I was so happy to attend this year’s International Women’s Committee (IWC) luncheon hosted by The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where my mother, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, received recognition for her lifelong contributions to the art world. Beyond the pride I feel for her achievements, I’ve always seen her as a trailblazer, particularly when it comes to her work in education, philanthropy, and art.

Darlene Boytell-Pérez and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Four decades ago, she bravely stepped into the world of art when she co-founded with my father Gustavo Cisneros, the Fundación/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and has since evolved into a powerful advocate for those overlooked in these spheres.

Hearing her acceptance speech as the 2023 IWC Honoree, I found myself immersed in the wisdom she shares, not only with me but with anyone open to listening. Her words served as a reminder that our journeys are interwoven, that every story is built on contributions from many people, and that nurturing connections, seeking guidance, and embracing collaboration are the cornerstones upon which we build each other up, moving beyond competition towards a horizon of collective success.

My mother’s journey was never a solitary one. During her speech she paid homage to the incredible women who mentored her, such as Sofía Imber and Virginia Pérez Ratton, and reflected on her mission to amplify the many voices echoing from the rich cultural tapestry of Latin America. Her words vibrated with the power of inclusivity, “People say that the future is female, but I would argue that the past is too.” It’s a testament to the often-overlooked truth that women have always been shaping our history; they were the pillars, even when the world wasn’t watching. Below, I share some of the heartfelt words from her speech.

Thank you so much to Darlene Boytell-Pérez, the Board of Trustees and the entire PAMM team for this acknowledgment. PAMM is more than a museum; for many of us, it represents a vital piece of the vibrant city we cherish as our home. I am hopeful that together, we will continually strive to honor and elevate Latin American art and culture, and I eagerly anticipate a future where women’s contributions are recognized and celebrated at every juncture.

Franklin-Sirmans, Darlene-Boytell, Perez-Patty Cisneros, Maritza-Lacayo and Trixie-Belo-Osagie

Thank you, mom, for the inspiration and insights you’ve imparted throughout your journey. The world is undeniably a better place because of you.”

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Remarks – Perez Art Museum Miami IWC Luncheon – October, 18, 2023

People say that the future is female, but I would argue that the past is too. When I was putting together our mid-century Latin American modernist collection in the 1990s, many of the obligatory names were women: Gego, Mira Schendel, Lygia Clark, María Freire. This was not revisionism; those names have been central to the story of Latin American modernism since day one. If one were to contrast the art history books of Latin America with those of the United States or Western Europe at the time, the humongous gender gap is strikingly clear.

And this was the case not just for artists, but also for museum directors, collectors, art historians and gallerists. Among the many mentors who helped me along my path. I would like to remember especially Sofía Imber, whose daughter is here with us today, and a former honoree of this committee, who built one of the most important museum in Venezuela, and was a patient and forceful teacher for me as I was finding my way through modern and contemporary art forty years ago. I also owe a huge debt to Virginia Perez Ratton who opened the doors of Central American contemporary art to me, and who became a tremendous role model for how to create alliances and build bridges between Latin America and the rest of the world. To this list I could add so many names, but I know our time is short.

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Team: Marcela Caruso, Ileen Kohn, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Alexa Halaby and Adriana Cisneros

Portrait of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros with Lygia Clark’s “Composição” (1953) by Mark Mahaney.

It is with great pride that we announce that my mother, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, has been inducted to the 2020 member class of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an immense recognition for her decades-long work in enhancing appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ mission is to convene, “leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” To date, the Academy has elected more than 13,500 members including more than two hundred and fifty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, and luminaries ranging from Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Mead, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Martin Luther King, Jr., Martha Graham, I.M. Pei, and Toni Morrison, to name but a few.

Gustavo and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros with Pia Gottschaler at the Getty Research Institute.

As a Venezuelan family, we are extremely proud of this recognition. Patricia has worked tirelessly over four decades to foster a greater appreciation of Latin American culture throughout the world. In addition to this great American honor she has also been awarded the Leone D’Oro di San Marco (Italy 2000) and the Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur (France 2002).

Congratulations mom, well deserved you are an inspiration to us all!

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros interacting with Jesús Rafael Soto’s Penetrable (1990) in front of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 2006

As the FC and CPPC enter their fifth decade of existence, we can see that the future holds many opportunities for movement in new directions. Digital media has opened doors in ways my parents could not have dreamed of in the 1970s, and the CPPC’s website (www.coleccioncisneros.org) is now a dynamic gathering place for ongoing discussions and scholarship about art and ideas from Latin America. Through our long association with various institutions, we have gained an understanding of their holdings and missions and have worked with them to donate works from the CPPC that complement their goals and permanent collections.

