A museum can hang a photograph of a landscape and leave out the person who named the river. It can display an archive and make its gaps look like natural silence. Chosen Memories, the Museum of Modern Art’s 2023 exhibition of contemporary Latin American art, began from a less comfortable premise: history is material that artists investigate, contest, and remake. The question is not only what the museum remembers. It is who had the means to produce the record in the first place.
The exhibition, organized by curator Inés Katzenstein with Julia Detchon, ran from April 30 to September 9, 2023. MoMA presented works drawn in part from gifts by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, alongside loans, acquisitions, and commissions. That selection could have become a survey of the region, flattening very different histories under one convenient geographic label. Instead, the curatorial structure moved through returns to images, neglected cultural legacies, and family or chosen bonds. Those are different ways of asking what an inherited record permits someone to say.
Consider the exhibition’s pairing of José Alejandro Restrepo’s Paso del Quindío I with Leandro Katz’s Catherwood photographs. Both take earlier images of exploration as a starting point. An explorer’s picture often claims the authority of discovery while hiding the labor, knowledge, and people that made travel possible. Revisiting such pictures is not nostalgia. It is an audit of how South America was turned into scenery for someone else’s account of progress.
The final section included Alejandro Cesarco’s Present Memory, a portrait of his father near the end of his life, and Paulo Nazareth’s Antropologia do negro II, which addresses the violence of slavery in Brazil. One work begins from a personal relationship, the other from a historical crime whose effects exceed any family. Placing both under memory is useful only if we resist making them equivalent. An intimate archive and a national wound demand different responsibilities from their keepers.
The exhibition was anchored in a major donor’s collection. That fact carries a productive tension. Private collecting can help bring artists into public view, but acquisition is itself a decision about which histories become available for study. MoMA says the Cisneros gifts have brought over 250 Latin American artworks into the collection. The number is significant; it is not a substitute for asking what remains outside the frame. Chosen Memories gave artists room to disturb the archive that displayed them. Its most useful legacy may be the suspicion it teaches us to bring to every apparently complete story.