Notes related to Latin American Art

Pinta Panamá Art Week makes its debut from May 21 to 25. Over five days, it will offer a public program filled with art activities, inviting attendees to explore a city undergoing a cultural boom. This first edition positions Panama City as a key destination on the international art and culture calendar.

This was my first visit to Lima (and I hope it’s the first of many), and I came to take part in Pinta Lima 2025—an incredibly enriching experience. From the opening to the close, the fair was full of life: buzzing rooms, lively conversations, and unexpected encounters. There was an unmistakable energy in the air, the kind that comes from a city that takes seriously its place on the Latin American contemporary art map.

In the heart of Casco Antiguo, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama (MAC) embarks on a new chapter with the opening of its Sala Satélite, a space dedicated to showcasing projects developed from its Permanent Collection. The inaugural exhibition, 60+1 el pequeño gran museo de Ancón (60+1 The Little Big Museum of Ancón), serves as a tribute, a reflection, and an exploration of the museum’s history.

Bogotá’s art scene was reinvigorated this past weekend with a new edition of ARTBO | Fin de Semana, held from Friday, April 25 to Sunday, April 27. Unlike the main fair taking place in late September, this format invites visitors to explore the city’s key contemporary art circuits, with gallery openings, guided tours, talks, and performances across various cultural venues.

After four days of intense activity, during which key figures from the international and regional contemporary art scenes came together, the twelfth edition of Pinta Lima concluded at Casa Prado, reaffirming itself as one of the main events for contemporary art in Peru. This edition, directed by Irene Gelfman, celebrated cultural legacy and projected the future of Latin American art at a time when the Peruvian ecosystem —with the international rise of its artists, the strengthening of its gallery circuit, and the growth of local collecting— is advancing strongly toward consolidation.

The first large-scale exhibition of Latin American art in the West Asia and North Africa region has opened: LATINOAMERICANO. Modern and Contemporary Art from Malba and Eduardo Costantini Collections.

In its 2025 edition, the Latin American contemporary art fair presents, through RADAR and Video Project, a selection of works that engage with key issues of the present—both within the artistic field and beyond it: from questions surrounding the re-signification of ancestral knowledge to reflections on the idiosyncrasies of human nature.

Alejandra Monteverde is the founder of Crisis Galería, an art space located in Lima, Peru. The institution will be part of the RADAR section at the 2025 edition of Pinta Lima, a platform for artists to engage with some of the most pressing discussions in contemporary Latin American art. Crisis Galería will present “stories of resistance, transformation, and belonging.”

Peruvian contemporary art is experiencing a vibrant moment. Over the past decade, its art ecosystem has begun to consolidate, with a growing local collector base, a more professional gallery scene, and an increasing number of artists gaining international visibility. However, it remains an early stage, with a small and fragile market that requires stronger structures to support its development. Unlike other countries in the region, Peru lacks strong institutional support for contemporary art.

The CAV La Neomudéjar Museum is in its final days of exhibiting Ecos del Vacío (Echoes of the Void), a project developed by Guatemalan filmmaker and artist Verónica Riedel during her artistic residency at Kárstica Espacio de Creación, in the town of Cañada del Hoyo, Cuenca.

The Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Estrategias de recuperación (Recovery Strategies), featuring three recent projects by the photographer. Including the series Las flores mueren dos veces (Flowers Die Twice, 2021–2024), Palimpsesto (2024–2025), and Maíz (Corn) (2023–present), the Mexican photographer explores the elements and causes that create distortion and fragmentation in memory.

The exhibition brings together a group of eight artists whose work, though diverse in technique and approach, shares a common concern for social justice and historical memory.

Pinta Lima is the most important contemporary art fair in Peru, presenting in its 12th edition a solid program that celebrates the diversity of the Latin American artistic and cultural scene. Located at Casa Prado in Miraflores, Lima, the fair is an essential event where a network of artists, galleries, curators, and collectors from the region connect with the international scene.

The exhibition El incondicionado desocultamiento: las experimentaciones audiovisuales de Rafael Hastings (The Unconditioned Unveiling: Rafael Hastings’ Audiovisual Experimentations) has opened at the ICPNA San Miguel space, offering a revisit of the Peruvian visual artist’s filmic work.

