Building Cultural Bridges to the South : Art: MOCA has embarked on a long-term project with two other museums to integrate Latin American works into the U.S. mainstream.

Amid a breakneck schedule of back-to-back meetings and coping with bureaucracy, Richard Koshalek, director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, paused in the brilliant light of an architect’s private studio here to reflect on why he was in Mexico last week.

It was not, he stressed, merely to set up a single exhibition. Nor was it just to find the cutting edge of this nation’s riches in contemporary art and architecture. Those things, he said, will come in time.

“The whole idea is that this is a long-term project--two or three years, minimum,” he said of his work here. “That’s what’s important about this. It’s not a one-time event. It’s a long-term commitment.”

Koshalek is laying the foundation for a program to build cultural bridges that he hopes will widen the horizons of contemporary art for decades to come. He was here for the inaugural trip of MOCA’s “Latin American Art Research and Exhibition Program,” a major new effort to integrate Latin American art and architecture--beginning with those of Mexico--into the oft-myopic mainstream of the U.S. art world.

“There are very few curators in the United States at any major museum who have any idea of the quality or diversity of the work that’s being done in Mexico,” Koshalek said. “I think there is a different kind of energy in Mexico than you will find in other parts of the world--creative energy. We see it in the architecture. We see it when we visit artists.”

The test over time, he said, will be for all of the United States to see it--not just once, but in many exhibitions and permanent collections in the Establishment art scene in museums from coast to coast.

This program is so ambitious, Koshalek conceded, that he and his project director Alma Ruiz--the Los Angeles museum’s exhibitions coordinator--knew MOCA could not accomplish it alone. So MOCA has linked up with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago; those institutions now are project partners and will be represented in future visits by curatorial teams traveling to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Since the project is still in the preliminary phases, it does not yet have major funding lined up, but it is currently planned in three stages, a MOCA spokeswoman said. In its first three years, teams will explore Mexico and at least two other Latin American countries--probably Chile and Colombia. The first stage will culminate in a symposium planned in 1998 in Los Angeles.

Research teams next plan to forge similar links throughout Central America and the Caribbean, followed by South America.

The Latin American research and exhibition program has been years in the planning. As Koshalek tells it--with more than a trace of self-inspired guilt--he and the museum board in Los Angeles started discussing the United States’ institutional blind spot for Latin American art years ago. They realized that “our education in art history tends to give a Western view of art and architecture”--a European bias that is as institutionalized as the museums themselves, he said. “The blame for this, I feel, falls with us,” he observed, assuming special responsibility as chief of a museum that, he said, geographically and demographically should better represent Latin America and Latinos.

It was, he said, with this goal in mind that MOCA committed itself to a project that demands of its researchers extraordinary talents in diplomacy, investigation, persistence, and, of course, an eye for important new developments in the art of another culture. “The critical part of all this is to be in the artist’s studio,” Koshalek said. “That’s where the ideas are created.”

In countries like Mexico, a virtual one-party state where even the art world has become as institutionalized as the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled since 1929, Koshalek conceded it will take time to cut through bureaucracy and find what’s vital and hot.

“This is done over a two- or three-year period,” he said. “You’ve got to get out of the mainstream. You need the bureaucracy and Establishment, but we’re well aware of what it takes to find that cutting edge. And even when you do, you’ve got to get an idea of what an artist does over time.”

In that context, the director turned reticent quickly when asked if his eye had already been caught by any works he had seen in the first of what he expects to be many visits. Instead, he spoke more generally of treasures he believes the project will unearth here--a world of Mexican artists and architects he hopes will become household names to the next generation of Americans.

“What we have seen so far is work that has a very strong cultural force running through it,” he said. “Yet it still has an awareness for what is happening elsewhere in the world--in art and in events. It is a collision that they’re trying to balance. It’s very, very different.”

Koshalek and Ruiz noted that the current calamitous times in Mexico--a period of assassinations, economic collapse and great political change--seem to be fostering rather than hampering the creativity of Mexican artists, whom they praised for their ability to overcome pain to endure and survive.

“Art feeds on crisis, and some of the greatest work done is fed by it,” Koshalek said. “Just look at what was created during the American Depression. Of course, the pain and insecurity this crisis has caused here is terrible. But from the artistic standpoint, this also could be a terribly exciting time.”