This exhibition essay discusses the Chilean artist Catalina Parra’s collages on view in the exhibition Catalina Parra: It’s Indisputable. It includes seven series with seventy works, which comprise collages made of newspaper clippings from the New York Times, sometimes combined with thread and other photographs or texts. She calls these works “reconstructions” because they create new meanings by recontextualizing the information conveyed in print media. These newer works are from the 1990s, but they hearken back to previous collages made in the 1970s. The earlier collages use clippings from the Santiago newspaper El Mercurio and chronicle the disappearances, torture, and killings that occurred during dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime. Many of the more recent works in the exhibition document Pinochet’s trial for crimes against humanity following his arrest in a London clinic in 1998. The essay suggests that Parra uses the visual language of photomontage to express her emotional responses to the trauma she experienced living under a fascist regime in the 1970s. The artist uses her collages to privilege Chilean voices, thus articulating her views on art, life, and politics.

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).

Catalina Parra (b. 1940, Santiago), daughter of the famous Chilean poet Nicanor Parra (1914–2018), is a mixed-media artist and photographer who lived in Germany (1963–72) before returning to Chile in the 1970s, and then moving to New York in the 1980s. After returning to Chile during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), her art practice became politicized. Inspired by Dada and Fluxus photomontage, she began creating collages that use print media and other materials. Her Reconstrucciones series, collages made of newspaper clippings, photographs, and advertisements sewn with thread, critiqued the Pinochet regime. In 1977, she held an influential exhibition at Galería Época in Santiago titled Imbunches—which in Chiloé Island mythology is a kind of monster—that exposed the regime’s state-sponsored terror and censorship. Parra won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to the United States in 1980, where she lived and worked for the next twenty years. In 1987, she created the Public Art Fund project USA, Where Liberty Is a Statue, a short, looping video played on a billboard in Times Square in New York City. In 1990, she was artist-in-residence at El Museo del Barrio, where she also taught art classes. In the 2000s, she created Land art pieces including FOSA (Grave, 2005), a large pit dug in Chile’s Atacama Desert intended to recall a mass grave in response to those who disappeared under Pinochet’s regime. Parra served as Chilean cultural attaché in Argentina (2000–2009), before returning to New York City.

This essay appears in the catalogue for the exhibition Catalina Parra: It’s Indisputable organized by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado at the Jersey City Museum (New Jersey) from September 26 to December 31, 2001, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Santiago) from June 1 to 30, 2002. [As a complementary reading, see another text by Herzberg (1991) on her work in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Catalina Parra: Reconstructions,” (doc. no. 769736)].