Vistas del Sur: Traveler Artists' Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Vistas del Sur: Traveler Artists' Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Stitzer Family Gallery, Robert and Dorothy Vance Gallery, and Richard and Virginia McKernan Gallery

Vistas del Sur features more than 150 rarely seen paintings, photographs, works on paper, and books dating from 1638 to 1887, that trace the evolution of Latin American landscapes by artists from Europe and the Americas. This presentation represents the NBMAA’s first collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, and is a variation of the acclaimed exhibition, Boundless Reality, which premiered in New York City at the Americas Society Art Gallery and the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College in 2015. Spanning the Museum’s Stitzer Family Gallery, Robert and Dorothy Vance Gallery, and Richard and Virginia McKernan Gallery, the exhibition will occupy the largest footprint of an NBMAA exhibition to date, and will be the first bilingual presentation at the Museum, offering text in English and Spanish.

Derived from the collection Traveler Artists to Latin America, which Gustavo Cisneros and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros began in 1997, Vistas del Sur features artists such as Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Frans Post, Auguste Morisot, Camille Pissarro, José María Velasco, and Marc Ferrez, among others, whose depictions of the New World range from romanticized scenes based on Western conventions; to directly observed illustrations of travel and expeditions; and scientific records of botanical, zoological, and ethnographic phenomena. The works attest to the ways in which traveler artists experienced Latin America, and the challenges they faced in reconciling preconceived ideals with the aesthetic realities they encountered.

Organized in collaboration with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Hunter College, the exhibition is curated by Dr. Harper Montgomery, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Professor of Latin American Art at Hunter College, New York, and students from her 2015 master’s course, Curatorial Practicum: Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Latin American Landscape.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, an authoritative volume on the early history of landscape painting in Latin America, edited by Dr. Katherine Manthorne.