“Chosen Memories” opens not with an image, but by breaking the silence. It is all about giving voice to the silenced, the people of Latin America. It sees them as muzzled by colonialism past and corporate interests in the present. It sees them as muzzled, too, by dictatorships and nature itself in the course of life and death. And still the voices carry on.
The Museum of Modern Art shows off a gift over the years of works by forty artists, from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—and I bring a fuller version of this together with my recent report on Daniel Lind-Ramos and more Latin American art as a longer review and my latest upload. MoMA favors artists that you may never have known, to underscore its theme of voices, but it opens with the sound of birds. If that sounds soothing, they are extinct birds, but do not lose heart. These are human voices, 
as recorded by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Rosângela Rennó in a Wedding Landscape. They belong to a living tradition of remembering, through rituals like this one, but just who is calling, the living or the dead? Memory here is trickier than MoMA lets on, through September 9.
The show must sound awfully dogmatic, at a time of renewed focus on Latin American art and Latin American architecture, including art from Haiti, art from Cuba, and art from Puerto Rico. In anticipation, you may have seen what looks like a classic of modern sculpture, a metal arc with points at each end directing one’s eye to the space between. Museums have brought out the region’s contributions to Modernism at that, only starting with Gego. This show has gold thread weaving through forty-eight bales of hay and fishnet transformed into glass and steel, both by Cildo Meireles. It weaves through its humble origins to Minimalism, but the show’s interests lie elsewhere.
That arc is not sculpture at all. It is a photo by Claudio Perna, of a desktop globe without the globe. The solid sphere has vanished twice over, on the way from object to art and then to reproduction. Europeans, MoMA argues, conveniently left out much of the globe, too, while imposing their image of a pristine continent waiting for them to discover it. The show’s first section, “Returns,” focuses on just that. Just for starters, the Peabody Museum at Harvard never noticed that scraps in its collection came from a sinkhole that Mayans imagined as a tunnel to the spirit world—not until Gala Porras-Kim pointed it out.
Others recreate the work of explorers and find it lacking. José Alejandro Restrepo displays native plants on seventeen monitors, to correct Alexander von Humboldt in 1801. Leandro Katz restages photographs from 1839, while Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves turn the pages of a book titled, embarrassingly, Secrets of the Amazon. Firelei Báez paints a fabled creature over an antique map, as Terra Nova. Suwon Lee photographs old sites in the polluted present, as Purple Haze and Dust City. All those years of modernization have taken their toll.
A second section, “Reverberations,” turns attention to cultures that those eyes could never see. Western eyes dismissed cracked pottery, in video by Armando Andrade Tudelad, as deformed. Laura Anderson Barbata travels up the Amazon with the offer to teach useful skills to native peoples and to learn in return. Her photos look more clumsy than skillful, but they record a personal journey. Sheroanawë Hakihiiw bases paintings on ancient symbols and what they represent. He, too, is on a journey between a valued past and a modern or postmodern present.
A third section, “Kinships,” might indeed sum up the show, with just three works. It speaks of “networks of belonging,” as if kinships and networks were not present all along. Paulo Nazareth calls his video Antropologia do Negro, with reference to the slave trade. Yet the man lying amid skulls reworks rituals, too, this time from Brazil, as another spiritual passage. Iran do Espírito Santo brings a final evocation of Minimalism and performance, with vertical stripes that turn the walls into a passage between light and shadows. As a fitting ending, video of his dying father reduces Alejandro Cesarco to silence.