Transnational Identities/
The group show is primarily the work of the curator, who brings art by many disparate artists together like found objects to make a point. In fact the curator often functions like a critic, and the exhibit’s words–in the form of wall texts, catalog essays, taped explanations, and panel discussions–often dominate. This discourse frequently reflects the current cultural debate on issues of “globalization of capitalism,” “transnational migrations,” “centers and peripheries,” “difference,” “identity,” “postcolonialism,” and “multiculturalism.” And though to the uninitiated the discussion can sound like incomprehensible babble, behind the language lie very real political and economic changes that affect the nature and practice of art making.
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The premise of “About Place,” curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, is interesting: to bring together diverse artists from the Americas. But the result is not so much a dialogue or an exchange as an expression of hyperalienation. Most viewers must be perplexed by the lack of contact between these works, a disjunction so extreme that what we learn from an overview of the exhibit is that, in this age of exile and displacement, each of us carries his own concept of home within. It follows then that there is little shared experience and we’re all just talking to ourselves.
If “About Place” represents the institutional side of the debate, “Transnational Identities” presents us with voices from the periphery. Like the Art Institute show, “Transnational Identities” is about place, since all the artists are Latin American, but they’re linked by another place: Chicago.
Older immigrants and the children of immigrants who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s have often seen themselves as part of the working-class movements of their adopted countries, and Cortez is of this generation of socialists. The five examples here of his beautiful woodcuts and linoleum prints, showing some German expressionist influence, cover subjects from labor-movement martyr Joe Hill to immigration in De la tierra somos. No somos legales (“We belong to the land. We are not illegal”).
