Latin Art

Latin Art Museums in NYC

National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian, exhibits one of the great collections of Indigenous art of the Americas. Many exhibits are designed for education, and presented in both English and Spanish. It’s Free.

The Brooklyn Museum holds one of the world’s great collections of African art.

Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibitions represent the people of The Bronx. It’s Free.

El Museo del Barrio started as a museum of Puerto Rican art, but has grown into New York’s museum of Latino, Caribbean, and Latin American art.

Hispanic Society is a research library and art museum that holds the most important collection of Hispanic art outside of Spain.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is New York’s encyclopedia of human art and culture.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibits one of the world’s great collections of modern art, contemporary art, and film. The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America makes it a world center of Latin American contemporary art.

The Studio Museum in Harlem exhibits art of the African Diaspora.

New York Art Fairs

New York art fairs and important gallery exhibitions cluster around Frieze Week in May and Armory Week in September.

The May and November art auctions are more pillars of New York’s art world.

After the November auctions, New York’s art world goes south to Art Basel Miami, America’s most important contemporary art fair.

The Origin of Art

Like most human culture, art begins as an expression of faith to ease the journey through life and death. From there it grows into a hundred flowers.

If you open your eyes, there is great art everywhere. In a way, being a New Yorker is an art form in and of itself.

Looking at Latin Art

If you look at American art (especially Latin American Art) the same way you look at European art, your own bias will blind you. We have different world views.

The art world now sees that one isn’t better than the other. European art is more European, American art is more American. Whether art is made from diamonds or garbage is irrelevant. In fact art made from garbage is probably more real. Diamonds are a sucker’s artifice.

Latin Art’s Influence on American Art

In February of 2020, the Whitney Museum of American Art recast art history by stating that the biggest influence on the development of American art was not the European schools, it was the Mexican Muralists. Let that sink in. 🇲🇽

The Most Famous Latin Art in New York That You Will Never See

The cover image is the most famous Latin art in New York City that you’ll never see. It’s Diego Rivera’s “Man, Controller of the Universe” (1934), in the Palacio de Bellas Arts in Mexico City.

That is Rivera’s recreation of his own “Man at the Crossroads” from 30 Rock in Rockefeller Center, which Nelson Rockefeller destroyed in 1933 because it includes a portrait of Lenin.