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.
In the new, progressive scene that blossomed following Salvador Allende’s election as president in 1970, Chile seemed to be an ideal spot for a reciprocal exchange of works back and forth across the Andes Mountains. In the early 1970s, Glusberg was in regular communication with Nemesio Antúnez, the painter, well-known printmaker, and director of the MNBA (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) in Santiago, who was an energetic promoter of contemporary art. The CAYC, in fact, proposed several exhibitions to the Chilean MNBA. The offers dovetailed with the center’s goals, which included the global promotion of art from the Southern Cone region and exposing Latin America to the international art world.
The newsletter mentions that works had been sent to Chile for the exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano and had been donated to the MNBA. (Mariana Marchesi and Sebastian Vidal Valenzuela, CAYC: Chile | Argentina | 1973-1985-2022, 2022.) The article reports complications with Arte de Sistemas, the CAYC’s mobile exhibition, which was also to be sent to the main museum in Santiago. As noted in this newsletter, this initiative also proved fruitless. The growing uncertainty created by the coup d’état infiltrated the activities organized for the Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Discusión at the CAYC in Buenos Aires, which was attended by researchers from Chile. In spite of the political complications (which would affect Chilean culture and art for decades), the CAYC was able to present the Homenaje a Salvador Allende, which is reviewed in this newsletter in an article that includes reproductions of works by contemporary Chilean artists.
