MoMA Announces Landmark Exhibition on Latin American Modernism Opening in September
The show will gather more than 300 works by artists from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba, many of which have never been exhibited in the United States.
By Ivy Liu · June 12, 2026 · 4 min read
NEW YORK — The Museum of Modern Art announced Thursday that its major fall exhibition will be devoted to Latin American modernism from 1920 to 1970 — a sweeping survey that will gather more than 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by artists from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela. The exhibition, titled New Worlds: Latin American Modernism and the Global Avant-Garde, opens September 6 and will occupy seven galleries on MoMA's third and fourth floors through January 2027. It is the most comprehensive exhibition of Latin American modernist art mounted at MoMA since the museum's foundational surveys of the 1940s.
The exhibition makes a revisionist curatorial argument: that the contributions of Latin American artists to the global modernist project have been systematically undervalued by a art historical canon that centered European and North American voices, and that works by figures such as Tarsila do Amaral, Joaquín Torres-García, Wifredo Lam, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica are not peripheral reactions to European modernism but independent and in many cases precedent-setting formal innovations. More than 40 percent of the exhibited works have never been shown in the United States.
Several of the loans are considered particularly significant. A large painting by Tarsila do Amaral, widely regarded as one of the foundational works of Brazilian modernism, will travel from the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo for the first time since a brief tour in the 1990s. A group of geometric abstractions by Torres-García from the 1930s has been assembled from private collections across Uruguay, Argentina, and the United States — the largest concentration of his work to appear in one venue since a retrospective at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. And a selection of kinetic and participatory works by Lygia Clark will be presented in a format that allows visitors to interact with them, following the participatory ethos that Clark herself insisted was central to the works' meaning.
The exhibition's co-curators, Dr. Alejandra Rios of MoMA's department of painting and sculpture and Dr. Paulo Mendes of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, said in a joint statement that the project began from a question: why did a generation of artists working in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century produce such a radical and varied body of work, and why has that work received so little sustained attention at the level of the major North American and European museum surveys? Their answer, developed over seven years of research and institutional partnership with museums in six countries, is presented across the exhibition's thematic sections.
The show is organized into four sections: the first addresses the encounter between European avant-garde movements — cubism, surrealism, constructivism — and the visual cultures and political contexts of Latin America; the second focuses on works that engage with landscape, nature, and the specifically American environment as a site of modernist invention; the third examines the relationship between abstraction and political commitment in the 1950s and 1960s; and the fourth presents the experimental, participatory, and conceptual practices that emerged in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela in the late 1960s.
MoMA has developed an extensive public programming calendar to accompany the exhibition, including a symposium in October that will bring together Latin American art historians, museum curators, and artists working in traditions that descend from the movements the exhibition examines. The museum is also partnering with several New York City public schools that have significant Latin American student populations to develop curriculum materials and subsidized visits. Director Glenn Lowry described New Worlds as one of the most important scholarly and institutional projects the museum has undertaken in a generation.
Tickets for the exhibition are included with general MoMA admission. Timed entry reservations are strongly recommended, as the museum expects demand to exceed its standard gallery capacity on weekends and during the school visit program's peak weeks. An exhibition catalogue, co-published by MoMA and the São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art, will be available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.