Blanton Museum Receives Major Award from AICA-USA for Exhibition Drawn from Caracas-Based Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas has received the prestigious award for "Best Thematic Show Nationally" from the United States section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) for its 2007 exhibition The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. The award will be presented to the museum at an awards ceremony at New York's Guggenheim Museum on March 17, 2008.

Declared by The New York Times a "must-see for anyone interested in modern art," The Geometry of Hope drew upon the Caracas-based Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), one of the world's leading collections of Latin American art, to examine the dynamic visual vocabulary of Geometric Abstraction as it developed in the cosmopolitan art capitals of South America from the 1930s through the 1970s. The exhibition was organized by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, the Blanton's curator of Latin American art. After its showing at the Blanton from February 20 to April 22, 2007, a variant of the exhibition traveled to New York University's Grey Art Gallery, where it appeared from September 12 to December 8.

Much of the show's preparatory research and scholarship, as well as its thematic development, were developed under Perez-Barreiro's supervision by participants in the Cisneros Graduate Research Seminar at The University of Texas at Austin. Part of a multi-faceted loan-and-research collaboration between the CPPC and the University of Texas at Austin, begun in 1999, this has enabled graduate students in Latin American art history to experience works of art first-hand, learn from international scholars and living artists, and develop new research and fresh insights into the field.

Blanton Museum of Art

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin has one of the longest-held and largest collections of Latin American art in the country, and has led the way in related scholarship, exhibitions, and research for 35 years. Along with the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, the museum has catapulted The University of Texas at Austin to the leading edge of Latin American studies.

Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

The Caracas-based Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros focuses on modern and contemporary art from Latin America, and includes as well Latin American landscapes from the seventeenth century to the present day, Venezuelan colonial art, and artworks and documentary evidence of Amazonian explorations. Works from the CPPC form the basis of international educational and public programming, ranging from programs for teachers and students to international symposia. Among these is Piensa en Arte, a visual-arts education program designed to use art to build students' observational, expressive-language, and critical-thinking skills.

AICA-USA Awards

The United States section of the International Association of Art Critics annually invites its 400 active members to nominate and vote for outstanding exhibitions of the previous season. AICA is the only organization to formally recognize excellence in this cultural arena, and the annual AICA Awards are the art-world equivalent to those given by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Drama Desk.

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