“HOME—So Different, So Appealing” Travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in November

The critically acclaimed exhibition features over 100 works by 39 U.S. Latino and Latin American artists

HOUSTON—November 6, 2017—In November, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents HOME—So Different, So Appealing, an exhibition featuring U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the late 1950s to the present who use the universal concept of “home” as a lens through which to view the socioeconomic and political changes that have occurred in the Americas over the past seven decades. Featuring over 100 works by 39 artists, HOME—So Different, So Appealing explores the differences and similarities within artworks related to immigration and political repression, dislocation and diaspora, and personal memory and utopian ideals. The exhibition will be on view in Houston from November 17, 2017 to January 21, 2018.

Organized in collaboration with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and co-curated by Chon A. Noriega, director of the UCLA CRSC; Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the MFAH; and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, the director of the Vincent Price Art Museum, HOME—So Different, So Appealing debuted in June as one of the key exhibitions of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the sweeping, multi-institution event sponsored by the Getty Foundation. The exhibition is the first group show in two major U.S. museums to bring together U.S. artists of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban origin in a productive dialogue with artists from Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela, among other countries. Despite the political, cultural, and religious affinities they share, these two broad and highly diverse groups of artists have been, until now, treated separately from one another. Across a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, film, and video—these artists examine and interpret one of the most basic social concepts by which individuals, families, nations, and regions understand themselves in relation to others. In the process, their work offers an alternative narrative of postwar and contemporary art.

“We have been fortunate to collaborate on HOME with the Chicano Studies Research Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and are proud to present this innovative exhibition in Houston,” commented Gary Tinterow, MFAH director. “The concept of home and the sense of identity it creates is universally relatable, as indicated by the show’s success in Los Angeles.”

“Home—signaling a dwelling, residence, or place of origin—embodies one of the most basic concepts for understanding an individual or group within a larger physical and social environment. In the United States, the concept of home is often narrowly equated with the emblematic ‘house’ of the American Dream, and is linked to notions of hard work, equal opportunity, and the kind of upward social mobility associated with a middle-class consumer-oriented culture,” added Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the MFAH, and co-curator of the exhibition. “For the exhibition’s curatorial team, home denotes not so much a physical or geographical place as a focal point within a dynamic network of relationships that encompass from the individual to the family, the neighborhood, the city, and, ultimately, the homeland. HOME is especially poignant in a city like Houston, one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the U.S.”

Exhibition Overview
The exhibition is organized thematically into features of “home” spanning seven decades. The curators use a “constellation model” that allows for works by artists from different nationalities and generations to be compared and contrasted on a level playing field and in critical dialogue with one another.

The opening section, Model Homes, focuses on the iconic single-family home and the far-reaching consequences of the utopian American dream. Central to this section is Miguel Ángel Rojas’s Nowadays (2001/2008), a text-b ased work made of coca leaves from which the exhibition title is drawn.

In The Archaeology of Home, works such as Sacrifice to Truro (1965), featuring an upholstered chair destroyed by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, show how artists transform and deconstruct domestic furniture and spaces to reveal the public significance of private objects.

Mapping Home uses maps and floor plans to further the discourse on home, combining the visual language of geography with representations of domestic interiors and furnishings that carry the imprint of human subjectivity or emotion, as in Guillermo Kuitca’s House Plan with Teardrops (1989).  

Included in the next section, Recycled Homes, are works that exemplify the common practice since the 1960s of using recycled found objects and trash in order to depict the precariousness, marginality, and displacement that characterizes shantytown culture throughout Latin America. Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Autoconstrucción (2010), a sprawling, site-specific installation arduously assembled from objects and refuse from family homes, recalls the artist’s childhood home and the never-ending process of building and re-building that takes place in shantytowns throughout the region.

Home as Form features works by artists who extract household objects from their domestic contexts, revealing traces of history that can never be fully erased, as in Carmen Argote’s 720 Sq. Ft.: Household Mutations (2010). For this work, Argote removed the multi-room carpet from her childhood home and reinstalled it in a gallery setting.

Gendered Home examines home as a gendered space, focusing on the relationship of the female self to domesticity. Works by artists Amalia Mesa-Bains, Beatriz González, Myrna Báez, and Laura Aguilar illustrate this point.

Next, Troubled Homeland explores the ways in which home and nation are established in relationship to each other through violence and patriotism. In this section, Daniel Joseph Martinez links domestic terrorism with consumerism and shelter in The House America Built (2004/2017), a to-scale model of “Unabomber” Ted Kazcynski’s cabin, painted with Martha Stewart Living paint colors that are in season at the time of installation.

The final section of the exhibition, Going Home, reveals how contemporary realities, such as political conflict, human trafficking, and informal economies, have led individuals to dream of and seek out “better” homes. Works such as Julio César Morales’s Boy in Suitcase (2015), a video evoking the true story of an eight-year-old boy who was smuggled from the Ivory Coast to Spain, focus on immigration, displacement, and diasporic notions of home captured in the context of border crossings.

Also included in the exhibition are works by internationally recognized artists Allora & Calzadilla, Andres Asturias, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Antonio Berni, Johanna Calle, Luis Camnitzer, Leyla Cardenas, Livia Corona Benjamin, Gabriel de la Mora, Perla de Leon, León Ferrari, Felix González-Torres, Maria Teresa Hincapie, Jessica Kaire, Antonio Martorell, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mondongo, Jorge Pedro Núñez, Pepón Osorio, Miguel Angel Rios, Doris Salcedo, Juan Sanchez, and Teresa Serrano, as well as emerging and established Los Angeles-based artists Christina Fernandez, Ramiro Gomez, Salomón Huerta, and Camilo Ontiveros, along with Houston-based artist Vincent Valdez.

Publication
HOME—So Different, So Appealing is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, featuring curatorial statements and individual essays by Chon A. Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center; Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas; and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, the director of the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College.

Organization & Funding
This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the support of the Getty Foundation. 

In Houston, the exhibition is supported by:
Leslie and Brad Bucher 
Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation 
Gail and Louis Adler 
Mike Loya 
Sara and Bill Morgan 
Olive McCollum Jenney
Ms. Victoria Goldstein and Mr. Randall H. Jamail 
Jorge and Darlene Pérez 
Sofia Adrogué and Sten L. Gustafson
Samuel F. Gorman
Linda and George Kelly
SICARDI AYERS BACINO
Mark and Mary Troth  
Ileana and J. Michael Treviño

Additional generous support is provided by the Latin Maecenas, the patron group for the Latin American art department at the MFAH. 

Media Contact
Laine Lieberman, publicist
llieberman@mfah.org | 713.639.7516