Mari Carmen Ramírez is the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Art Houston and director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). She has curated numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions of Latin American art over the last 15 years, including Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (2004), and monographic surveys of the work of Antonio Berni, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gego, and Hélio Oiticica. At the ICAA, Ramírez launched and has overseen Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project, an extensive initiative to source, digitize, and publish some 10,000 primary sources fundamental to research in Latin American and Latino art.
Utopia in the Caribbean: Ups and Downs of a Revolutionary Concept
Nearly six decades after Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces entered Havana in 1959, the situation for Cuban people has only worsened under the extreme restrictions imposed by a US-led embargo and the conditions of impoverishment and marginalization that this extraordinary situation imposed upon them. Investigating themes in the exhibition Adiós Utopia, curator Mari Carmen Ramírez asks: Why then the focus on utopia? What positive artistic inspiration stems from its historical fate in Cuba?