Marcela Guerrero

Marcela Guerrero is the Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recently, she was part of the curatorial team that organized Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945. In summer 2018, Guerrero curated the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. From 2014 to 2017 she worked as Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she was involved in the much-lauded exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, organized as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative and guest-curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta. Along with Fajardo-Hill, Guerrero curated the show’s selection of Latina and Chicana artists and has written the catalogue chapter on Caribbean women artists, along with more than sixty biographical entries. Prior to her position at the Hammer, she worked in the Latin American and Latino Art Curatorial department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), where she served as Research Coordinator for the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). In this role, she was in charge of reviewing, vetting, and publishing primary and secondary sources on the ICAA’s digital archive “Documents of 20th -Century Latin American and Latino Art” . At the MFAH she also participated in the acquisition of artworks from the Caribbean region for the permanent collection. Guerrero’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications including ArtNexus, Diálogo, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Intransit, and Gulf Coast, and has contributed articles to numerous exhibition catalogues. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Guerrero received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, and holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of WisconsinMadison.

Image courtesy of Javier Romero

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in June 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator, as well as your current job at The Whitney Museum?

MG: I’m originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. When I was [in college] studying history, I came to Hunter College in New York for an exchange program. I took a couple of art history classes and fell in love with it. I decided that if I was going to go to graduate school, I was going to study art history. I was doing a PhD and was at a point where I had defended my dissertation proposal, but I didn’t want to be tied to Madison, Wisconsin. So I thought that I could see what a career in museums was like. I applied for a research job at the MFA Houston, which was cool because it allowed me to do research but also get into curatorial work. I did that for three years and I then moved to the Hammer Museum, where I worked as a Curatorial Fellow for the “Radical Women” exhibition. That was a great experience being a junior curator in that institution and getting a glimpse of exactly what I wanted – MFA Houston is big, encyclopedic institution and the Hammer is more mid-size and contemporary. I worked with two guest curators and it took a lot of diplomacy being the person in the middle advocating for the needs of the exhibition to the Hammer – so resources and budgets, and communicating to the curators about the Hammer’s protocols and approvals. […] Another part of this experience was that I was a Curatorial Fellow under the PST umbrella, so I questioned what was going to happen after the exhibition opened. I talked to Naima Keith, who was the Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer for the exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 - 1980” (2011-2012). Naima had an incredible career after her fellowship; she went on to The Studio Museum, then CAAM, and now LACMA. I met with her when she was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at CAAM and she gave me great advice: “Don’t worry about leaving the Hammer if you see another good opportunity. Go for it, and once you get that opportunity, stay there for 3 years and then move on to the next thing. ” Which is really great advice for people who are just starting out and getting settled into a job. There was an open position at the Whitney and I applied; they said they wanted someone with Latinx expertise. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on Jackson Pollock or Edward Hopper, that’s not who I am. During 2015 2016 there was a real interest in Latinx art specifically. I was lucky to be at that moment in my career where I was ready to take the next step, and the people at the Whitney wanted to create a position that looked at that area of our program and our collection that had been understudied and underrepresented.

GM: How do you center on the work of under-recognized Latinx and Latin American artists in your curatorial practice?

MG: Starting July 1st, I’ll be [the Jennifer Rubio] Associate Curator at The Whitney. Our role as curators is to create exhibitions and acquire works for the collection. When I joined the museum, I knew that they hadn’t been consistently representing Latinx artists. There [is a large] amount of work that one has to do to represent this expansive group of people that are not a monolith and vary a lot depending on the city where they are. (Continued)

Installation view of Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Ronny Quevedo, ULAMA-ULE-ALLEY OOP, 2017; Ronny Quevedo, Errant Globe, 2015; Ronny Quevedo, Field of Play, 2016; Ronny Quevedo, Cabeza Magica, 2012. Photograph by Ron Amstutz and courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art

I met with Thelma Golden, who gave me great advice from when she curated "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art" (1994) at The Whitney. She wanted to represent her generation, and I thought that that made a lot of sense [for me] in terms of the artists and their ideas that I’m gravitating towards. So I decided to lean into that idea of working with artists of my generation and pitched a group exhibition titled “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay; Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art” , featuring seven early and mid-career Latinx artists based in the U.S. who looked at ideas of architecture, their family backgrounds, and their Latin American backgrounds, specifically Indigenous inspiration. That was overall a great experience in knowing that I had the support of the institution. There was a lot of support in terms of resources, and six of the featured artists are now in the collection. We’ve been increasing our works by Latinx artists in the collection at a pretty speedy rate. The Whitney was founded in 1930 and 40% of the collected works by Latinx artists were acquired in the last 5 years. So there’s a lot of wok to do. […] I’m currently working on a group show of intergenerational Puerto Rican artists and a solo project; hopefully in the future I’ll do a mid or late-career solo exhibition, but it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. I feel good in that I’ve been doing the best that I can for my single position as the one curator here to present and support Latinx artists as much as I can.

GM: What could art spaces do to better engage with Latinx art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and diversifying collections?

