Gabriel Perez-Barreiro has been Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum since 2002. This month, he and his wife Regine Basha depart for New York, where he will assume the position of Director at the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. In anticipation of their departure, …might be good sat down with Gabriel to talk about his curatorial philosophy and practice, his recent work as Curator of the 2007 Mercosul Biennial and his future at the Colección.

…might be good: I’d like to begin by talking about your approach to building a university museum collection. In a conversation with Luis Camnitzer published in Issue #78 of …might be good, you described the way you built a collection at Essex University. Students and professors would receive a proposed acquisition, and you would consider it in a seminar-like format. If you were still talking about the piece 20 minutes after you’d begun, you’d acquire it. Was it really that simple?

GPB: It wasn’t that simple. The process at Essex was a response to a particular situation: we built the collection largely on donations and we cared above all about what kind of discussions the work could provoke. Often, an artist or a collector offered an unsolicited piece and we didn’t have the expertise to judge it. So talking about the work together was the safest way to select some acquisitions. If the conversation was interesting, if people were disagreeing about something meaty, then chances were that the work was worth having. But things have changed a lot at Essex since then.

…mbg: I’m excited about the process you’re describing because of the way it might allow faculty and students to shape a university museum’s collection. Would that kind of a process work at the Blanton?

GPB: The University of Texas is a much more consolidated institution. I don’t think that system would translate here. We have a collection that’s so much bigger and so much more complicated. We also have resources for purchase. But I’ve always liked the idea behind the acquisition process at Essex. We were trying to find alternative sets of criteria for building a collection. The curators weren’t just looking for an artist that was in the news last week. We weren’t on a gallery waiting list trying to get the same repertoire everyone else has. Our collection was really about debate and discussion rather than value, product and career.

...mbg: I wonder, though, whether the acquisitions process at Essex created a rather disjointed collection. When you acquire work, aren’t you trying to create some sort of coherence within the collection?

GPB: You have to have criteria, but criteria are different from coherence. At Essex and at the Blanton, the collections have particular groups of work that make sense together and others that do not. Over the life time of a collection, its focus shifts. Some pieces of the Latin American collection that used to be way in the back of storage are now on display, and vice versa. To me, that’s where museums are valuable. When work is out of fashion it doesn’t get thrown away. I think these shifts mean that our criteria for building a collection need to be less dogmatic and we need to be able to accept that we are not always right all of the time.

...mbg: I’m interested in alternative models for acquisitions because of the opportunities they might create for partnerships between academic art history departments and curatorial departments at university museums. What would you say are the next steps toward fostering collaboration between the Department of Art History at the University of Texas and the Blanton Museum?

GBP: I believe the curator here should be a member of the faculty—a step we’ve never been able to take. The faculty needs to have a healthy relationship with the museum. The new faculty appointments to the Department of Art History—Andrea Giunta and Roberto Tejada—are really going to help. We need faculty and curators that want to build common projects between the university and the museum. But I should say that I think UT has a closer collaboration than most university museums. There will always be those faculty members who boycott the museum or who complain about the program, but that’s inevitable, and for each one of those, there are several with whom we have a great relationship.

…mbg: Can you say more about how you think the new appointments to the Department of Art History will affect the study of Latin American art at the university and museum?

GPB: These appointments are so important. Jacqueline Barnitz, who retired last year and is in her 80s, was a pioneer in the study of Latin American art and built UT’s reputation in this area. I think the failure to start planning for her retirement 20 years ago was a mistake. We slipped very fast down the ladder from a preeminent position in the study of Latin American art to a lesser position. The replacement process got wrapped up in the faculty being upset over the new Blanton having yoga in the galleries or something, when the issue was so much larger than that. Now we have a chance to be one of the leading institutions in the study of Latin American art again.

...mbg: Will Roberto Tejada be involved in acquisitions and exhibitions at the Blanton? The Blanton has an excellent Latin American collection, and I’ve seen a lot of thoughtful shows focusing on Latin American artists here. But what about Chicano/Latino art?

GPB: My view is that Chicano art is American art produced in the United States by people who’ve been here often for generations. Annette Carlozzi [Curator of American and Contemporary Art] has been so thoughtful about making a diverse American collection that questions what it means to be American from diverse perspectives. We have important works by Jesse Amado, Luis Jiménez, Benito Huerta, Celia Muñoz—some of the leading figures of Chicano/Latino/Mexican American art. These works live mostly in the American collection. However, the collaborative relationship between the American and Latin American departments at the museum means that we’re constantly questioning these definitions and divisions. It is part of a much broader discussion about what we mean by Chicano art. Are there Chicano artists now who will accept that label? Is it a term that applies historically to the 70’s and 80’s? Having Roberto studying these questions academically is going to help us to define how we talk about, classify, display and interpret those works at the museum. Roberto has the expertise we’ve been missing, but institutionally we are uniquely positioned to answer these questions.

