Mari Carmen Ramírez accepts the “A” award for collecting from Fundación ARCO

At an awards ceremony in Madrid on February 20, 2018, Mari Carmen Ramírez accepted the “A” award for collecting from Fundación ARCO, on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and its department of Latin American art. Ramírez is the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the MFAH.

The “A” award recognizes “the artistic value of institutions’ collections” and was awarded to the MFAH for its 20th century Latin American art collection.

The department of Latin American art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was established in 2001, with the appointment of Ramírez. Since then, the MFAH has acquired more than 700 works of Latin American and Latino contemporary and modern art, including 100 from the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, first exhibited in 2007. Major works by Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gego, Gyula Kosice, Hélio Oiticica, Xul Solar, Joaquín Torres-García, Cildo Meireles, Luis Jiménez, Daniel Joseph Martínez, and Teresa Margolles have entered the collection over the past decade and a half. In addition, the department has originated and organized widely acclaimed exhibitions, including Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (2004); Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (2006); and Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time (2011).

As director of the ICAA, the pioneering research institute devoted to 20th-century Latin American and Latino art, Ramírez has led a long-term transformation in the appreciation and understanding of Latin American and Latino visual arts in the United States and abroad. The ICAA’s landmark Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project, launched in 2012, established a free, online database of primary sources, laying unprecedented groundwork for future scholarship in the field.