Artists Respond To The Continuing Toll Of Colonialism In The Americas The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

What does dispossession look like when it is carried not only through land seizures, but through language, memory, and the body? At Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, a new exhibition takes that question as its center. Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present opens April 17 and runs through July 18, bringing together works by more than 35 contemporary Latin American artists.

Co-curated by Jonathan D. Katz and Eduardo Carrera, the exhibition gathers artists whose practices confront the long afterlife of colonial violence across Indigenous, Afro-descendant, queer, and trans communities. Among the participants are Guatemalan performance artist and poet Regina José Galindo, Indigenous Peruvian artist Rember Yahuarcani, late Cuban American conceptual artist Ana Mendieta, Ecuadorian trans activist Purita Pelayo, and Colombian conceptual artist and filmmaker Miguel Ángel Rojas.

The show is part of a $5 million Mellon Foundation-supported research project at the University of Pennsylvania that extends well beyond Chicago. Under Katz's direction, the project commissioned institutions including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, the national museums of modern art in Bogotá and Mexico City, and Fundación Klemm in Buenos Aires to organize related exhibitions between 2021 and 2024. Each participating institution was asked to acquire the work of an Indigenous artist not previously represented in its collection.

That approach, Katz said, was designed to avoid reproducing the very structures the project examines. He pointed to the Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, where Amazonian artists traveled downriver to present work in multiple villages rather than confining the project to the capital.

At Wrightwood 659, the exhibition includes an ink and tempera painting by Mexican artist Felipe Baeza in which foliage erupts from a figure's mouth, pillows stitched by Dominican artist Lizette Nin with the names of Chile's family dynasties and the enslaved people in their employ, and a video performance by Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo, who suspends her body above water in a meditation on the privatization of Chile's water under Augusto Pinochet.

The exhibition also reaches back to the 1960s, a period shaped by U.S. intervention in Latin America, to show how older histories remain active in the present. Katz argues that the project is ultimately about continuity: colonial ideas formed in the 1500s, he said, still structure political and cultural life today.

Alongside the works inside Wrightwood 659, a related video art series will be shown at nearby Park Presbyterian Church on weekends on a biweekly schedule. Together, the exhibition and its satellite program frame dispossession not as a closed chapter, but as an ongoing condition whose effects are still being felt across the hemisphere.

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