To build a collection is to make a journey without a precise destination. It is, above all, a vision of the world, a warp woven with the semiotics, evident or hidden, of the threads that make it up. Thus, Jorge M. Pérez (1949), born in Argentina to Cuban parents, raised in Colombia and living in Miami since 1968, businessman and philanthropist, whose name appears in one of the most prestigious art institutions in the United States, the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), started collecting art at a very young age because “I did not want to lose my roots, forget my cultural heritage, my reason for being a Hispanic American and […] to keep alive the link with my homeland.

This, then, is the journey proposed by Territorios: to give space to a cultural heritage, to a “Patria Grande” whose destiny is to show the diversity of that legacy through the creativity of its artists over time. From the nearly 2,000 works in Pérez’s Latin American Art collection, Territorios selects artists from different generations and contexts whose works offer an intellectual and emotional journey that challenges the monolithic vision of Latin America. Territorios: Latin American Contemporary Art in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection provides space for readings and re-readings, centered around a vast and profound region, from which to propose themes that pertain to its history and context while being contemporary and universal in their essence.

With a checklist of more than 50 artists, the exhibition proposes a diversity of themes that include a cartographic approach to the territory and its physical or imaginary borders (Cartography of the spirit), issues of gender and identity (I, myself, me, with you), colonialism and race (Colonialism and miscegenation), geopolitics (The neighbor to the north), violence, artivism and resilience (Memory and resistance), the spiritual and the ritual as forms of discernment and relationship with the world (Other forms of knowledge: The Spiritual and the Ritual), and the formal and conceptual influence of modernism in the region (The Legacy of Abstraction).