Photos: Digital Image, MoMa, N.Y.
Over a hundred artworks on display spanning furniture, graphic design, textiles, ceramics, and photos (culled from the MoMA collection and public and private collections across the USA, Latin America, and Europe) demonstrate how Latin American design provides a valuable platform for studying and understanding the region’s major social, political, and cultural transformations.
The exhibition centres around a period of dramatic transformation marked by great economic growth and rapid modernization. During the 1940s, amidst the turmoil of the Second World War in Europe, countries in that area began substituting imported goods with domestically made products.
The abundance of materials at hand fuelled the exponential growth of domestic industries, opening up a vast array of career prospects for designers in the area. Until the late 1970s (when a string of economic crises rocked the region, signalling the end of a period of rapid progress in Latin America), it was generally thought that the state’s job was to promote modernization and establish a robust internal market for domestic goods.


The exhibition will be open to visitors throughout the summer, ending on September 22.