The Museum of Modern Art in NY is one of these institutions. At MoMA, modern and contemporary works from the CPPC have found a home in one of the world’s preeminent collections of art from Latin America. The endowment of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA was announced in the fall of 2016, and I am delighted to say that the appointment of Inés Katzenstein as the inaugural Director of the Cisneros Institute has been recently announced by the museum.

Katzenstein, a scholar and curator who worked at MoMA at the beginning of her illustrious career, will oversee the programming and administration of the Cisneros Institute and will also be a Curator of Latin American Art at the museum. (Katzenstein is also, incidentally, one of the interlocutors in the CPPC’s bilingual Conversations/Conversaciones books; she is presented in conversation with Argentine artist Liliana Porter.) The Institute will engage visiting scholars and fellows, present symposia and lectures, and design educational programs and publications. The establishment of the Cisneros Institute, to be housed within MoMA’s mid-town campus, will ensure that Latin American artists continue to be studied and considered in the context of the global history of art. Where we will go from there will be exciting to see.

MoMA Press Release

With Fred Cohen, Chairman of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences

I was honored to be the Gala Chair for this year’s 44th International Emmy Awards held in New York City last Monday. What an evening! Never has it been more evident how transformative television is, truly the most powerful source of communication we know.

The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences was founded in 1969 to promote excellence in international television and is the organization that awards international Emmys to the best television programs produced outside the United States.

Alan Cummings, Scottish actor and producer, was our host for the evening and like so many of the other talented people in the room, he entertained us, made us laugh, provoked us to think and made it such a memorable evening for all.

The evenings two honorees Shonda Rhimes, best known for shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal and Maria Rorbye Ronn, CEO of Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) are a true testament to creativity and inspiration.

Shonda Rhimes shifts our conscience with every story she writes. Her ability to bend our reality is awe-inspiring. She has over 300 million viewers in 67 countries. Need I say more!

The night was a tribute to talent from around the globe. There were 40 nominees from 15 countries and 885 jurors from 66 countries that participated in our three rounds of judging this year.

There were so many great moments. A few of the highlights included:
The winner for non-English-language U.S. primetime program was Francisco, El Jesuita (Francis, the Jesuit) from Anima Films, The History Channel Latin America, Telemundo, Claro Video and DIRECTV.

Globo TV’s Hidden Truths picked up the win in the telenovela category.

Dustin Hoffman won best performance by an actor for the U.K.’s Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot from Endor Productions, Red Arrow International and The Weinstein Company.

The best actress category went to Christiane Paul in Under the Radar from Germany’s Enigma WDR and ARD Degeto.

A very special thanks to Fred Cohen, Chairman and Camille Bidermann-Roizen, Executive Director of The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the entire IEmmy team. The night would not have been such a success without you.

Click on the links to see all the highlights from the evening: Awards Gala, Social Media, Facebook, Press Release

My parents, Patty and Gustavo, grew up in Caracas, a city that was considered to be the epicenter of modernism. It was a city with buildings designed by Carlos Raul Villanueva, Richard Neutra, and Gio Pointi. Murals by Fernand Leger decorated the city walls, sculptures by Alexander Calder were displayed throughout the national university and Burle Marx designed our public parks. From this city emerged people like my parents with a modernist and global perspective of the world, a perspective which ultimately informed and influenced our entire collection.

My mother began the Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) in the 1970s. She started by collecting local favorites – Cruz Diez, Jesus Soto, Otero and Gego, but soon realized during her travels throughout South America, that modernism was also having a profound impact on the artistic development of other countries such as Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. This prompted her to begin studying the relationship between artist movements in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rio, Sao Paulo and Caracas as well as their connection to Europe, especially Paris. The works in the collection by Torres-Garcia, Maldonado, Oiticica, Volpi and Willys de Castro, to name just a few, all represent her quest to present art from Latin-America within the canon of modernist art in spite of geography.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, “Proyecto para un muro exterior”, 1954–1965. The Museum of Modern Art. Promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Carolina Rodríguez-Cisneros

Our gift today to MoMA is a carefully chosen selection of works from our collection that are a perfect complement to MoMA’s existing collection. MoMA has been collecting art from Latin America since the 1930’s. In fact, the museum’s second show, in December 1931-January 1932, was on the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. It is remarkable that MoMA insisted on not only having the best Latin American art collection in the world, but also since inception intended to have these works integrated seamlessly into the collection alongside Mondrian and Picasso.

