OBERLIN, OH.- The first modern work of Latin American art entered the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in 1936, providing the seed for a diverse group of more than 200 modern and contemporary works by artists from 12 countries. This fall, for the first time, the museum is showcasing this Latin American collection in a comprehensive exhibition organized by Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Denise Birkhofer. Latin American and Latino Art at the Allen anchors the AMAM’s yearlong focus on “The Americas.”

Represented are artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay, as well as the United States. The works range from Mexican Revolution-era prints to recent conceptual installations. Organized into thematic groupings—Religion and the Sacred, Immigration and Exile, and Death and Violence, for example—the exhibition includes works by such major figures as Enrique Chagoya, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alfredo Jaar, Roberto Matta, Ana Mendieta, José Clemente Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, Diego Rivera, and Doris Salcedo. Many of the works are on view at the AMAM for the first time.

Latin American and Latino Art at the Allen showcases the remarkable breadth and quality of a collection shaped, not only as a result of astute purchases, but also through gifts from individual collectors who championed Latin American art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two women, for example, were early patrons of Mexican School artists. During the 1940s, philanthropist and suffragist Lucia McCurdy McBride donated five important works by Mexican artists, most notably José Clemente Orozco’s 1929 painting, Mexican House. She also facilitated, in 1947, the AMAM’s purchase of Diego Rivera’s colorful Portrait of a Girl and Guillermo Meza’s iconic painting, Nopalera. In the 1970s, Leona E. Prasse, a longtime curator in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s prints and drawings department, donated 12 lithographs by Rivera, Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, three artists known as los tres grandes (the three giants), whose public murals have come to define the Mexican Revolution.

The AMAM continues today as an active collector of works not only from Mexico, but also from other parts of North and South America, as well as the Caribbean. The AMAM collection reflects major movements in modern art, such as abstraction, as well as cultural practices and political concerns unique to Latin America. For example, Vik Muniz’s 1996 photograph Valicia Bathes in Sunday Clothes references the exploitation of children working on sugar cane plantations on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts.

Themes of immigration, exile, and human mobility permeate the work of many contemporary Latin American artists. The Journey, a 1988 painting by Cuban artist Luis Cruz Azaceta, embodies the psychological and physical perils posed to immigrants. The experience of displacement underscores Silent Barrack, a large installation by Uruguayan political exile Rimer Cardillo. The Body is the Map, a set of nine photographs by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, refers to the “coyotes” who make a business of assisting border crossings into the United States.

A number of works incorporate religious iconography. Representations of the highly venerated Virgin of Guadalupe appear in the works of Pepón Osorio and Enrique Chagoya. Edouard Duval-Carrié’s painting Justicia, the first work by a Haitian artist to enter the AMAM collection, references Vodou traditions and African diaspora in the Americas.

In a catalogue accompanying the exhibition, curator Denise Birkhofer chronicles the history and growth of the collection. The 112-page publication, Latin American Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, includes more than 80 color illustrations and a checklist of this important collection. In another essay, Oberlin College History Professor Steven S. Volk tells how he has used the AMAM’s Latin American works to engage students in new ways.