BLANTON MUSEUM ANNOUNCES MAJOR GIFT OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN ART
The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin has been gifted approximately 120 modern and contemporary Latin American artworks from UT alumni Judy and Charles Tate of Houston.
In addition, the Tates have made a major contribution towards the endowment that supports the museum’s Latin American curatorship. Their collection—the entirety of which will ultimately come to the Blanton—includes painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, and mixed media works by artists Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, Frida Kahlo, Carlos Mérida, Wifredo Lam, Armando Reverón, Diego Rivera, Alejandro Xul Solar, and Joaquín Torres-García, among others.
Spanning the early 20th century to the present, the gift features many of the artists who were key to the creation of modernism in Latin America. The endowment gift adds to the Tates’ past contributions to the Blanton’s Latin American art program and reaffirms their commitment to endowment building as an institutional priority. The total value of the gift to the Blanton is $10 million.
For over fifteen years, the Tates have built a collection that complements the museum’s existing holdings of more than 2,100 Latin American objects. Highlights include: an ethereal painting by Armando Reverón from the 1920s; a 1946 graphite drawing by Frida Kahlo and a cubist period drawing by Diego Rivera; two paintings and an ink drawing by Wifredo Lam spanning his time in France in the late 1930s to his return to Cuba in the 1940s; a 1951 Surrealist painting by Leonora Carrington; a 1953 glass mosaic by Carlos Mérida—a playful fusion of abstraction and figuration; mid-20th-century Kinetic and Concrete works by important artists Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Lygia Clark, Willys de Castro, Lothar Charoux, Mira Schendel, and Hélio Oiticica; and contemporary works by Fernando Botero, Waltercio Caldas, Jorge Macchi, Sebastián Gordín, and Tunga.
From September 20, 2014 – February 15, 2015, the Blanton will present a selection of approximately 70 works from the collection. Entitled La línea continua, the exhibition takes its name from an elegant sculpture from the collection by Enio Iommi: a stainless steel “line” that traces an infinite loop in space. The work is also a fitting metaphor for the continual and nourishing connection between Judy and Charles Tate, the University of Texas, and the Blanton Museum of Art.
A fully-illustrated catalogue of the Tate gift will be published in fall 2014, with a preface by UT President William Powers; Blanton Director Simone Wicha in conversation with Judy and Charles Tate and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Director of the Patricia Cisneros Collection; an essay by Blanton Curator of Latin American Art Beverly Adams, and short pieces by UT Art and Art History graduate students.
The University of Texas at Austin
Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard at Congress Avenue
200 East MLK, D1303, Austin TX 78712
P 512-475-6784/ F 512-471-7023
www.blantonmuseum.org
