A Latin Link Just Got Stronger

In a move that fulfills a donor’s requirement and signals a deepening commitment to the art of Central and South America, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is launching a showcase and study center for Latin American art. Named for Southern California dealers Bernard and Edith Lewin--who in 1997 gave the museum more than 2,000 works, mostly by Mexican Modernists--the new facility will open Thursday at LACMA West, the museum’s satellite at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.

The Bernard and Edith Lewin Latin American Art Galleries, lodged in a 4,000-square-foot space previously used for temporary exhibitions, will operate as an extension of the museum’s permanent collection galleries in the main building, says Ilona Katzew, who recently joined LACMA’s staff as the museum’s first curator of Latin American art. The study center, in an adjacent 4,000-square-foot space, is open only by appointment to scholars and curators.

The museum has an encyclopedic, 110,000-piece collection that includes 1,364 Latin American artworks--ranging from ancient to contemporary--in addition to the Lewin material. A variety of Latin American art has been incorporated into the temporary exhibition program as well. But the Lewin donation--made in exchange for an annuity of an undisclosed amount and a promise to provide a permanent space for the display and study of Latin American art--has led the museum to commit more of its resources to the field and give it greater prominence.

Belated as this development may appear in a region with a large Latin American community, Katzew says that LACMA is in the forefront as “one of the first major public institutions in the United States to be fully committed to Latin American art.” Although the Museum of Modern Art in New York began collecting Latin American art in the 1930s and many U.S. museums have acquired Latin American material as part of broad holdings, it’s mainly the purview of small, specialized institutions, such as the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

The Lewin gift, which includes the world’s largest holdings of works by Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, is “a seed for what promises to be a much broader collection,” says Edward J. Sullivan, a leading scholar of Mexican art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. “I hope having extremely important examples of Mexican art will be a magnet for donations and acquisitions of Latin American art from Mexico to the tip of South America.”

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The Lewin donation has provided LACMA with “a wonderful core collection that we can work with and gradually, carefully build upon,” Katzew says. “Most of the works are by Mexican artists because that was the Lewins’ interest, but the museum is committed to expanding the collection to include artists from the rest of Latin America.”

Acknowledging that “there are many gaps to fill,” Katzew says that “it makes sense to have a comprehensive collection, given the very diverse population of Los Angeles. There’s a large Mexican American community, but there are also a lot of people from other parts of Latin America who want to see their own culture. Part of the idea is to make the public aware of how rich and complex the field is.”

The Lewins, who fled Nazi Germany, arrived in Los Angeles in 1938. They established themselves as furniture dealers but became increasingly involved in fine art and eventually concentrated on Mexican art. Initially exhibiting artworks in their furniture stores in Van Nuys, Glendale and North Hollywood (the stores were closed in the mid-1970s), the couple owned and operated the B. Lewin Galleries in Beverly Hills from 1968 to 1984 and in Palm Springs from 1984 to 1997. Edith Lewin died last May; Bernard Lewin, 94, lives in Palm Springs.

The inaugural installation in the new galleries will feature about 80 modern works from the Lewin collection and the museum’s other Latin American holdings, including Diego Rivera’s 1925 painting “Flower Day.” There will be “a few surprises,” Katzew says, referring to pieces not included in the museum’s 1997 exhibition of the Lewin gift. She also has selected a number of Surrealist works to be shown in one room. In the future, fragile works on paper will be rotated about every six months, but major paintings will remain on view, as they do in the museum’s other permanent collection galleries.

Opening the new galleries does not mean Latin American art will be exclusively relegated to that space, Katzew says. Special exhibitions of Latin American art, like temporary shows of other material, will continue to be displayed in the museum’s Hammer and Anderson buildings. And although she is a member of the modern and contemporary art department, Katzew plans to bring in exhibitions of colonial art and to work with curators in other departments who deal with Latin American art.

“We are going to have exhibitions that range throughout history,” she says, noting several upcoming exhibitions planned long before her arrival. “Tres Generaciones: Photography in Castro’s Cuba,” organized by Tim Wride, LACMA’s associate curator of photography, will open April 15. “The Road to Aztlan: Art From a Mythic Homeland,” a 2,000-year survey of art and artifacts from the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, organized by pre-Columbian art curator Virginia Fields, will open May 13. In 2002, the museum will host a traveling exhibition of works by Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

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Katzew was born in 1965 in Chicago, where her late father was engaged in psychiatric training, but grew up in Mexico City. She attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned her bachelor’s degree there in 1990, with a double major in art history and Spanish and Latin American studies.

“It’s a beautiful place, very magical,” she says, recalling the university’s setting. “Israel attracts people from many places. At the university there were students from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, especially Argentina and Uruguay. It was an interesting melting pot.”

Her interest in art began during her childhood, when she accompanied her mother to museums and art markets in Mexico City. Specializing in Latin American art was “a natural choice,” she says, but she was also fascinated with Greek art and studied a variety of subjects. She earned her master’s degree at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1992, with a major in modern art and a minor in Greek art.

Pursuing her doctorate, also at the Institute of Fine Arts, Katzew focused on Latin American art of colonial, modern and contemporary periods and minored in modern European art. She was granted her doctorate last January after completing a dissertation on 18th century casta paintings, which depict people of various racial mixes and socioeconomic groups, or castes, that composed Mexican society.

Before joining the staff at LACMA, Katzew coordinated exhibitions for several institutions in New York, Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. Among various projects at the Americas Society in New York, she organized a 1996 international loan show of casta painting and edited the exhibition catalog, which won the New York Historical Society’s 1997 Henry Allen Moe Prize for art history scholarship.

“Doing that exhibition was a wonderful opportunity,” she says, recalling not only the challenge of ferreting out artworks in far-flung collections, but also the audience’s response. “It was very nice to see mixed groups of people come to the Americas Society Art Gallery because it’s an intimidating place on Park Avenue,” she says. “For me, that was the best part of the exhibition.”

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She hopes LACMA’s Latin American program will be popular with the public as well. “I’ve always had a social take on art, and I’m very interested in placing art within its context,” she says. “I want to present monographic exhibitions that highlight particular artists and retrospectives for artists who haven’t been given enough attention or whose works haven’t been seen in this country, but I also want to engage in more complex social issues in thematic exhibitions. If we place art in its context, the results are immensely richer and we get a better sense of what it’s all about.”

Moving to Los Angeles and adapting to its sprawl is “a paradigm shift,” says Katzew, who visited the city for the first time a few months ago, when she was interviewed at LACMA; she recently got her first driver’s license. But now that she’s getting into the swing of things at LACMA, she’s excited about the possibilities.

Along with the public program, the study center offers many opportunities, she says. “I’m looking forward to organizing university classes and having students do research there. Most of the pieces in the Lewin collection aren’t published, so I think it will be very challenging for students to handle the works of art and come up with useful information.” But the main thing, she says, is “to let people know what a wonderful resource we have and give them an opportunity to work with us.”

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Bernard and Edith Lewin Latin American Art Galleries, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, noon-8 p.m.; Friday, noon-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Adults, $7; students and seniors, $5; children and students 6-17, $1; children 5 and younger, free. (323) 857-6000.