The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas presents How to Look at Latin American Art, an online exhibition launching on May 5 from 1-2pm EDT with an accompanying symposium. Curated by State University of New York at Geneseo students, and organized by Lynette M.F. Bosch, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History, offers a guide towards answering this important question. For those who want to learn more about Latin American Art, the selections made by the students from paintings in the collection of the Art Museum of the Americas provide a primer, which Autumn Bieber, Leah Knapton Rapp, Ashlee Kuzemchak, Heather Matela, Emily McMahon, Ruby Morris, Lora Odeh, Ella Pearcy, and Ralph Velasquez have developed.

The AMA is unique in many ways and its collection, was enacted initially by José Gómez Sicre through purchases and gifts, the provenance of which can be traced, in most instances, to original owners and galleries that directly represented the artists whose work is at AMA. At a time when so many museums are facing the return of works acquired in less-than-ideal ways, AMA is free of such a clouded past-a rare, if not unique place to hold among museums with historically significant collections.

The student curators selected works by Juan Downey (Chile); Dario Suro (Dominican Republic); César Menendez (El Salvador); Joseph Jean-Gilles (Haiti); Rufino Tamayo (Mexico); Zoma Baitler, Pedro Figari, Ignacio Iturria (Uruguay); and, Héctor Poleo (Venezuela). This exhibition is not intended to be a comprehensive catalogue of the art of Latin America. In their essays, each student curator presented their research and their interpretation of their selected work from a contextual perspective, reflective of the social, cultural and political circumstances within which artists gave visual expression to their experience. 

This project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Society for the Advancement of the Art Museum of the Americas.