Mari Carmen Ramirez
The
Evangelist For Modern Art
 HOUSTON
(By Richard Lacayo, Time) August 18, 2007 — Five minutes into a conversation
with Mari Carmen Ramírez and you can tell she's an evangelist. She's just not
the kind who preaches about God. What she wants you to know about is Gego, the
German-born Venezuelan sculptor "whom we're only now beginning to rediscover,"
or Joaquín Torres García, the Uruguayan artist who used pre-Columbian motifs in
a Modernist idiom. As Ramírez is happy to tell you, her mission is "to let the
world know the richness and significance of Latin American and Latino art of the
20th century." In 2001, Ramírez, who was born 50 years ago in Puerto Rico, was
named the first director of the International Center for the Arts of the
Americas, based at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The most ambitious effort
of its kind in the U.S., the center is dedicated not only to collecting and
showing work by the Latin American avant-garde but also to supporting research
and education to make plain that there is more to that art than, say, the
folkloric Surrealism of Frida Kahlo or the toiling peasants of Diego Rivera.
If the standard history of modern art is like a
package tour of a few familiar cities—Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin—the
Ramírez version also passes through Buenos Aires, S„o Paulo and Caracas, among
other places. As she sees it, modern art in Latin America has been likely to
have a political dimension, something that the standard academic accounts of
Modernism, with their emphasis on questions of form, have had trouble taking
into account. But even though Ramírez has a Ph.D. in art history from the
University of Chicago, she says "my role models were never academics. I come
from a tradition where intellectuals and artists are part of the public sphere,
where they participate in forging public life on a daily basis." Now she doesn't
just come from that tradition. She's extending it.
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