back to 2006 exhibitions

PAPER TRACES: Latin American Prints and Drawings from the Collection
opens at SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART
1450 El Prado - Balboa Park
San Diego, CA 92101

September 23 - December 31, 2006


Van Cleve Fine Art is pleased to announce the inclusion of Hugo Crosthwaite's Bartolomé in San Diego Museum of Art's Fall 2006 exhibition, Paper Traces: Latin American Prints and Drawings from the Collection at SDMA. The exhibition is curated by the UCSD VisArts Research Group. In the Fall of 2005 Robert Tejada, Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, offered a graduate course designed around SDMA's collection of Latin American works. Students were given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with SDMA's collection, research individual works, and choose the approximately 60 prints and drawings to be included in the exhibition.

The collaboration between the SDMA and UCSD's Visual Arts Department has resulted in an exhibition revealing the breadth and depth of the Museum's Latin American collection. Professor Tejada and his graduate students selected works by major artists from all over Latin America including los tres grandes (José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros), Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Matta, José Luis Cuevas, Leonora Carrington as well as contemporary artists Hugo Crosthwaite and Artemio Rodríguez.

Entitled Paper Traces, this exhibition focuses on the importance of paper as medium and the place of prints, drawings, posters and portfolios within the history of Latin American art throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. While the dates of the works in the exhibition span 100 years, many present musings on similar subject matter including national identity, labor, ethnicity, social class, politics, religion and family.

Paper Traces marks the premier exhibition of Bartolomé, a 2004 graphite and charcoal drawing by Hugo Crosthwaite, recently purchased by SDMA. When Crosthwaite began this large drawing (96x96 inches) the major news of the moment was the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. He was very influenced by what he was hearing about the scandal of the prisoners, the torture of the Iraqi soldiers and all of the things that were happening in Iraq. In Bartolomé Crosthwaite has juxtaposed the concept of torture in modern times with Catholicism's Saint Bartholomew, a saint who suffered martyrdom in the Middle East. These ideas have come together in a fractured cityscape, reminiscent of Tijuana - the birthplace of the artist.

For more information on this exhibition please contact the San Diego Museum of Art at 619-232-7931.