Along with this gift comes the creation of the Cisneros Institute which will be located on MoMA’s campus.

The Institute will offer opportunities for curatorial research and travel, host visiting scholars and artists, convene an annual international conference, and produce research publications on art from Latin America. It is poised to become the preeminent research center in the field, building on MoMA’s history of collecting, exhibiting, and studying the art and artists of the region.

It has been an amazing experience for me to see the thoughtfulness and rigor with which this gift has been made by the CPPC and that has been accepted by MoMA. We are thrilled that my mother’s life work of assembling this collection will be forever preserved within the walls of this extraordinary institution.

The collection is anticipated to be displayed at MoMA in 2020 when the museum opens its new wing. To learn more about the collection and our programs please visit the CPPC website.

Franz Weissmann, “Composição com semicírculos” 1953. The Museum of Modern Art. Promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund

In the press:
Press Release MoMA: Major Gift from The Colección Patricia Phelps De Cisneros Adds More Than 100 Works by Latin American Artists to The Museum Of Modern Art’s Collection and Establishes A Research Institute Focused On Art of The Region

The Economist: An important gift will transform MoMA’s holdings of Latin American art

NY Times: 102 Latin American Artworks, and a New Institute, Will Go to the Modern

Wall Street Journal: Cisneros Gift to MoMA Will Boost Latin American Holdings, Research

Infraculture is a beautifully created adaptive site that presents a curated listing of cultural events in town. It works with about 40 institutions ranging from O,Miami  to PAMM and promotes events by day, category, type and institution.  Because they have carefully selected their institutional partners  you get a good balance between mainstream events, like museum show openings,  to less obvious suggestions  like a photography workshop for kids at Miami Dade College or The Alternative Clinic by ICA.

The New Tropic was created with Miami’s curious locals in mind. Their mission is to help Miamians feel more connected and engaged with the city so they can “live like they live here”. Part journalism, part guide,  the site and great  daily newsletter  offers insights into what makes the city tick.  Events listed tend to be more happenings or experiences – like a recent fieldtrip to a farm in Homestead to learn where your local food comes from, or Downtown Recess!, a monthly gathering in Bayfront park with games, food trucks and community building activities.

Creative Mornings is a lecture series for the creative community. They have events in over 106 cities including Miami.   They organize talks that include breakfast with the leading minds of the city.  Previous speakers have included Howard Herring from The New World Symphony, Nick Gelpi, an experimental architect and Mike Tomás, the CEO of BioHeart.   They also film the sessions and edit them into great capsules that are posted on their site. https://creativemornings.com/cities/mia

It’s been fun figuring out what this city is all about and initiatives like this indicate that this is only the beginning of how much Miami has to offer in terms of culture.

Alfredo Hlito’s Chromatic Rhythms II, 1947. Courtesy of Sonia Henríquez Ureña de Hlito

Finally, after traveling everywhere from Brazil to Spain, Texas to New York the Collection has arrived in the city where I grew up, London.  I left London for good in 1989, the same summer when the Hayward opened their landmark show on Latin American art.  Many of the artists that have long resided in the CPPC (Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros) were displayed back then.  The art being judged hasn’t changed in those twenty five years.  Yet its reception couldn’t be more different this time.

The show at the Royal Academy is floating on top of a sea of superlatives.  “Dazzling”, says the Guardian.  “Stunning,” says the Daily Telegraph.  “Sensational,” says the UK’s version of the Huffington Post.  I’m guessing that will go on for a while.  There’s something a little karmic about the reception because boy did London get things wrong last time.

The Guardian, the same newspaper that gave not one but two large glowing reviews of this Royal Academy show wrote very differently about Latin American art back in 1989.  The newspaper’s critic concluded that “Europeans tend to find pleasure in such pictures, a pleasure which is not fully intended by the painter.”  Latin American artists weren’t perceived as being intelligent enough to be doing anything deliberately, so the aims of the artist whether political or cultural weren’t even considered.  That was rich coming from the left wing Guardian, who preferred its Latin American revolutionaries to be wielding machine guns not creating Kinetic art.

Helio Oiticica’s Metascheme, 1958. Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica

This time it’s all so different.   Is it just timing?  Or maybe it’s also curatorship?  The case made at the Royal Academy is very clear.  The Latin American artists were men and women who knew how Europeans thought because they’d lived or traveled in Europe.  They brought back ideas, adapted them, improved them, and deliberately forgot them.  They wandered down paths that their European contemporaries couldn’t have envisaged because the Europeans hadn’t lived or traveled in Latin America.

