Curated by Jorge Daniel Veneciano

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, El Museo del Barrio (in partnership with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires) will revisit the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye,” with the stated ambition of presenting the history of Op art from a Latin American perspective. The show includes some seventy paintings, sculptures, and environments produced during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s by some fifty artists, including Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto (who refused to participate in MoMA’s show) as well as several others whose “origins” are not South American—e.g., Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. Yet many Latin American artists of the time strove to be universal, such that the necessity of a geographic perspective invites paradox. Surely the catalogue, with essays by the curator, MACBA director Aldo Rubino, Ariel Jimenez, Luiz Camillo Osorio, and Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, will engage this very issue.

— Kaira M. Cabañas