On December 2018, I got to see for the first time since I live in the US an exhibition solely about Venezuelan artists and I got more than I ever expected. #ContestingModernity, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, captured the #informalist #arteinformal movement in Venezuela from 1950s-70s. The moment when Venezuela expanded after the oil industry boomed, the moment they went from rural to urban, from dictatorship to democracy, when the middle class expanded, when the immigrants moved in, when the population from the interior into the booming cities like Caracas. It was a moment of so much opportunity, prosperity, and disarray.
I wouldn't exist today had it not been for a moment like this. This economic boom in the country is what brought my father's family from Lebanon in 1957 with the prospect to make money and build a new life in Caracas. This hope for upward mobility is what drove my maternal great grandmother to marry my grandmother off to a man from Caracas so they could move from the llanos (rural plans) into the city.
But more importantly, that moment cemented the foundation to the social and political mess we have today. Which groups were ostracized and marginalized back then? Why did that happened? Whose resentments are we harboring today? Which communities got isolated in this process of expansion? What were these artists dissenting from? How democratic was the political process? What about militarism? When and why did the obsession with women’s bodies and aesthetics start?
This couldn't have happened anywhere else in the US except in this oil city. H-town keeps giving me the things I didn't know I needed.
--June 2020