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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
During the 1970s, Glusberg forged a network of contacts in South American and international institutions based on a common interest in the experimental practices that were all the rage at the time. He shared programs with them that addressed this subject in an attempt to encourage the production and exhibition of Conceptual works at a time when Latin America was living with violent dictatorships and coups d’états. The MAC USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo), which in those days was directed by the curator and art historian Walter Zanini (1925–2013), was part of that network. Glusberg and Zanini helped to champion the growth of “a transnational dialogue territory” and organize a number of initiatives, including an exchange of local and foreign artists through exhibitions and symposiums (Luiza Mader Paladino, “Intercâmbios internacionais,” Caiana, 2016).
The one-woman show of works by Regina Vater (b. 1943) in Buenos Aires was one of those initiatives. Her work in the 1960s addressed women’s social roles based on an aesthetic that blended international Pop with Brazilian mass culture. She won a prize at the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna in Brazil, which allowed her to go to New York. While she was there, she photographed trash in the streets and used those images to create a number of works that included artists’ books, poetry, installations, and postcards, all inspired by the work of the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos (b. 1931), Luxo/Lixo (Luxury/Trash, 1975). She remained in the United States and settled in Austin, Texas, with her husband, the video-installation artist and professor Bill Lundberg. Since the late 1970s, her work has focused on environmental issues, underpinned by an exploration of feminism, culture, and identity, and a re-creation of the American and African cosmogonies. She returned to Rio de Janeiro, her hometown, in 2011.
