Cleaning the Ministry of Public Education and Health, Rio de Janeiro, 2014
Galería de Historia (Museo del Caracol), Chapultepec, Cd. de México, 1960 (Foto de Luis M. Castañeda, 2009).
Venezuela Pavilion, Expo '67
Venezuela's national pavilion at Expo '67, the World's Fair celebrated in Montreal, consisted of three large cubes of aluminum painted in primary colors. Inside one of these volumes, the work of the established architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, was a Penetrable by artist Jesús Rafael Soto. Soto's installation work consisted of a series of plastic hoses suspended from the ceiling that invited not only visual appreciation but also a physical, immersive interaction with visitors to the pavilion, an aim that the entire structure also intended to encourage. In tune with the spectacular atmosphere of the Fair as a whole, this mass-media friendly structure intersects not only with a number of global artistic and architectural trends of experimentation of the late 1960s, but also represents one stage in the long and productive collaboration between Venezuelan-born artists and architects like Soto and Villanueva and state authorities like those that commissioned the pavilion. This is one of many artworks to be discussed in an examination of multiple modernisms in the art, design, and architecture culture of twentieth-century Latin America I will be conducting this spring at Syracuse University.