The Lesson for Today Is in Portuguese

While I have to give props to The New York Times for praising El Museo del Barrio's new show, Retratos: 2000 Years of Latin American Portraits, I really wish they hadn't titled the article "The Lesson for Today Is in Spanish," considering the fact that more Latin Americans speak Portuguese than speak Spanish. (Of course if one really wanted to nitpick, one could also point out the many other indigenous languages that were once spoken or are still spoken.)

Nevertheless, reading these words makes me want to go check out this exhibit:

How great that New York City's big art institutions are finally catching up with El Museo del Barrio, which started tiny in an East Harlem storefront in 1969 and now perches, larger, grander, still venturesome--and under-visited--on upper Fifth Avenue.

For 35 years the museum has devoted itself to showing Latin American artists, which basically meant introducing them, as almost no one else was doing so. And all that time, it was contributing to a huge new history. Today New York is a Latin American city: well over a quarter of its residents have roots there. That percentage continues to grow, and El Museo, where an eye-opening survey of Latin American portraiture opens today, is growing with it.

So is a broad interest in art from Latin America, to judge by its visibility in museums. Tops among special exhibitions is "The Aztec Empire" at the Guggenheim, focused on material from pre-Columbian Mexico. The show is just fantastic, a killer. It's not only the most intense art experience in Manhattan, but possibly the most intense theatrical experience, too. It will turn your notions of art-as-beauty-and-goodness inside out and infiltrate your dreams.