MG: Yesterday, I listened to a conversation with David Evans Frantz and C. Ondine Chavoya, the two curators of “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. ” – this show has been traveling everywhere for years. They were told many times that there wasn’t an audience for this show or a market for the catalogue. And that was so wrong; many of the institutions that took a chance [on the exhibition] were academic museums. (Continued)

[…] I’m currently working with an artist, Martine Gutierrez. If you look at her exhibition history and the collections where her work is, it’s mostly academic museums that took a chance on a trans female artist who is playing very tongue-in-cheek with appropriation, identity, fashion, and editorial. I think that bigger institutions should take a note from more experimental spaces or take a chance [on artists and thematics] that they think there isn’t an audience for, especially Latinx art. Don’t assume that you know what the audience is from the get go, it’s not what they think it is.

GM: Can you discuss your experience working on “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985” (2017) at The Hammer Museum?

MG: That was a huge exhibition. It was experimental in the sense that you don’t [often] see exhibitions featuring 100 artists. Showing 1-2 works by an artist and writing about them in the catalogue spurred young scholars to write dissertations and created a scholarship around many of the [featured] artists. Many of them were unknown when we started [working on] the exhibition, and still are because the interest hasn’t picked up for all of them. In hindsight there were things that could’ve been done better, or earlier – the idea of adding Latina artists [based in the United States] was not a part of the original conception for the show. This ended up being good representation for those artists. But the way that the exhibition was originally conceived would’ve only featured artists from Latin America. So someone like Judy Baca, who lives just a couple of miles from [the Hammer] wouldn’t have originally been apart of the exhibition. Which is strange for Los Angeles, but then again, LA institutions like the Hammer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and LACMA are not really known for their deep engagement with Latinx artists. That’s something we realized and fortunately were able to correct.

"The Power of Words" gallery. From left to right: Marie Orensanz, Límites (Limits), 1979, Limitada (Limited), 1978/2013, and Pensar es un hecho revolucionario (Thinking is a revolutionary act), 1974, and Lenora de Barros, Poema (Poem), 1979. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. September 15–December 31, 2017. Photo: Brian Forrest and courtesy of The Hammer Museum

GM: What was your experience co-curating “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925 – 1945” (2020-2021) at The Whitney Museum?

MG: If I thought that “Radical Women” was a big show, it was incredible to see the amount of resources that can be put behind an exhibition. “Vida Americana” was a different exhibition in the sense that it took a lot more [effort]. For example, securing loans – when you’re working with emerging artists, you either get the works from the artists themselves or their galleries, and it’s pretty simple. But when you’re talking about works that are in the national patrimony of countries, in this case Mexico, you’re almost a diplomat. It wasn’t emailing someone to lend us a Diego Rivera work. We had to go [to Mexico], show our faces for them to see who we were, [explain] what the thesis of the show was – it was intense! In that sense, I’m grateful for the opportunity because I saw Barbara Haskell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Whitney who has years of experience, and she would not back down. She would think of every possible option to feature the works, and that was impressive to see in real time. In terms of the thesis of the show, and really anything that upends American exceptionalism, I’m all for that. “Vida Americana” was an exhibition that tried to retell an early chapter of American art history; that uber men like Jackson Pollock are not these geniuses, that’s a myth. Every artist is a reflection of their time, the people, and the network that they’re around. Two examples of artists whose work we looked at in terms of the elements and aspects from the Mexican artists that [Pollock] took from were José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, in order to really give credit where it’s due. These artists, as complicated as they and their rhetoric was in terms of aligning with a communist ideology, but at the same time accepting commissions from uber capitalists, is still kind of the way the arts manifests, at least in this country. (Continued)

Installation view of Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 17-May 17, 2020). From left to right: Diego Rivera, Study for Colonial America, from Portrait of America, c. 1933; Diego Rivera, Reproduction of Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934; Hugo Gellert, Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together (The Last Defenses of Capitalism), 1932; Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1932. Photograph by Ron Amstutz and courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art

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Image courtesy of Javier Romero

Some artists tend to be very left leaning and forward thinking, but at the end of the day, institutions are funded by people who are making money that, on a personal level, one may not agree with. I’m saying this to emphasize that these issues that we saw in the 1930’s are still prevalent today. Another interesting aspect of “Vida Americana” , which premiered right before COVID, was when we re-opened in fall 2020; there was this awareness that if the government doesn’t step up and help artists, what’s going to happen to art and culture? Right after we re-opened we could hear rumblings about if there should be another WPA. So it was really nice to see those parallels between the 1930’s and almost a century later.

GM: Did the last presidential administration’s xenophobic and racist laws against people from Latin American countries, especially immigrants, affect your practice?

MG: By the mere fact of being in this container that is the U.S., one has to contend with the constant politics of legislating for rights. This is true for many Latinx groups, whether it’s Mexican Americans in Arizona who, just a couple of years ago, were getting [their] books burned, or laws like Proposition 227 from 1998 being passed in California that prohibited Spanish language being taught in schools. In a way, the previous president was extreme perhaps, but I’m always ignited in my work by this constant wish to champion artists who are showing a different version of stereotypes against Latinos. This became imperative during the years of 2016 - 2020.