New Territories Exhibition Review: Latin American Design and Craft
This exhibition review examines New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America, presented at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD). The paper analyzes how contemporary Latin American artists use appropriation and pastiche to reconfigure traditional design forms into conceptually layered modern works. Through close readings of three featured works — Les Crayons Noirs' graffiti-inflected porcelain, DFC's kitsch-infused ceramic wall hangings, and Eduardo Sarabina's hand-painted vase — the review argues that the exhibition consistently merges high and low art traditions, challenges Western notions of individual artistic authorship, and uses ceramics as a site of cultural and conceptual tension.
- Overview of the Exhibition: Exhibition thesis: appropriation and pastiche of traditional Latin American design
- Les Crayons Noirs: Graffiti Meets Porcelain: Graffiti collective fuses street art with traditional porcelain surfaces
- DFC: Kitsch, Photography, and Mexican Handicraft: Design collective merges photography with traditional Mexican ceramic motifs
- Eduardo Sarabina: High and Low in Ceramic Form: Hand-painted vase merges tourist kitsch with contemporary realism
- Conclusion: Exhibition unifies high and low across all featured works
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What makes this paper effective
- The review moves logically from a general orienting statement about viewer expectations to close, work-by-work analysis, giving the argument a clear and coherent shape.
- It consistently identifies a unifying theme — the merging of high and low art traditions — across all three works, demonstrating critical synthesis rather than mere description.
- It uses precise art-critical vocabulary (appropriation, pastiche, kitsch, conceptual art) accurately and in context, signaling genuine familiarity with the discourse.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic analysis across multiple works: rather than reviewing each piece in isolation, the writer identifies a shared conceptual logic (the fusion of traditional and modern, collective versus individual authorship, high versus low) and applies it consistently. This approach elevates the review from descriptive summary to critical argument.
Structure breakdown
The review opens with a reorienting hook that corrects an expected first impression of the exhibition, then establishes its central thesis about appropriation and reconfiguration. Three body sections each examine a distinct work in depth — Les Crayons Noirs, DFC, and Eduardo Sarabina — before a brief conclusion that reinforces the conceptual reading. The structure is well-proportioned for an undergraduate exhibition critique of this length.
Overview of the Exhibition
A viewer wandering into New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) might initially believe the institution was showcasing a catalogue of traditional works from the region. Upon closer examination, however, New Territories reveals itself as a series of modern pieces by contemporary artists from Latin America who employ 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.
Les Crayons Noirs: Graffiti Meets Porcelain
Les Crayons Noirs (in collaboration with Felipe "Flip" 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, transposing them into three-dimensional graffiti-like structures and onto porcelain. Bombe has an artisanal look and is created 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.
These works are not the product of a single artistic intelligence but of a collective. Like traditional art, then, the works are presented as the collective output of a common people, challenging traditional Western concepts of what "high" art must be — namely, individualistic and solitary — as well as what traditional materials should compose art. The work gives dignity to street art even while it maintains a conscious, intelligent design, as is characteristic of traditional "high" art. It can thus be classified as conceptual in its fundamental nature even while it cultivates an artless spontaneity in its appearance.
DFC: Kitsch, Photography, and Mexican Handicraft
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 kitsch motif, even while they honor Mexican history. Not the work of a single artist, the coverings are all handmade and are the result of the compilers' travels across Mexico.
In one component of the exhibit, a series of traditional porcelain plates bearing red designs feature modern images — faces frowning, smiling, and making silly expressions — of real human beings drawn from photographs, placed at their centers. Once again, traditional design (ceramic pottery) is merged with the modern (photography).
Conclusion
Across all three works, New Territories consistently stages a confrontation between traditional craft forms and contemporary conceptual strategies. Whether through collective graffiti on porcelain, kitschy photographic ceramics, or an ironic tourist vase, each piece challenges received boundaries between high and low art, individual and collective authorship, and tradition and modernity. The exhibition ultimately reframes Latin American craft as a vital and self-aware site of contemporary artistic inquiry.
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