Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The new cultural scene that blossomed in Chile following Salvador Allende’s election as president in 1970 encouraged the reciprocal circulation of works back and forth across the Andes mountains. In the early 1970s, Glusberg was in regular communication with Nemesio Antúnez, the director of the MNBA (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) in Santiago, who was an energetic promoter of contemporary art. But expectations for any ongoing collaboration between the two countries were thwarted on September 11, 1973, when the Chilean armed forces overthrew Allende’s government in a coup d’état and installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator, an arrangement that remained in effect for the next seventeen years.
This was not the first time the CAYC had organized an event of the kind that was announced in this newsletter. In 1970—when it opened its center on Viamonte Street—it arranged for an auction of works donated by artists to cover the expense of inviting foreign critics (GT-07; pending). On this most recent occasion, poets were also involved and the center organized a benefit for the Chilean people in the wake of the tragic overthrow of the Unidad Popular party’s government led by Salvador Allende, the constitutionally elected president. Probably because of its goal of solidarity, the event included a far more diverse selection of visual artists than the center usually invited to participate in its exhibitions.