The renowned artist Moico Yaker returns to the exhibition halls with a solo show after six years to present Conversaciones en el zoológico (Conversations at the Zoo), while Rafael Pascuale explores the relationship between the body and fragility in Espejos de una humanidad perdida (Mirrors of a Lost Humanity).

The concern about how the surrounding affects not only the individual but also artistic production connects with the principle by which Édgar Calel (San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, 1987) has developed a unique project from scratch at La Oficina gallery. Sueños guardados en granos de maíz brings us to a specific moment of materialization, but it expands toward all the vertices with which the artist works, delving above all into the importance of ancestry, identity, and the spirituality that is related to space.

Mexico has emerged as a significant contemporary art hub on the international stage. Since the inception of Zona Maco, Mexico City has become a key destination for cultural pilgrims, marking the start of the global art fair calendar.

The Museum of Modern Art of Bogota (MAMBO) presents its first exhibition cycle of 2025 with Colombian artist Julieth Morales, Chilean artist Seba Calfuqueo, and Brazilian artist UÝRA. They address, from different perspectives, the relationship between identity, territory and memory, proposing new forms of resistance.

An exhibition that navigates the complex layers of womanhood, resilience, and the inherent solidarity forged through collective survival and the pursuit of safety in community, highlighting the invisible threads that connect women across different cultures.

With strong gallery participation, ARCO is an interesting point to measure how the proposals reach the visitor and the collector. The choices based on aesthetic or commercial criteria create synergies that shape a fluid and sometimes circumstantial representation of each catalog. From Arte al Día, we delve into ten of those catalogs, expanded to variegated universes, monographs and dialogues that show a sample of the approach of Latin American galleries in their presence at the Madrid fair.

The Latin American presence at ARCO is consolidating year after year, establishing itself as a primary guiding thread beyond market trends, becoming a significant part of the identity of the Madrid fair. In this sense, the participating galleries in the various programs showcase well-established names as well as younger or more radical bets, shaping an ecosystem in which various productions can be analyzed.

The organization has entrusted Mexican curator José Esparza Chong Cuy with the development of Perfiles | Arte latinoamericano, a curated journey that highlights, through ten selected figures, the diversity of visual approaches. As the curator himself states, it offers "a broad panorama of how to identify as artists and build community, proposing new ways of making, thinking, and living together."

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Archives, Library, and Research Collections, announced the launch of Cisneros Research Guide. This bilingual research tool provides public access to over 200 curated digital assets, ensuring the long-term accessibility of key materials related to Latin American and Caribbean art and culture.

Maria Wills (Bogota, Colombia 1979) and Denilson Baniwa (Barcelos, Brazil, 1984) are the responsible for Wametisé: ideas for an amazofuturism, one of the special programs curated for ARCO 2025 and that navigates the Amazon and its growing impact on contemporary art. This proposal proposes a scenario of representation and dialogue through a selection of galleries and guest artists who will raise, through their works and their realities, the different conceptions of the Amazonian world and the possibilities of a collective future.

The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA Miami) presents a retrospective of textile artist Olga de Amaral (Bogotá, 1932), a pioneer in material exploration and the expansion of textile art. The exhibition, in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, will be open from May 1 to October 12, showcasing over 50 works spanning six decades of her career, including pieces never before exhibited outside Colombia.

Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum, in collaboration with the Reina Sofia Museum Foundation, reinforces its growing involvement and strategy for the dissemination and study of Latin American contemporary art with the creation of the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), dedicated to the research and dissemination of Central American art.

With an innovative perspective and a personal scenic language, KAY presents a play that reveals how the myths of the Amazon have been distorted to conceal the violence lurking over the women and girls of the region. The performance will serve as the closing event of the tenth edition of the prestigious theater and dance festival Temporada Alta, organized by the Alianza Francesa de Lima.

Marres, House for Contemporary Culture, will present on March 15 the exhibition Vultures & Fireflies by Alejandro Galván; this is a painted chronicle of Mexico from the perspective of one of the largest working-class suburbs.

The Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA) presents the exhibition Carmelo Arden Quin: In the Fabric of Constructive Art, curated by renowned historian and scholar Cristina Rossi.

Madrid's CentroCentro approaches the artistic production related to the Amazon with the exhibition Trópico sin tópico: Amazonas (Tropic without Topic: Amazon), curated by Halim Badawi (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1982), and with which it intends to facilitate new looks beyond the usual ones with which the European imaginary contemplates the indigenous legacy and its relation with the contemporary world.