Cover: “Espacial 2, 1968”
October 24, 2019-January 12, 2020
This exhibition compiles for the first time in 50 years works of the Guatemalan master of AMA’s collection alongside those of public and private collections, taking place on the 60th anniversary of his first exhibition at the OAS.
In 1959, José Gómez Sicre, curator of the OAS Visual Arts Unit (formerly the Pan American Union) invited the Guatemalan artist Rodolfo Abularach to hold a solo exhibition of his work at the organization’s headquarters in Washington, DC. With the resources of the purchase fund that Gómez Sicre had created in 1957, the OAS purchased several of Abularach’s pieces, which later became part of the collection of the museum, created in 1976. A few months earlier, Abularach had met with curator Dorothy Miller at the MoMA during a visit to New York, and had shown her several pieces that would go on to be exhibited at the OAS. This quick and unplanned meeting resulted in the purchase of the first of the 42 artworks that in subsequent years were incorporated into the MoMA collection.
In 1962, Abularach was awarded an OAS scholarship to study at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York. In the following years, he consolidated his work and began to exhibit systematically, primarily in the United States and Latin America. 60 years on, the work of Master Rodolfo Abularach is an important reference in Guatemalan and Latin American art. The years that he lived in the United States (he settled down again in Guatemala in 1998), which were paramount in his training and in the international promotion of his work, gave rise to a group of artworks that made him an internationally renowned artist. His professional development in the 50s, 60s, and 70s resulted in the acquisition of a broad representation of his artworks by museums in the United States.
The realization of a personal exhibition of Abularach at the AMA is an excellent opportunity to gather, for the first time in a half-century, pieces of its collection together with those belonging to public, corporate, and private collections in the United States and Guatemala. It is also an ideal time to thoroughly study and demonstrate the impact that the AMA had on Guatemalan art in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The invaluable documents of AMA’s archive have allowed for a catalog that gathers a documented bibliography on the artist, necessary for the historiography of Guatemalan art.
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Permanent Mission of Guatemala to the OAS, the Embassy of Guatemala in Washington, DC, the Friends of the Art Museum of the Americas, Marta Regina Fernandez, Valia Garzón Art Services, Rafa Cruz Photography, DC House Cleaner, and Wynwood Shipping.