...mbg: I’m interested in hearing about your focus and your expertise. How have you been shaping the Blanton’s Latin American Collection over the last five years?

GPB: I’ve been working along two basic lines. One is filling out the collection in certain areas. Considering what we already have, I’ve suggested acquisitions that fill our collection out historically. The other area I’ve been working on is contemporary art, which is a particular interest of mine. I saw an opportunity for us to be building a collection where other people were not—artists from the 90’s to now, from parts of the world that have been invisible to the art market, for example Guatemala or Chile.

Everyone talks about the boom the art market for contemporary Latin American art. But what they mean by Latin American art is the art that’s in Chelsea and Miami. Most museums and collectors stop there. They get a Beatriz Milhazes, an Ernesto Neto, an Adriana Varejão or a Guillermo Kuitca and they feel like they’ve ‘done’ Latin America. But if you go to Argentina or Brazil and look at what artists there are producing, then you see that it’s much more complex than the few artists who make it to Chelsea. There are many artists who are extremely important but they didn’t have access to the market at the right time, or didn’t have the support of a certain curator who was calling the shots. I think we have a role there to be looking out for work that’s very important and valuable, not economically, but historically.

I tried to structure the 90’s collection by thinking about place—very specific scenes. We systematically picked cities and tried to build collections from the 90s through the present. We’ve been very successful in building a collection from Buenos Aires. No one has the collection we have, not even in Argentina. In Guatemala City, there was an amazing generation of political artists working during the 90’s. People only know one—Regina Galindo. The market can only handle one artist from Guatemala at a time. But there are 20 others that worked alongside Regina during that movement. So a donor supported us to build a comprehensive collection from Guatemala City. Often the work we purchased from these artists was the first work the artist had ever sold to a museum, or to anybody. We collected work from Chile in a similar way. The point is not to just go and get one token work, but to actually try to build a corpus of works so you can understand the relationships between them.

…mbg: So are there collectors in Austin supporting Latin American art?

GPB: When I came here, my rolodex was empty. There wasn’t anyone supporting Latin American art in particular. So I came here thinking that this would not be a context that would support a Latin American collection, least of all a cutting-edge or experimental collection. And I was totally wrong. I could list over half a dozen people off the top of my head who have been generous supporters of the Latin American Collection here at the Blanton. And some of them have helped us acquire very political, challenging works for which it’s often hard to find donors. These donors aren’t just supporting acquisitions, either. They’re building relationships with the artists and hosting them when they come to Austin. As a curator, working with supporters like these is really rewarding. I have people I can talk to about the artists I’m interested in, and they know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s great when people support a museum financially, but even better when they also engage closely with what you are doing.The ecosystem in Austin for these artists is growing, too. You know, Benito Laren had a show at Okay Mountain and Eduardo Navarro had a show at Art Palace. People in Argentina and Brazil are interested in Austin and I think these relationships are only going to grow.

…mbg: Let’s talk about your recent project, the 2007 Mercosul Biennial. How did you use the metaphor of the third bank to structure the biennial?

GPB: I never wanted to do a biennial. I don’t like biennials and usually try to avoid them. I agreed to do the Mercosul Biennial as long as I could re-define it. What bothers me most about biennials is that they’re overly thematic. Curators try to create an exhibition that’s about something other than the art. You read those e-fluxes and they’re kind of pompous. They say things like, “This exhibition will force you to reconsider the roles…” It won’t force you to do anything, it’s a show. So I wanted to get away from anything that would be a theme. The image of the third bank comes from a short story by João Guimarães Rosa and I consider it more of a metaphor or attitude than a theme as such.

Let me put it this way, art is an operation, art is a way of thinking, art is a way of reinterpreting the world. It’s not a subject, it’s a methodology. That shift was very important to me. Thinking about methodology, I realized all good art breaks down binary positions and creates a new space. It pushes our experience into foreign territory—the third bank. It’s an image of independence, somewhere that’s not one thing or another, but is dependent on both. It’s precarious. The idea of the third bank was the most important to me in terms of the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. In my mind, the art work was one bank, the viewer was another, and the encounter between them would generate the third. Rather than privilege one or the other, I wanted to treat both artwork and viewer with equal respect and create this “third bank.”

…mbg: You worked very closely with Luis Camnitzer on the biennial. Can you tell me about this collaboration?