Obviously the world is such a different place than it was twenty five years ago.  We’re not quite so certain where its center lies these days.  We’re all more open to voices from different corners of today’s world, but how refreshing to see such consideration of the past.  That’s exactly what these artists were searching for fifty, sixty years ago.

Additional Press Coverage:

Artists Insight: Radical Geometry at the Royal Academy

Financial Times: Radical Geometry: Modern Art of South America, Royal Academy, London – Review

Apollo Magazine: Review: Radical Geometry, South American art at the Royal Academy, London

London Evening Standard: Radical Geometry, Royal Academy – exhibition review

After an hour-long traffic jam—not an unusual experience nowadays in the streets of Caracas—we finally arrived to Lugar Común, one of most interesting independent bookstores in Latin America. We were there because some of the foreign presenters participating in the Seminario Fundación Cisneros wanted to purchase books unlikely to be found abroad, and particularly to look into Lugar Común’s own publications, for the bookstore was established by a group of young writers, editors, and book connoisseurs who run a publishing house with the same name.

Traffic jam aside, it was a pleasure to take them there, since Lugar Común—located in Chacao, a municipality in greater Caracas known for its liberal politics and active cultural scene—was a collaborator in this year’s edition of Seminario Fundación Cisneros. This day-long-seminar, titled Promises of The Commons, addressed authorship, copyright, and access in contemporary art. It was organized by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), and took place on November 15, 2013 at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas.

In brief, the seminar’s umbrella topic was intellectual property, a frequently misunderstood and contested concept; hence, Lugar Común’s collaboration would become central. Prior to the seminar, they developed programming with local guest speakers and organizers of Promises of the Commons to introduce the seminar topic; and presented in their bookstore a shelf of reference materials on the topic, making available publications (provided by the CPPC holdings and otherwise unobtainable in the city) that anyone could browse and consult free of charge, library style.

It’s worth nothing here that easy access to publications is one of the many challenges facing the cultural field in Venezuela today. In an article for Publishing Perspectives last year, Julieta Lionetti explains the difficultly in importing publications there, and remarks that, “of the many islands that form the Spanish book markets, perhaps Venezuela is the most isolated.” Given this scenario, a collaboration like the one between CPPC and Lugar Común which may at first strike one as a simple action takes on a different meaning.

No doubt, context always inflects meaning. Take another case in point, one pertaining to the topic of Promises of the Commons: The basis of intellectual property may have a central concept and genealogy, but its interpretation and application means different things depending where an author is producing a work or, for that matter, depending where an author is re-producing another’s work. No doubt, too, addressing intellectual property is complicated, at least in the art field. So, to offer some clarity before the seminar kicked off in Caracas, we teamed up with artist Nate Harrison and Paste.tv to create and distribute online a PSA-kind-of-video about intellectual property, specifically as it pertains to the arts. The video is fun and informative, both cool and a tool for specialized or general audiences.

Other actions and collaborations were also set in place and held in advance of the seminar. Among them was the workshop “Contemporary Art and Intellectual Property: Appropriation and Copyright Law.” Conducted by artist and lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, the workshop was designed for artists, curators, cultural producers and lawyers. It took place a week before the seminar in three different cities: in Buenos Aires, at the art department of Universidad Torcuato DiTella; in Bogotá, at the art department of Universidad de los Andes in that city; and in Caracas, at the CPPC headquarters. (Apparently, the participants in Buenos Aires were more for copyright, while the ones in Bogota for copy-left. There’s also copy-future, much debated in Caracas. More on this ahead.)

Indeed, community and institutional collaboration are central for developing contemporary arts programming—or culture in general. And basic activities done consistently, such as providing information, debating it and generating awareness, potentially creating new knowledge or perspectives around a subject, are central goals of the Seminario Fundación Cisneros. Started in 2011, this annual seminar is organized by the CPPC staff in its headquarters in Caracas and New York; Ania Calderon and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa from Mexico City, as well as Ileana Ramirez from Caracas have served as advisors in the last two years. The seminar’s first edition, Piet Mondrian: Parallel Readings, focused on Latin American geometric abstraction; its second edition, The Betrayal of the Contemporary, taking place last year, focused on the present cultural landscape.

