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San Antonio Museum of Art Opens Latin American Folk Art Exhibition

San Antonio Museum of Art presents an exhibition of Latin American Folk Art on view from April 6.

The exhibition features 200 of the nearly 400 works that have been donated to SAMA by collector Peter P. Cecere over the past 10 years. Cecere was a career foreign service officer who collected folk art for more than 50 years. For Cecere, folk art was a passionate pursuit and a means for exploring cultural patterns and social structures of his host countries.

Pasión Popular is organized by function: The Faces of Folk Art, The Beauty of Utility, The Shape of Belief, The Art of Diversion, and Art for the Sake of Beauty and Memory. From the eighteenth century to modern times, the exhibition presents objects originating from different Hispanic cultures of Spain and Mexico, as well as Latin American countries such as Guatemala, Peru and Chile.

Objects include utilitarian ones such as bowls, oil jars, and bread stamps for personalizing loaves in communal ovens, as well as shop signs, puppets, dance masks, toys, carousel figures, and religious paintings. They are crafted of everything from wood, cloth, and metal, to tin, leather, and cork. “Folk art is ephemeral: the objects are made to use and use up. Even items that were designed to be more permanent are often made from fleeting, inexpensive materials,” says Oettinger. “To find pieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of this caliber is pretty extraordinary.” www.samuseum.org