This exhibition critique examines "New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America" at the Museum of Art and Design, analyzing how contemporary Latin American artists deconstruct and reconfigure traditional imagery through modern mediums. The paper traces three featured artists and collectives—Les Crayons Noirs, DFC, and Eduardo Sarabina—demonstrating how their work merges high and low art, challenges Western artistic conventions centered on individual authorship, and bridges traditional craft with contemporary photography, graffiti, and commercial design. Through these examples, the critique reveals how the exhibition's central concept of "new territories" reflects artistic innovation that simultaneously honors and subverts cultural heritage.
If a viewer were to initially wander into the exhibition New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America, he or she might initially believe that the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) was showcasing a catalogue of traditional works from Latin America. However, upon closer examination, New Territories is actually a series of modern pieces by contemporary artists from the region who make use of techniques such as appropriation and pastiche of traditional designs. These works are reconfigurations of traditional images—hence the expression of "new territories" in their output.
The exhibition operates on a deliberate visual deception that rewards closer attention. What appears at first glance to be heritage craft or folk art is revealed, upon engagement, to be conceptually sophisticated contemporary practice. This curatorial strategy challenges viewers' assumptions about what constitutes art, who creates it, and what materials should be valued in aesthetic discourse. The featured artists do not abandon tradition; rather, they interrogate it, repurpose it, and infuse it with modern visual languages and production methods.
Les Crayons Noirs (in collaboration with Felipe Yung, Herbert Baglione, Sesper, and Thais Beltrame) makes use of traditional images and ways of rendering the human body common to many Latin American traditional works and transposes it into three-dimensional graffiti-like structures and onto porcelain. The work titled Bombe is an artisanal creation made with spray paint (the French term for making graffiti with a spray can is to "bomb") and porcelain. Images of traditional Brazilian design are fused with traditional "high" art surfaces as well as onto nontraditional structures in the form of graffiti.
What is significant about this collaborative effort is its fundamental challenge to Western art historical conventions. These works are not the product of a single artistic intelligence but a collective. Thus, like traditional art, the works are presented as the collective work of a common "people," challenging traditional Western concepts of what "high" art must be—individualistic and solitary—as well as what traditional materials should compose art. The work gives dignity to street art even while it has a conscious, intelligent design, as is characteristic of traditional "high" art.
The conceptual sophistication lies in this paradox: Bombe can be classified as conceptual in its fundamental nature even while it cultivates artless spontaneity in its appearance. The collaboration between fine craft (porcelain) and urban vernacular (graffiti) creates a deliberate friction that forces reconsideration of artistic hierarchies. Graffiti as a practice has historically been marginalized, yet here it is elevated through association with traditional ceramic artistry while simultaneously subverting the preciousness typically associated with porcelain.
DFC, the product of a design collaborative arranged by Tony Moxham and Mauricio Paniagua, is an equally arresting series of wall hangings that initially appear to be traditional Mexican handicrafts but instead use photographs and other modern representations to create a fusion of past and present. Many of the plates and ceramics have a deliberately "kitschy" motif, even while they honor Mexican history. Not a work of a single artist, the coverings are all handmade and the result of the compilers' travels across Mexico.
In one of the components of the exhibit, there are a series of traditional porcelain plates with red designs with modern images of faces—frowning, smiling, and making silly faces—of real human beings from photographs in their centers. Once again, traditional design (ceramic pottery) is merged with the modern (photography). The juxtaposition is deliberate: the formal, decorative language of Mexican ceramics encounters the documentary realism of photographic portraiture. This collision of aesthetic systems creates productive ambiguity about authenticity, cultural ownership, and the politics of representation.
Photography's role in contemporary art practice becomes a tool for interrogating tradition rather than simply documenting it. By embedding contemporary faces within traditional ceramic patterns, DFC suggests that cultural heritage is not fixed or historical but alive and inhabited by present-day people. The handmade quality of these pieces—they are not mass-produced—insists on the continued relevance of craft even as modern media infiltrates its surface.
Eduardo Sarabina's A Thin Line Between Love and Hate is a hand-painted ceramic vase and silkscreened cardboard box. The woman on the vase looks primitive in design, almost in the tradition of early modernist painters who appropriated non-Western aesthetic vocabularies. Her breasts form the center of the work, as do her lips and ample thighs. There are star-like flowers around her. The overall technique suggests a kind of "touristy" vase, the type of object often produced for export markets and tourist consumption.
Yet the face of the woman is realistic and contemporary, suggesting that the "real" is breaking through this apparent kitsch. This sense is intensified with the reproduction of a commercial box for transport next to the ceramic. Once again, there is a merging of high and low in an ironic fashion. The work can be appreciated both on a surface level—as decorative object—but also on a conceptual level, where the tension between primitivist aesthetics and photorealistic portraiture raises questions about representation, exoticization, and artistic intention.
Kitsch, traditionally dismissed in art criticism, becomes here a deliberate aesthetic strategy rather than a failure of taste. By embracing kitsch imagery while inserting contemporary realism, Sarabina creates a work that is simultaneously sincere and ironic, celebratory and critical. The inclusion of the commercial transport box further complicates readings, introducing the language of commodity and export into the gallery space, implicating global systems of cultural circulation and economic value.
The exhibition New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America succeeds in demonstrating how contemporary Latin American artists have created a space where tradition and modernity coexist not as opposites but as integrated aesthetic and conceptual strategies. Through the work of Les Crayons Noirs, DFC, and Eduardo Sarabina, we see that contemporary art practice rooted in Latin American contexts need not choose between honoring cultural heritage and engaging with cutting-edge conceptual frameworks. The "new territories" claimed by these artists are spaces of productive fusion, where appropriation becomes not theft but reimagination, where collective labor challenges the myth of solitary genius, and where kitsch and craft are rehabilitated as legitimate aesthetic and political positions.
What makes this exhibition particularly vital is its refusal to treat Latin American artistic tradition as a historical artifact or source material to be mined by outside interests. Instead, these artists assert ownership over their own cultural vocabularies, transforming them into contemporary languages of expression. The exhibition invites viewers to abandon the expectation of seeing "authentic" traditional art and instead witness the genuine, complex artistic intelligence of creators who understand that cultural identity is not static but continually remade through dialogue with the present moment.
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