CURRENT EXHIBITION
Beyond the Sounds of Silence: Latin-American Artists Connecting Art, Sound, and Society
Beyond the Sounds of Silence: Latin-American Artists Connecting Art, Sound, and Society
Born between 1943 and 1986, the nineteen artists featured in this immersive exhibition are heirs to John Cage’s seminal 4’ 33, the iconic American composer’s work that captures “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence,” or, more accurately, ambient noise during that same arc of time. Hailing from ten different countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, these practitioners embrace cultural “anthropophagy,” or cannibalism—a term coined by the Brazilian poet and critic Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) to refer to the appropriation of practices associated with the Global North by those in the South, who transform them into powerful creations of their own. In doing so, they produce a level of attentiveness that allows for a different way of hearing (or seeing) the sounds that surround us.
They also explore how this “music of reality” influences and transforms our interactions with the world. Their works blur the line separating impersonal technologies from the poetics of 21st-century artistic practice and embrace the web of life that holds art, sound, and society in tension. This exhibition invites visitors to enjoy a broad range of sensory interactions and perceptual experiences, which, together, create a conceptual “concert” that enriches the polyphony of contemporary art. Like Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García’s América Invertida (1943), it also positions Latin American art beyond the sounds of silence.
