Art Museum of the Americas

On a rainy Saturday morning, I trotted over the Art Museum of the Americas. Though I arrived at 10:20am--twenty minutes after opening--I was the first visitor.

It is a small museum, more like a gallery, comprising six rooms displaying recent work by South American artists. I spent less than fifteen minutes there. Then, with much more time than I expected, I planned what to do next. I decided to spend a while exploring some of the memorials on the mall, as reported in another post.

At another time, I went to an Art-Museum-of-the-America's-sponsored exhibit at the Organization of American States building. The exhibit, Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas, showed black-and-white photographs of ruins from North, Central, and South America. The photographs were a nice reminder of the number of and diversity of civilizations on the American continent. One often hears about ruins in Europe; these American ruins are no less numerous, varied, or impressive. Incidentally, as with the main museum's exhibit, I took less than fifteen minutes to see it.

Many months later, I returned to the Art Museum of the Americas to see its newest exhibit, New York: Latin American and Spanish artists in New York. I re-learned that contemporary art isn't really my thing. One series of work in this museum, however, is worth mentioning: The Real Story of the Superheroes by Dulce Pinzon. It's both creative and sweet. He photographs immigrants who send money back home (to Mexico) in superhero costumes. How apropos: they're probably superheroes to their families. The thumbnail at the top of the linked exhibit page shows one of his pieces: a window-washer dressed as spiderman.