This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975

Americas Society presents This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, a two-part group exhibition exploring the work of a generation of migrants from Latin America who created and exhibited in New York City between 1965 and 1975. The exhibition maps the connections and spaces these artists created in the city and offers a much needed reevaluation of 1960s and 1970s American art. Embracing experimental practices such as Happening, minimalism, conceptualism, performance, and video art, they contributed artworks centering on issues of community, identity, and belonging, and offered a unique perspective to the neo-avant garde art scene in New York.

It was in New York that many of these artists recognized themselves as Latin Americans, something they did not necessarily realize back home. By being in contact with migrants from other parts of the continent, they forged a new sense of self as Latin Americans that resisted the stereotypes imposed on them by American culture. Located in-between spaces of belonging and occupying a unique political subjectivity, these artists made work in the interstices of traditional cultural categories and advanced ideas about identity that would not be discussed until the arrival of multiculturalism in the 1980s.

This exhibition puts into dialogue collectives and artists from diverse backgrounds in South America metropolises, the Caribbean, and New York. This Must Be the Place centers the efforts made by communities of creators to assert agency over their social and cultural identities, working collaboratively and in solidarity with one another. Then as now, these artists transformed the overwhelming experience of migration into the continuous search for a home, a constitutive process in the construction of imagined communities.

Part II of the exhibition will be on display January 19 to May 14, 2022.

The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: an illustrated guide to the exhibition featuring a curatorial text along with the full exhibition checklist, and the book This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York 1965-1975 to be released during the second part of the show with the support of our co-publisher, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

The presentation of This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Additional support is provided by the Smart Family Foundation of New York, Fundación Ama Amoedo, and The Cowles Charitable Trust. 

Americas Society acknowledges the generous support from the Arts of the Americas Circle members: Estrellita B. Brodsky, Virginia Cowles Schroth, Emily A. Engel, Diana Fane, Galeria Almeida e Dale, Isabella Hutchinson, Carolina Jannicelli, Vivian Pfeiffer and Jeanette van Campenhout, Phillips, Gabriela Pérez Rocchietti, Erica Roberts, Diana López and Herman Sifontes, and Edward J. Sullivan.

Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Director and Chief Curator of Visual Arts at Americas Society 

Press: Please contact mediarelations@as-coa.org