Carla Stellweg, the fearless curator and author who shifted the very floor of Mexican modern artwork at a crucial juncture for the nation’s historical past and id, died on Monday, October 20. Her passing in her dwelling in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the age of 83 was confirmed by her son, the author George Stellweg.
Alongside her contributions to Mexican artwork scholarship, Stellweg cast a wider path for Latin American and Caribbean artists on a world stage, constellating the ladies’s rights activism, the marginalization of United States-based Latine communities, class considerations, and institutional hierarchies as interrelated struggles. Amongst her most lauded achievements is Artes Visuales, the quarterly bilingual modern arts journal Stellweg co-founded and edited on the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico Metropolis from 1973 by way of 1981. Even whereas working inside the confines of a state-funded publication underneath the auspices of President Luis Echeverría, whose marketing campaign to usher in a democratic ultimate obscured his roles within the nation’s infamous pupil massacres, Artes Visuales embraced the experimental and the political in “subliminal” methods, Stellweg wrote in a 2010 essay. Points featured something from a survey of artists’ ideas on the Panama Canal to texts on emergent video and conceptual artwork and early chronicles of Chicano artists.
“This was in the early 1970s, when few paid attention to the art scene involving Mexican Americans,” Stellweg’s pal, the artwork historian and gallerist Patricia Ruiz-Healy, informed Hyperallergic. “This was the first time in Latin America that questions about what Latin American art is were discussed.”
Taiyana Pimentel, director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, emphasised that Artes Visuales made house not only for artists but additionally for younger writers, like thinker Manuel de Landa, who revealed one among his first items within the journal. “It established a paradigm in Latin American art criticism — an early model that has been followed by other publications on the continent,” Pimentel stated.
Artes Visuales subject 1, Winter 1973 (picture by JSP Artwork Images, courtesy Hunter School)
Stellweg was born in 1942 in Bandung, Indonesia, then the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies, the place she and her household had been imprisoned in a Japanese detention camp by way of the tip of World Battle II. She studied within the Netherlands within the Fifties and moved to Mexico in 1958, the place she absorbed herself within the writings of José Gorostiza, Alfonso Reyes, and different thinkers who propelled a imaginative and prescient of Mexican id past post-revolutionary nationalism. Her profession within the arts took off within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, when she began working as an assistant curator for Fernando Gamboa, the famend museographer and later director of MAM.
Orchestrating Mexico’s presence in reveals like Montreal’s Expo 67 and the 1968 Venice Biennale positioned Stellweg on the coronary heart of fierce debates round artwork and modernity. She recounted in a 2021 interview that she confronted the ire of muralist titan David Alfaro Siqueiros when he opposed their proposal to indicate works by Rufino Tamayo and artists of the so-called Generación de la Ruptura, a motion that pushed again in opposition to the hegemony of social realism.
Stellweg was later briefly named deputy director of the nascent Museo Tamayo in Mexico Metropolis in 1979, and the museum introduced an exhibition devoted to her work in 2023. “She was from everywhere and nowhere,” stated Andrea Valencia Aranda, who co-curated the present with Pablo León de la Barra. “This gave her great courage, and allowed her to approach without prejudice artists and movements that did not represent the mainstream.”
Cultivar. Homenaje a Carla Stellweg on the Museo Tamayo in 2023 featured works by artists she championed. (picture courtesy Andrea Valencia Aranda)
“Most of us came to her through the world of art, but she ended up teaching us about the world of life,” Iglesias Lukin stated, recalling Stellweg’s heat and distinct humorousness. “When I got separated and I felt heartbroken, Carla told me: ‘Oh, this is your first divorce? Welcome! I’ve had three.’”
Stellweg nurtured US-based artists of Latin-American descent, who grappled with the wonders and challenges of a bifurcated existence, and embraced city and ephemeral artwork kinds like graffiti that broke the mildew of mainstream expectations. Like her transient stint on the Museo Tamayo, lots of Stellweg’s endeavors throughout this era had been short-lived but profoundly influential. She cofounded Stellweg-Seguy Gallery in 1983, and in 1986 she turned chief curator of the Museum of Modern Hispanic Artwork, a put up she held for 3 years earlier than leaving to ascertain her namesake gallery on Mercer Avenue. She devoted herself to the house for nearly a decade, exhibiting the likes of Ana Mendieta, Liliana Porter, Luis Camnitzer, Hannah Wilke, and Vito Acconci. Porter stated that she was “immediately captivated” by Stellweg’s spirit. “I had the privilege of witnessing her extraordinary talent and her unwavering commitment to promoting Latin American art, even in settings that were not always welcoming,” Porter added.
From 1997 to 2001, Stellweg led the Modern at Blue Star, another artwork heart in San Antonio, Texas. Later, she returned to New York to show on the Faculty of Visible Arts earlier than making her manner again to Mexico, the place she would spend the ultimate years of her life.
Carla Stellweg on the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Radical Ladies: Latin American Artwork, 1960–1985 (picture courtesy Aimé Iglesias Lukin)
In contrast to high-profile museum leaders who strategically deflect from the political, Stellweg waded eagerly into controversy. She was a part of the Contrabienal, a late-Nineteen Sixties effort by Latin American artists to boycott the São Paulo Biennial in protest of Brazilian state repression and the broader terror of army regimes within the area. She leaves behind a trove of writings, newly compiled in a set edited by Edgar Alejandro Hernández that chronicles her outspoken and incisive reflections on every thing from the rise of counter-feminist teams in Mexico to the stifling boundaries of the artwork market.
“Curatorial projects must have major ‘protagonists,’ and big-time moguls flip their trophy works, increasing prices and their earnings from art investments at a stroke,” she wrote in a single 2015 essay. “Who is writing art history today? Does the entire sphere reside solely in the hands of private and corporate collectors? Do curator-driven projects play further into this purely monetary system of value? Is there a distinction between private and institutional collecting? Are there still alternatives?”
The curator’s influence on artwork and its individuals is captured in an outpouring of tributes and remembrances over current days. The Venezuelan-American artist Rolando Peña, who was launched to Stellweg in New York as a part of progressive artist teams opposing the conflict in Vietnam, informed Hyperallergic it was “like meeting an angel.” Frederik Schampers, a nephew of Stellweg and director at Gladstone gallery in New York, stated she was a “guiding light … an incredibly powerful woman — deeply intelligent, fiercely independent, and profoundly committed to the artists and ideas she believed in.” The New York supplier Henrique Faria known as her a “visionary.”
“Carla was a pioneer. Her curiosity for the new and her conceptual rigor made her one of the most critical voices of her generation,” stated Patrick Charpenel, director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. “Her departure leaves an irreplaceable void.”
Stellweg’s archives are housed on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York and Stanford College. An exhibition devoted to the legacy of Artes Visuales, curated by scholar Harper Montgomery in collaboration with the Institute for Studes on Latin American Artwork, is on view at Hunter School’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery in Manhattan by way of December 13.
