Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck

• Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (BR)
• 04.09.2026–31.01.2027

Before it names a region, an identity, or a community of origin or destination, "Latin America" names overlapping territories and intertwined histories, a zone of political, cultural, and symbolic disputes shaped by colonial invasions, independence movements, authoritarian modernization projects, and Indigenous, Black, feminist, and ecological struggles. Consolidated in the nineteenth century, the term refers to Mexico, Central America, parts of the Caribbean, and South America, where languages of Latin origin, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, predominate. To think about Latin America, therefore, is to grapple with an unstable idea. Latin American Histories takes this instability as its starting point: it does not seek a totalizing synthesis of the continent, nor does it attempt to establish a fixed definition of what Latin America means. The exhibition looks to the past and present, asking how the region was and continues to be invented, contested, and reinvented.

Occupying all five exhibition floors of the Pietro Building, the exhibition brings together 187 works by 148 artists from 20 countries. The selection encompasses Latin America and its diasporas, as well as contexts historically connected to the region. It brings together works from the MASP collection with loans from museums and public and private collections in Brazil and abroad. Rather than organizing Latin American art according to national schools or chronological sequences, the exhibition adopts a thematic structure, bringing different periods into dialogue: precolonial objects coexist with contemporary works, devotional and religious images with conceptual works, and documents and maps with paintings, photographs, and videos.