GBP: The Mercosul Biennial has a very strong local audience. People really want to see the biennial serve as a tool for education. I was totally into that, so the first person I asked to work with me was Luis because of his role as an educator. He was the Pedagogical Curator and that role had never existed before. The two of us worked very closely together. We were almost co-curators of the entire project.The biennial was about critical thinking, not consumption—that was Luis’s idea. Normally people go to a biennial like they go to a mall. Do I like it? Would I hang it in my house? We wanted to deactivate the I-like/I-don’t-like mechanism and get people to think critically about what each artist was trying to do and build their relationship from there.

We hired three hundred people as mediators—not to give people lectures, but to converse with people. The Mediators received six months of training in everything from philosophy to body expression to art history to pedagogy. I had some of the best art conversations I’ve ever had with these mediators. We also created Pedagogical Stations where viewers could respond to artists’ statements. Viewers could write comments that the next viewers could read. The audience would guide the future audience. The comments on these stations were unbelievable. To me, that was the third bank.

...mbg: Can you speak to the international reception the biennial has received?

GPB: There were articles in Art Papers [February 2008, Ursula Dávila-Villa], Modern Painters [March 2008, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy], and Artforum [March 2008, Anne Ellegood on the 6th Mercosul Bienal]. I decided that rather than put our energy into courting the international press, we should use our resources to do something that was creative and original. If it was good, then the press would pay attention. Biennials are constantly sprouting up and there are endless panel discussions about the crisis of the biennial. People are looking for new models, we tried to create one.

...mbg: Last weekend the New York Times Magazine published a feature about Mari Carmen Ramírez (“After Frida,” March 23, 2008), the Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She was fairly critical of the Blanton, the University of Texas and you. How did you feel about the article?

GPB: To me, what’s interesting is how the field of Latin American art has expanded and become so much more diverse. Of course, this is in part thanks to Houston, but also to so many other people and institutions internationally, and against a background of growing globalization of the art world in general. I wish that the article had focused more on that larger, truly fascinating story and on the art itself, and less on personality. I will say that I was surprised that Mari Carmen criticized the Blanton’s integration of the collections when the article also described her as saying that she is planning a similar thing for Houston.

...mbg: How would you define your curatorial differences with Mari Carmen?

GPB: Mari Carmen was very important to my generation, as she was the first professional curator in the field, and made the Blanton internationally known in this area. I have great respect for her work and her commitment, but I don’t think the field revolves around one person or one institution. Ultimately I’m a great believer in pluralism, so to me it’s not a zero-sum game between Austin and Houston, or between Houston and New York. As the field expands and more people are in it, it only creates more options, more support, and more opportunities for everyone. This helps institutions to define and refine their missions, and this ultimately makes the art world a richer and better place. To me, what’s important is the artist, the art, and the audience—not the curator. My ideal curator is one with a light touch, who lets the art define the terms of discussion as much as possible. When I think of my role models, they are all people who come to art asking questions, and who don’t always feel they have the answer, but think the question is worth asking. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself which art and artists you really believe in, and the answer to that question is always very specific. That’s why I don’t think that ‘Latin American art’ is a cause in itself. There are amazing artists in that part of the world, as there are in all others, and it probably does require particular skills to present Latin American art in the US context, but there is a risk in doing so that you end up believing that the translation was more important than the original. It’s something I try to be mindful of.

...mbg. Before we part ways, I’d like to hear about what you’ll be doing for the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros [CPPC].

GPB: At this stage, it’s quite open-ended. We’ll start by revisiting the goals and programs of the collection. One of the reasons I’m so excited about the collection is that Patricia Cisneros has always understood what education means in relationship to a collection. She sees the collection as a tool to increase awareness of Latin American artists and Latin American culture in the world. The CPPC is not a trophy collection, but a collection with a very strong education slant. It has been a leader in supporting research and has an educational program that is active in something like 8 different countries. I won’t be doing as much curating, because the collection has an excellent curatorial team; but I will helping to guide the curatorial direction, including doing more of the oversight and planning. We will be looking to the future and shaping the organizational plans for the CPPC for the next 10 to 15 years, which is a very exciting prospect. I also have several years of programming here at the Blanton that I’ll still be working on, but that will eventually wind down.

...mbg: So you’ll still be around Austin?

GPB: I’ll be around. The CPPC and the University have a history of partnership, and again, with Andrea and Roberto coming on, UT is really positioned to be a powerhouse for the study of Latin American art. And I’m sure that’s something the CPPC will want to be a part of in one way or another. I also want to keep watching the scene here in Austin. It’s s improved so much in the last five years. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Claire Ruud is Managing Editor of ...might be good.