This exhibition brochure, written by guest curator Julia P. Herzberg, explains the ideas behind Leandro Erlich’s installation Neighbors. The brochure contains her curatorial statement and a brief artist’s biography. It describes Neighbors (2001) and other previous installations by the Argentinean artist—El Living (1998) and Rain (1999)—as presenting everyday environments that expand notions of reality and illusion. For instance, El Living recreates a living room facing what appears to be a mirror reflecting the room, but it is an illusion. Rain comprises, in turn, a window on a wall, through which the viewer sees what appears to be a rainy exterior, but that too is not real. Like these previous works, Neighbors plays with daily space, reality, and artifice, recreating a long corridor of an apartment with locked doors at both extremes and a functionless elevator in the middle.

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

Leandro Erlich (b. 1973, Buenos Aires) is known for his installations depicting uncanny architectural spaces that stimulate viewers’ sensory experiences and blur the boundaries between the real and the illusory. The Argentinean artist studied at Escuela de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón (Buenos Aires) in 1991, and in 1992 he won a grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, which gave him the chance to work with well-established artist from the sixties generation Luis Felipe Noé (b. 1933). In 1994 he won another fellowship from Fundación Antorchas for work study in the Taller de Barracas with artists Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) and Pablo Suárez (1937–2006). From 1998 to 1999, Erlich participated in the Core Program, an artist residency at the Glassell School of Art, MFAH (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), where he debuted his most widely displayed work, Swimming Pool (1999). He later showed versions of this work at the 2001 Biennale di Venezia (2001) and P.S.1. New York (2008). The work is currently on permanent display in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japan). He presented his installation Rain at the Whitney Biennial (2000) and Tourism at the 2000 Bienal de La Habana. At the time of his exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, he was living in New York. He lives and works in Argentina.

Erlich’s installation Neighbors was installed at El Museo del Barrio from February 8 to May 20, 2001. The installation was commissioned as part of the museum’s Contemporánea series (then in its fifth year), intended to fund site-specific installations by emerging or underrecognized artists whose work expanded artistic boundaries. Neighbors was a site-specific installation, and it was the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.