Illuminating Latin American Art
 Morgan McGivern
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(9/30/2008) Esperanza Leon sat at her desk on a kitchen chair covered in Astro Turf one day last month. “I grew up here in East Hampton, but I was born in Caracas,” she said. The word “Caracas” rolled off her tongue and swirled through the room with a timbre gloriously Latin.
A gallerist, curator, and private art consultant, Ms. Leon is best known for the exhibition venue she founded here in 2001 — Solar Art and Design, where she presides over a lively schedule of shows focused largely, but not exclusively, on Latin American artists.
On top of showcasing a range of visual arts, once a year Ms. Leon produces an exhibit based on a cultural theme. Often, these group shows challenge perceptions or expose stereotypes, and sometimes they shed light on crude generalities or prejudices that inhibit greater cultural understanding.
This year, the show is titled “What Can Brown Do for You?,” a phrase that pokes fun at the popular U.P.S. ad campaign while taking a not-so-subtle jab at the exploitation of immigrant workers in the United States. The show is smart, insightful, and provocative.
“The world is not black and white,” Ms. Leon said. “I’m not the first person to point this out.”
She has a knack for identifying pertinent issues. In 2004, her show “Spanglish” predated Adam Sandler’s film of the same name. Based on Edward Morales’s book “Living in Spanglish,” the show focused on issues relating to the hybrid language, which is spoken in places near the Mexican-American border.
“What Can Brown Do for You?,” an amalgamation of mostly Latino artists from all over the United States and South America, is not a vicious indictment of American culture, but it does offer serious food for thought. Together, the artists present multiple views on a tough subject — that of the disenfranchisement of a huge percentage of the American population.
Ms. Leon watched “A Day Without a Mexican,” she said, “and then I saw ‘Fast Food Nation.’ ” She shook her head. “The level of human exploitation . . . it’s just unbelievable.”
“A Day Without a Mexican,” an independent film that premiered in 2004, is a satirical look at Californians who wake up to find all the day laborers have vanished. Imagine that.
Born in Venezuela, Ms. Leon moved to East Hampton in 1976 when her father, a retired steel merchant, decided his two children should receive an American education. In those days, there was a much smaller immigrant population on the South Fork, and no particular Latino community. Spanish was rarely spoken outside the home.
Indeed, to be “other” in the United States was to be marginalized, and Long Island’s South Fork was no exception. Still, the young Ms. Leon thrived. By ninth grade she was off to boarding school in Toronto, where she would stay through college.
After Ms. Leon graduated from college, she headed straight back to Venezuela, art history degree in hand, and landed a job at the venerable Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art. “I would daydream about assembling shows from their collection,” she recalled, “an Orozco here, a Leger there.” She pointed, curating in midair.
One of the great joys in the art world is the thrill of discovery — uncovering Leonardo’s workshop, stumbling upon a Van Gogh sketchbook, dredging up a Modigliani sculpture or two in the Royal Canal. These are the kinds of revelations that make art world headlines, often shaking up art historians and wreaking havoc with the status quo.
So it should come as no surprise that the gradual discovery of a treasure trove of modernist art south of the border has been met with excitement.
Just where was this cache of magnificent modern art unearthed? It has been right next door all along, in Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.
The surprising thing about Latin American art is that, as much as we love Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, or our own longtime neighbor Fernando Botero, the sculptor, there’s a lot more to it than that. In 2004, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston mounted a blockbuster show, “Inverted Utopias,” which filled the museum head to toe with art from South America’s avant-garde.
The Museum of Modern Art, never to be outdone, installed a full-time curator of Latin American and Caribbean art in 2006, to expand and oversee its developing collection, now numbering over 3,500 works of art. Last year, Pinta Art Fair premiered in New York City, making a splash with over 50 galleries featuring South American art.
Together, these venues and institutions in Los Angeles, Miami, and elsewhere are beginning to illuminate the art world riches to be found in Latin America and ultimately to remove the asterisk so often applied to its artists.
“It’s time for an Armando Reveron to hang alongside a Picasso, instead of being relegated to a subcategory,” Ms. Leon said. Often marginalized as exotic and folkloric, in reality Latin American art has participated in the big art movements right alongside European and North American. Geometric abstraction, minimalism, Conceptualism, post-modernism, they’ve all occurred there — indeed some of them have made their debut in Latin America.
For Ms. Leon, the discovery couldn’t come at a better time. Her focus on the art of Latin America has helped her forge a reputation as a local leader both in the arts and in the community.
“She’s the most professional person in the arts I’ve ever worked with,” said Andrea Cote, an artist who lives and works in Flanders. “Esperanza is fully devoted — really on the ball,” she continued. “She’s studied, considerate, respectful. She’s just amazing.”
Ms. Leon is also the youngest trustee on Guild Hall’s board of directors, where she helped found the Junior Circle, an entity that invites a younger, hipper crowd into the museum fold.
So, what can brown do for you?
One of the artists in the show, Santiago Garza, reveals both dignity and vulnerability in his photographic portraits of Latin American New Yorkers that exude something he calls “Hispanicity.”
When crackdowns on illegal immigrant workers resulted in marked increases in homelessness and unemployment on Long Island, Sheila Breck, a painter, took to the parking lot of her local 7-Eleven in Farmingville, where she painted portraits of the day laborers congregated there.
Ms. Breck’s depictions expose a range of emotions — from pride to frustration and skepticism — as discouraged men wait, hoping for a day of employment.
For Dulce Pinzon and Michael Pribich, humor is the salve that heals. Commenting on the heroism in sending most of your paycheck to the folks at home, Mr. Pinzon stages elaborate tableaus in which Mexican immigrants continue their workday while wearing superhero costumes.
Turning a phrase, Mr. Pribich satirizes Herbert Hoover’s famed campaign slogan “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” by changing it to “a Mexican in every kitchen.”
“These days I get more inspiration from the ancients,” Ms. Leon reflected as she adjusted pens in a kangaroo-shaped pencil holder. “I love going to artists’ studios, spending a day at the Met, inviting students to see the shows here.”
“Chelsea, not so much,” she continued.
When Ms. Leon is not puncturing stereotypes or helping to revise art history, you might find her in the kitchen cooking Venezuelan tidbits alongside her mother, Blanca Ricardo.
“She’s the genius,” Ms. Leon said, deferring to her mother’s gastronomic abilities.
“I have just as much fun hanging art in my mother’s house and throwing a party around it as I do curating a big show,” Ms. Leon said.
Her exhibit space manages to be warm and professional at the same time. Lucky visitors might be even greeted at Solar’s door with a heady cloud of garlic, cocoa, and spicy cilantro.