Good Neighbors: The Museum of Modern Art and Latin America, 1933-1955

A colloquium with Barry Bergdoll

Wednesday, November 14, 2012 | 4:30pm | Room N107 | Princeton School of Architecture

The intertwined histories of modern architecture and cultural politics in inter-American relations have yet to be fully write, but one thing is clear: in the crucial years spanning World War II and the heating up of the Cold War, the Museum of Modern Art played a crucial and central role, and not only through its curators but through its complex relationships to inter-American politics. At present Bergdoll is at work with his colleagues from Central and South America on an exhibition to take place at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014-15, precisely sixty years after the last major effort to comprehend the production of a whole continent: the epoch making "Latin American Architecture since 1945" organized by Arthur Drexler and Henry-Russel Hitchcock in 1955.

Barry Bergdoll is a Professor of architectural history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.