Drawing is often considered a mere handmaiden to painting and sculpture. Sketch, scribble or doodle, it’s seen as a preparatory step in the creative process, rather than as a goal in itself.
But in Latin America, drawing has been elevated to a significant means of expression. Artists working in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela treat the mutable medium as a source of survival — and defiance — in a political climate of dictatorial rule and censorship.
Over the past three decades, they’ve used paper sketches as an inconspicuous, personal alternative to more permanent, public art forms scrutinized by the state. Drawings provided a practical form of protest: they could be easily executed, reproduced, rolled up and sent abroad for exhibitions and competitions. From the early 1960s to the 1980s, the medium became so popular in South America that it was dubbed “the Boom.”
At the Miami Art Museum, a compelling overview of this contemporary movement testifies to drawing’s rich potential but downplays its political role. “Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing” challenges traditional definitions, with renderings in a variety of materials in both two and three dimensions. Pencil and ink aren’t only applied to paper, but to wood, marble, notebooks, walls, even water.
Organized by the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the exhibit is arranged according to the intrinsic qualities of drawing, rather than chronologically or by country. Works by 46 South American artists are grouped under labels such as “trace,” “gesture” and “projection” to reveal common themes among artists from different countries and generations.
The 114 pieces in this show are reflective of European and American trends, such as pop art and conceptual art, rather than South America’s indigenous cultures.
In addition to drawings, the show incorporates several sculptures and installations. The most remarkable are by Oscar Muoz, a Colombian artist who transfers charcoal powder images onto water through photosensitive screens. Floating in plexiglass trays, his Narcissi series of self-portraits will dry over the run of the exhibit to leave dessicative carbon imagery that is somewhere between photography and drawing.
Among the most visually arresting drawings are some female artists’ austere works that balance abstraction with hand-wrought elegance. The geometric constructions of Gego, a Venezuelan artist born Gertrude Goldschmidt, are given a human dimension through unevenly applied ink and watercolors. Similarly, Anna Maria Maiolino achieves mysterious, jagged calligraphy by dropping ink onto paper and manipulating the sheets from underneath.
Viewers are also invited to try their hand at drawing. Haroldo Gonzlez’s Drawing in Five Lessons, a didactic slide show filled with political overtones, incorporates blank pads for practicing his teachings. In the visitors’ gallery off the main exhibit space, museumgoers are asked a series of questions related to the exhibit and encouraged to sketch their answers.
Curators Edith Gibson and Mari Carmen Ramirez clearly want American audiences to understand the complexities of drawing, and their exhibit excels in showing diverse forms and techniques. But they’re less successful at conveying the personal and political meanings behind the drawings. In several places, it’s unclear just how South American this work really is.
Part of the problem is that the curators relegate the most politically charged imagery to a gallery near the exhibit’s end. Although categorized under the rubric “convention,” this section of representational renderings offers some of the most provocative social commentary — and most identifiably South American imagery — in the show.
The earliest drawings, from the 1960s, come from a group of Argentine artists known as Otra Figuracin, who captured postwar instability with graffiti-like figures reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet and CoBrA. Related to their expressionistic work are the violently gestural gouaches of Alberto Heredia, the autobiographical scrawls of Alberto Greco, and Rubens Gerchman’s ink-on-plywood Crowd, which portrays the congestion of Brazilian urban life.
Also included in this section are the striking charcoals of Colombian Luis Caballero and Chilean Jose Balmes, whose classically rendered nudes convey the anguish and brutality of a political coup in the tradition of Velasquez and Gericault. European influences are also evidenced in the tryptich by Herman Braun-Vega, who juxtaposes Peruvian peasants and Indians with quotations from Picasso’s Guernica and other Spanish masterpieces.
Cartography provides another means of criticizing political injustice and unrest. In Continental Drift, the late Chilean artist Juan Downey depicts a bloodied South America falling toward a group of figures inspired by Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women. Brazilian Anna Bella Geiger similarly uses maps as metaphors of cultural instability, translating the outline of the South American continent into a crutch and mulatto.
In the hands of these artists, drawing becomes more than an ephemeral recording of lines and images. It’s a way to moralize in an imaginative, and often subversive, way. The best work in this eclectic exhibit assumes that ethical stance to reveal how artists of different nations share common convictions.
Deborah K. Dietsch can be reached at or 954-356-4708.
