now more unlikely than a lottery. But when the case brings together – via an air flight with obligatory stops, as in the most noble flights of yesteryear – two very distant cities such as Chicago and Lisbon, the right formula materializes as if by magic. There are two museum institutions to which credit must be given for the choices: the American MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art and the MAAT, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology of the Portuguese capital.

MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

With art exhibitions having expanded and gone global, and dialogues about identity, especially from those who have suffered systemic oppression increasingly at the center of cultural debates, the MCA’s response is the staggering”Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today”, the first major group show in the United States to imagine a new approach to contemporary art in the Caribbean diaspora, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields. Among the many works on display are the “Cursed Grounds: Cursed Borders” by Didier William and the colorful “Untitled, Silieta Series” by the Cuban Ana Mendieta, as well as the installation of eighty-one individual works with which Firelei Bàez describes the life of the queen of Haiti, Marie-Louise Coidavid, and her children, who died in exile in Italy. Simply unmissable.

Also at the MCA, the exhibition interiors explores the potential of the simplifications of geometric abstraction to allude, obliquely, to the body. The works in this exhibition use shapes and curves to imply the sensual presence of a figure. At the same time – as curators Nolan Jimbo, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, explain – these abstract elements fragment, obscure or distort the body, allowing the subjects to remain indeterminate. The show, housed in the Cohen and Stone family galleries on the museum’s fourth floor, includes works that adopt inward-looking and inward-preserving aesthetic strategies, resisting pressures to be publicly visible and definable within static categories of identity. Interiors was inspired by Miyoko Ito’s painting Chiffonier (1971), which was acquired by MCA in 2005 and is on display for the first time. Works include Zilia Sánchez, Topología (de la serie Tatuajes), 1993–2001 and Fred Eversley “Untitled”.

Also in Chicago the intense and exciting exhibition, curated by Amanda Donnan, entitled Duane Linklater: mymothersside. Through the work of the artist, Duane Linklater, we question here how the conventions and structure of museums have historically excluded the indigenous content. On display are sculptures and videos that focus on ancestral practices such as hunting and the fur trade; digital translations of tribal objects preserved in institutional collections as well as large structures that deconstruct and reassemble one of the symbols of indigeneity: the types, or the conical tent of poles covered with skins, a favorite home of Native Americans. With his cover paintings of the types draped and folded, Linklater transforms the semicircular canvas envelope of the traditional Cree house into a support for digitally printed images that he dyes with natural dyes, and which reveal nostalgic references to the artist’s childhood.

MAAT, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon

Also in Portugal we are questioning the role and selection of museums through a real itinerary to discover new worlds of art, which with the exhibition Hervé Di Rosa Archipelago proposes a journey in parallel with those narrated by Jules Verne. Hosts precisely the artist Hervé Di Rosa and the museum he founded, MIAM, Musée international des Arts Modestes of Sète (France). Through a wide selection of works from the MIAM collection we rediscover the modes of creation that have been set aside by institutionalized art by museums, critics and history. In the Oval Gallery, the artist draws the new “geographical” maps of art, assembling a “pangea” that includes fanzines, sand castles, comics, traditional art, naïve art, graphics, raw art, dolls houses, psychedelic art , cinema, commercial art etc. Its pyramids include and embalm in plain sight plastic birds, collector’s puppets, reproductions of superheroes, dolls and cartoon characters, monsters of all kinds. A very colorful miscellany capable of recycling the Disney universe and that of Japanese manga, robots and taxidermies, revisited geographical art and shell clothes. Suspended in the air, terrible snake-like inflatables stretch out, on the ground guide-carpets in bright colors for a new universe made up of nostalgic puppets and meta-artistic reflections. A real pleasure for a new bombastic aesthetic, where even the “good things in bad taste” of Gozzani’s memory find unusual combinations to reach unusual pyramidal and nostalgic peaks, comics, evocative powers. Contained in pyramidal display cases and in a caravan, the fairy-tale puppets and playful bande dessinée dreams acquire an alienating completeness, breaking down and rehabilitating what remains on the margins of the museum canon, to recompose themselves in a new aesthetic value. An astonishing, nostalgic exhibition for creatives without borders.