Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/504939
"SICARDI GALLERY HAS DEVELOPED A SINGULAR MISSION DEVOTED TO OVERLOOKED MASTERS OF LATIN AMERICAN ART ALONGSIDE A STABLE OF SOCIALLY AND POLITICALLY-COMMITTED CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS ..." — GILBERT VICARIO, SENIOR CURATOR, DES MOINES ART CENTER MAY | PAGE 51 | 2015 Above: Sicardi Gallery partners David and Allison Ayers, Carlos Bacino and María Inés Sicardi with sculpture by recent Core Fellow Anna Elise Johnson. Right: Francisco Sobrino's kinetic sculpture, Structure Permutationnelle, 1963/2014. Far right: Luis Tomasello's Atmosphere Chromoplastique, 2011, gets installed at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Bottom: Pablo Siquier installing his 2013 exhibition, "Structure," at Sicardi's current West Alabama gallery. Basel Miami Beach, where its booth paired dizzying chromatic wall pieces by Cruz-Diez with Thomas Glassford's suspended Plexiglas palm leaf, effectively communicating a dialogue across generations of Latin American artists. Sicardi signals out a 2004 exhibition as perhaps the gallery's most unforgettable. The politically tinged Ambulatorio by Oscar Muñoz was "an important piece of 36 floor panels of shattered glass with aerial photographs of Cali, Colombia." Despite its highly experimental nature, it sold twice — one edition to the former president of Colombia, César Gaviria, and another to a Houston collector. Sicardi recalls "hearing the noise of the glass continuing to break for hours after we'd taken a hammer to it" — a step required to properly install it and complete the artist's vision. The Muñoz work is one component of dual directions: on one hand, kinetic masters Soto and Cruz-Diez, with whom Sicardi developed warm friendships during frequent Latin American and Parisian travels, and on another spectrum, artists such as Muñoz, based in Cali, Colombia, whose work possesses a minimalist, refined aesthetic even as it addresses his country's drug trade and rampant social problems. Other gallery artists in this sociopolitical vein include another Colombian, Miguel Ángel Rojas, who often employs surprising materials such as coca leaves and U.S. dollar bills, and Argentine Miguel Angel Ríos, whose retrospective featuring the metaphoric video of spinning tops was shown at the Blaffer Art Museum in 2007. (One of Rojas' seminal works is a life-size nude photograph that resembles Michelangelo's David; only later does the viewer discover that the subject, a soldier, has lost part of his leg to a land mine.) Then there is the perfect confluence of the gallery's immersion in the rewriting of art history — much of that being done in Houston thanks to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's pioneering Latin American curator, Mari Carmen Ramírez. Sicardi first heard of Ramírez in 1990, during a trip to Argentina. The pair did not meet until 1996, two years after the gallery opened, because Sicardi wanted to be ready to have a dialogue with the star curator. Another seminal experience was seeing "Inverted Utopias," first mounted at Madrid's Reina Sofia in 2000 — the exhibition that Ramírez organized the year before she arrived in Houston, which was subsequently presented to both critical and audience acclaim at the MFAH in 2004. Sicardi herself has played a role, being in on the ground floor of the founding of the museum's most important collector's group, the Latin Maecenas. The well-heeled, influential group was born after Sicardi, with the approval of then-director Peter Marzio, invited 30 patrons — Argentinians, Peruvians, Cubans and Americans — to fund acquisitions of Latin American art. "It didn't really take off, though until Mari Carmen came to the MFAH in 2001," Sicardi recalls. "The Maecenas has been a great help to build the collection; it's a dynamic, fun group of sophisticated collectors and travelers." Coming full circle, collectors surprised Sicardi last December with a gathering at the warehouse/art space owned by Leslie and Brad Bucher, where they made a donation in her honor in celebration of the gallery's 20th anniversary towards funding future museum acquisitions. Gallery artists also each contributed a work to enter the MFAH's Latin American collection. The current gallery chapter is being written from a jewel of a location that was intuited years ago. Of her friendship with the architect who designed the serene, yet breathtaking 5,900-square-feet structure, Sicardi says, "Fernando Brave was one of the first people I met when I came to Houston. I think he was finishing at the University of Houston. I told him then, 'When we build a gallery, you are going to do it!' I said for years that the perfect location was to be near the Menil. In 2007, Fred Armstrong [Allison Ayers' father], a realtor with Martha Turner Properties, found the land, which had a small cottage, in the area we wanted. We bought the property, tore down the house and began planning." Waiting until after the 2008 downturn passed, the new Sicardi Gallery, designed by Brave, opened May 2012. Boasting light-filled, 16-foot-high spaces downstairs and upstairs, expansive offices, additional galleries and an outdoor area, it combines the feeling of a kunsthalle with a nod to Houston's tin-building movement as well as "the use of corrugated metal exterior siding, traditional in the unique area of La Boca in Buenos Aires," says Brave. The architect savored this project, creating a building perfectly in tune with the nearby Menil neighborhood (whose parking lot it faces on West Alabama). Brave, also a long-standing gallery collector, notes, "A great building is the result of a great client. María Inés allowed me to freely design with an open mind ... From this collaboration, I learned as much as I offered." Sicardi and the gallery she co-owns played a role in last summer's breakout posthumous Soto installation at the MFAH, which garnered worldwide attention. Sicardi says, "Allison and I had planned to go to Paris to visit him and several other artists, so we talked to Mari Carmen and offered to help with anything she needed. We took blueprints of the museum with us, and we sat with him and his wife at their house, and he drew the Penetrable in front of us. He passed away a few weeks later; it was the last design he made." For the future, Sicardi weighs the challenges of a bigger operation — "in the past two years, our space has tripled in size, and our staff has grown to seven full-time employees" — alongside a mission to support 22 international artists. But as the MFAH ramps up for its third building (the Latin American department is considered its breakaway star) and worldwide collectors continue to embrace the light and spatial wonders of Cruz-Diez and Soto or investigate politically tuned in talents such as de la Mora, Muñoz, Ríos or Rojas, it's a very good time to be Sicardi Gallery. "I'd always hoped to be where we are today," its founder says. "I BELIEVE ART GALLERIES — AND MUSEUMS, FOR THAT MATTER — SHOULD BE SUBTLE IN DESIGN, NOT TO OVERWHELM OR BE IMPOSING OVER THE ART BEING DISPLAYED." — FERNANDO BRAVE, ARCHITECT Above left: Jesús Rafael Soto, María Inés Sicardi, Carlos Cruz- Diez, at the Richmond Avenue space, June 2004. Above: Jesús Rafael Soto, designing Houston Penetrable, Paris, December 26, 2004. Left: Jesús Rafael Soto's Houston Penetrable, 2004-14, at MFAH. Below: Artist talk at Kipling gallery, circa 1996-1997. Thomas Glassford's Xipe Totec, 2010, at Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, Mexico City. Alfresco upstairs at Sicardi, looking to gallery library. THOMAS R. DUBROCK © ESTATE OF JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO. PHOTO © MFAH.