The Seminario Fundación Cisneros started as an academic conference; by the second edition, the format radically changed, including keynote scholarly lectures in addition to a series of short-presentations, specifically, Pecha Kuchas organized around thematic blocks. This new format, dynamic to say the least, allows for introducing diverse, new cultural production and distinct, emerging viewpoints by several influential artists and cultural frontrunners from the country and elsewhere. No less, it creates a hyper-stimulating creative environment. Talks have ranged from a fast-forward, critical history of Venezuelan cinema presented by Sergio Monsalve, to a slow-paced, poetic study of contemporary landscape by artist Suwon Lee.

At this year’s seminar, Promises of The Commons started with a keynote by Terry Fisher, a law professor at Harvard University, who presented the theoretical underpinnings of the three main positions on intellectual property—the fairness, personality and welfare theories—and added a new position, a cultural theory based on acknowledgment and collaboration. You can read an excerpt of a text by Fisher explaining this, or better yet watch the video documentation of his lecture at Promises of The Commons. The presentations at the seminar varied significantly in approach to copyright, introducing controversial subjects such as patrimony and weird ones like brainwashing. For example, the American artist Jill Magid focused her presentation—in like manner of her narrative-based conceptual performances—on an ongoing project she’s developing about the archives of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose holdings, now in a private foundation in Switzerland, include those of copyright, or so deem their owner. For his part, Willy McKey, a Venezuelan poet, questioned the media for inserting content into his brain, programming him to repeat it as if willfully, and along the way incited the hundreds of audience members in attendance to chant along a song of an early twentieth century soap ad. The room turned into a concert hall, then McKey raised the question to the room of whether it mattered that a digital server somewhere has stored our entire histories, of whether who, and if it mattered, would be charging copyright at their playback. These are only three of a total of 12 presentations, not counting the group conversations and dialogues that were also staged as part of the day’s program. Hopefully this gives you a sense of the seminar’s program.

If you’ve watched the videos hyperlinked above, you’ll probably notice that these are not typical documentation for a cultural event—TED Conference aside, perhaps! The videos of the seminar were produced by Venevision, the television network that is part of the media conglomerate Organización Cisneros, sister organization to Fundación Cisneros. With their crew of TV experts and a tech set-up including various cameras and professional editing equipment during the event, these videos were captured and edited on the air and on site, as if it were a live talk show, and were simultaneously broadcast via online streaming through the CPPC website.

To disseminate this, in 2012 the CPPC formed an International Network, which involved partnering with cultural organizations throughout the Americas, who convened their public to watch and respond to the seminar via live-stream. Many people gathered and experienced the seminar this way, and many others experienced the seminar from their personal, school or office computers. The use of social networking tools have also been strategically used during the seminars; for example, a group of guest Digital Correspondents post reports on Twitter informing audiences (local and abroad, physically or virtually present at the seminar), incentivizing conversations about the seminar topics, and receiving questions to be posed in the auditorium to the presenters on stage.

All efforts are made to make the seminar digitally accessible, for accessing the event there and then or from elsewhere and afterwards, but it’s certainly recommended to be present in Caracas: the program is great, and the presenters are accessible throughout the day for public questions or can easily be approached during break times. The quality of the audience also makes it for the experience; it consists of local artists and intellectuals, professors and their students, engaged in the cultural developments in Venezuela. The seminar makes an environment not only for learning, but also for cultural exchange and professional networking. This is why the CPPC offers grants to subsidize travel for interested audiences that live in the interior of the country.

It may also help to say that the setting for the Seminario Fundación Cisneros is an inspiring place, a modernist architectural jewel. Designed and constructed in the mid-twentieth century by the Venezuelan architect Raúl Villanueva, the campus of the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas is considered by UNESCO a World Heritage Site. The seminar program includes guided walkthroughs with leading architectural scholars, including Professor Rafael Pereira. And his campus walkthrough is certainly a highlight of the program, and a lure for foreign presenters to come—as it is being accompanied by local artists like Dulce Gomez, Luis Molina Pantin, and Luis Romero to an early morning hike to el Ávila, to the Metro Cable public transportation system, or to visit art galleries in Los Galpones and La Trinidad. Certainly, the one drawback of moving around Caracas is its hours-long traffic jams, which have increased in recent years, making evident the pressing need for the development of an integrated public transportation system, and of more thoughtful urban planning in general. For a start, it would help that the taxi services—most of which are part of the city’s increasing informal economies—were organized, with a map on hand and networked among drivers, to say the least.

–Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy

The fourth edition of Seminario Fundación Cisneros takes place in Caracas on November 2014. You can join the CPPC mailing list to keep abreast of its developments, and learn about related activities: www.Coleccióncisneros.org.

Orinoco. “Journey to a Lost World Opening”

Words of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros,

Santiago de Compostela, May 27, 2013

I remember with joy the smile on my daughter Adriana’s face when returning to our camp in the Venezuelan Amazon after playing all day with children from the Yanomami tribe. This was part of her routine, as two weeks a year my husband Gustavo and I took our children deep into the Orinoco to coexist with the local cultures, which they learned to love and respect dating back to their infancy. These trips and numerous expeditions that we conducted beginning in the 70s are certainly a memorable part of our family history, and the birth of what is today the Orinoco Collection.

The rigor with which we undertook these voyages likely grew from my grandfather William H. Phelps and his experiences and life lessons that he shared with us. William H. Phelps was a naturalist as passionate as Schomburgk or Humboldt. His deep love for the physical and human geography of his adopted Venezuela led him to create the ornithological Phelps Collection, now recognized as one of the largest in the world.  His passion as an explorer leads him to undertake tours of unparalleled scientific discoveries.  His research discipline and skills helped to create a cultural reference of the history of our country. For us, his vision was inspirational, and our efforts in the lands of the Orinoco is in great part a tribute to his work, to his desire to preserve the culture of the ethnic groups of the Orinoco, which are as fragile as the birds in our skies.

With these principles in mind we undertook expeditions that submerged us into the richness and variety of the indigenous cultures of Venezuela, that despite the cultural hybridization process, fight to maintain its authenticity and ethnic tradition. With the support and vision of Gustavo, we established the Manaka Camp, located at the convergence of the Orinoco the Ventuari, the native land of the Piaroa, Yabarana and Yekuana, and one of the most pristine Amazonian ecosystems in extraordinary condition with exceptional native vegetation.

With each passing year we noticed significant changes in the cultural processes of these communities, and today we have only a few remnants and testimonies of a nearly lost history. The remaining relics are objects of worship or of practical use that mean something beyond their shape, abstract designs and decorations, allowing us peek into the ​​cosmogony and theology of these peoples. This instilled in us the desire to study their material culture and aesthetic practices, and preserve vases, figurines, rattles, etc. that have survived. Along with my husband and our three children Gustavo Guillermo, Carolina and Adriana, dazzled by such wonderful artifacts, we began to collect items on which we found the pattern of symbols representing these cultures, reminiscent of ancient traditions that have been perpetuated to this day; objects from the jungle we now wish to share through this show and our website orinoco.org, where visitors can explore the collection and the rich culture of the ethnic groups in depth.

For more information, visit:

orinoco.org

cidadedacultura

Photos of the Opening in Santiago de Compostela

The series of in-depth conversations between luminaries of the Latin American artworld thus far includes the artists Jesús Soto, Gyula Kosice, Tomás Maldonado, Jac Leirner, Ferreira Gullar and Carlos Cruz-Diez; a conversation between Liliana Porter and Inés Katzenstein will be released soon. They are available in print as well as digital format. The assets available in the eBook versions bring the conversations to life. They include features such as exclusive live interviews with the artists, additional documents from their personal archives, video footage that shows kinetic works in action, virtual studio visits, and complete manuscripts and manifestos related to the artists. Everything has been very carefully chosen to complement the already considerable material available in the print editions.

Here’s a screenshot showing an embedded video of a studio visit with Cruz-Diez by Ariel Jiménez that is included in Carlos Cruz-Diez in Conversacion with/en conversación con Ariel Jiménez:

The CPPC worked with MAPP editions in London to produce the editions, and we were fortunate to have Michael Mack, MAPP’s founder, present for the celebration. He’s a veteran in art-and-photography print publications, but decided to start MAPP editions, devoted to eBook publishing, soon after he saw how people were reacting to the iPad. He realized that new technology would change the way people read, and would also be a way to bring books to a new, wider audience because they would sidestep the expensive and often complex production and distribution of paper books. He is the perfect partner for this venture, since the CPPC also is dedicated to disseminating information produced with high production values to a wider audience at an affordable price. The eBooks will make access to Latin American culture easy for anyone in the world with an internet connection.

Available as a free sample or a full download for $9.99 on iTunes for iPads: https://itunes.apple.com/ (Kindle, Nook and Kobo versions are forthcoming)

And through the FC/CPPC site at https://www.coleccioncisneros.org/publications

Here is a commercial produced to advertise the books: