Permission To Be Global/ Prácticas Globales

Powerful contemporary voices across the Americas offer critical understandings of what it means to be global.

“Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales” debuts in New England 60 contemporary Latin American works from the collection of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, founder of the CIFO Art Foundation in Miami. Featuring sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, and performance art from 1960 to the present, the exhibition explores how avant-garde artists from the Caribbean and Central and South America have become integral to discourses on international contemporary art after years of exclusion from institutions at home and abroad. Four thematic sections—Power Parodied, Borders Redefined, Occupied Geometries, and Absence Accumulated—consider distinct aesthetic strategies that resonate within the artists’ cultural contexts and beyond. Their unique visual languages subvert status quo, defy boundaries, humanize art's abstractions, and revisit forgotten histories. Together they offer critical understandings of what it means to be global today. Developed in collaboration with CIFO, the exhibition will be shown in both Boston and Miami (opens December 4, 2013, for Art Basel Miami Beach) with specially commissioned performances and related installations by internationally acclaimed artists.

Above: Daniel Medina, Reja Naranja (Dispositivo Cinético-Social) / Orange Bars (Social-Kinetic Device), 2012. Metal bars on hinges and vinyl paint on wall. © Daniel Medina. Photo credit: Ángela Bonadies. Image courtesy of the artist and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection.