Editors' Biographies

Olea, Héctor; Ramírez, Mari Carmen; Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás

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Editors' Biographies

Héctor Olea (Editor), Mari Carmen Ramírez (Editor), Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (Editor)

Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?

Editors' Biographies

Author

Héctor Olea (Editor), Mari Carmen Ramírez (Editor), Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (Editor)

PublisherThe Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00102.036

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-17292

Editors' Biographies

Héctor Olea (Mexico City, 1945)

Héctor Olea, a Mexican architect, art critic, writer, and translator, serves as the International Center for the Arts of the America’s (ICAA) Publications and Translations Editor. Specializing in Latin American modern art and theory, he has collaborated on literary magazines and written about many avant-garde artists, including Xul Solar, Luis Felipe Noé, León Ferrari, Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Artur Barrio, Ferreira Gullar, and Waldemar Cordeiro.

Olea curated the exhibition Heterotopías (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2000) and, with Mari Carmen Ramírez, co-curated Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), which was named the “Best Thematic Show Nationally” in 2003–04 by the International Association of Art Critics (U.S .chapter). Olea also edited the catalogue that accompanied Inverted Utopias (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). The symposium publication for this exhibition earned first prize for scholarly journals in the Museum Publications Design Competition of the American Association of Museums in 2007. Olea and Ramírez served as co-editors for the exhibition catalogues Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2011) and Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; distributed by Yale University Press, 2009).

As a translator, Olea has been responsible for several noteworthy “trans-creations”—a genre of translation that involves well-researched recreations of important writings in a language different than that of its original publications. In this genre, he has was responsible for the creative translation of Mário de Andrade’s masterpiece Macunaíma (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977; second edition (Barcelona: Octaedro, 2005). He has also translated manifestos, poems and experimental prose by Oswald de Andrade into Spanish in Obra Escogida (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1981). Olea’s creative writing focuses on experimental approaches in poetry and prose. His last novel, Tenoche Me Reonda (Austin: Whichever Press, 1999), designed with Henk van Assen, received the 2000 AIGA Prize of the American Institute of Graphic Arts for book design. When the book Grande Sertão: Veredas (first edition, 1956) celebrated fifty years, Olea published O Professor Riobaldo: um novo místico da Poetagem (São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial/Oficina do Livro, 2006).

Mari Carmen Ramírez (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1955)

Mari Carmen Ramírez is the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and founding director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the MFAH. Prior to this appointment, she was curator of Latin American Art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art and adjunct lecturer of the department of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. She has also served as director of the Museo de Antropología, Historia y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, at Rio Piedras campus. Ramírez received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago in 1989.

Ramírez has curated many groundbreaking exhibitions of Latin American art including Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2011); Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood (Houston: The Menil Collection in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009); The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2007); Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007; traveled to Tate Modern, London, England); Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2005; traveled to The Drawing Center, New York, 2007); Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, with Héctor Olea (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004); Heterotopías: Medio Siglo sin Lugar, 1918–1968, with Héctor Olea (Madrid: Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000); Cantos Paralelos/Parallel Cantos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art (Austin: Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 1999); El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and its Legacy, with Cecilia Torres (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas Press, 1992). Ramírez has also published extensively on topics pertaining to Latin American art history, curatorial studies, exhibitions, and the politics of representation in Latin American and Latino art.

Ramírez was named one of the twenty-five most influential Hispanics in America by TIME Magazine (2005). She has received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2005) and the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Peter Norton Family Foundation (1997).

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (San Antonio, Texas, 1938)

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto recently retired as Associate Director for Creativity and Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. His work with the division includes the Humanities Residency Fellowship Program, the Recovering and Reinventing Cultures through Museums Program, The U.S.–Mexico Fund for Culture, and PACT (Partnerships Affirming Community Transformation). Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Ybarra-Frausto was a tenured professor at Stanford University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He has served as the chairperson of the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and the Smithsonian Council, and he has written and published extensively, focusing primarily on Latin American and U.S./ Latino cultural issues. He has edited, co-edited, and contributed to a number of texts that consider Latino expressive culture through art and literature, including: Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities (co-edited with Alicia Gaspar De Alba, 2002); Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (co-edited with Amalia Mesa-Bains and Shifra M. Goldman, 1990); Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–1981 (compiled with Shifra M. Goldman, 1986); and Chicano Literature: Text and Context (compiled with Antonia Castaneda Shular and Joseph Sommers, 1972); and the forthcoming Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. In 1998, Ybarra-Frausto was awarded the Joseph Henry Medal by the Smithsonian Institution Center for Latino Initiatives for exemplary contributions to that institution which included the donation of his invaluable collection of documentation on Chicano art and culture (now at the Archives of American Art).

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