In her introduction to the catalog for the exhibition, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom at the MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999–2000), the curator Alma Ruiz explains that the purpose of the exhibition is to show significant works by five Latin American artists. The artists included were Gego, Lygia Clark, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel, all of whom undertook experimental paths within the avant-garde trends of the 1950s and 1960s. In Ruiz’s opinion, each of these artists used artistic practices that shook the foundations of modern art and the European canons. Each of them forged direct connections with the cultures where they did their work, as well as charting unexplored paths in architecture and other media. Artists of this kind turned the making of art into an experience, which also translated into new relationships between art, daily life, and social life. Ruiz explained that another major objective of the exhibition was to break with the paradigms that had governed the presentation of Latin American art on the international scene.

This text by the curator, Alma Ruiz, who is originally from Guatemala, is the introduction to the catalog for the exhibition, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel. This exhibition was held at MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) between October 17, 1999 and January 23, 2000. The remaining texts for the catalog were signed by Rina Carvajal, Suely Rolnik, Sônia Salzstein, Catherine David, and Osvaldo Sánchez. Alma Ruiz worked with Rina Carvajal to curate and organize the exhibition.The importance of the show was to introduce five artists who represented paradigms in contemporary Latin American art but who were not well known on the international scene. The purpose was to disseminate the distinctive artistic practices used by Latin American avant-garde artists, as well as to describe their completely new approaches, contributions, and the milieus in which these works were produced. The idea was to completely uproot the firmly entrenched concept of Latin American art: that it should be tropical and exotic. These ideas are clarified in the text by Ruiz, who also summarizes the key periods in the artistic lives of each of the artists included.