Language and Image: Conceptual and Performance-based Photography from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection brings together more than 100 works by over 50 international artists. In line with our mission and vision—one that is shared by our patrons’ passion for collecting—the artists come from all over the planet but artists from Latin America and the African diaspora play a significant role. Celebrated artists who have made innovative works of art for decades, such as Marina Abramović, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, and Thomas Struth are featured alongside artists like Jonathas de Andrade, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ana Mendieta, and Vik Muniz, among others who have been presented at the museum frequently in the past.
Since the 1960s, photography has been used as an important medium for contemporary artists to tell stories and create narratives — a language. Photography became the paramount way artists created art, documenting time-based works like performances and moving-image works, such as video installations, into still objects.
Photography has been an integral part of PAMM’s collection and its growth since we became a collecting institution almost thirty years ago, in 1996. The first major show to present the medium as its central subject took place in 2005. Organized with museum patron Charles Cowles and then director Terrence Riley, The Machine, the Body and the City: Selections from the Charles Cowles Collection celebrated a large donation of 100+ photographs. In 2013, when we opened in our new building, curator Diana Nawi organized Image Search: Photography from the Collection. In 2019, on the occasion of the museum’s 35th Anniversary, Ford Foundation Fellow Ade Omotosho organized a significant selection of photographs with new research and many works that had recently been acquired. Language and Image celebrates that history while paving a new path. PAMM’s collection is heavy in works of 20th-century art prior to 1960, and this exhibition aims to create a bridge between our collections and celebrate new works coming into PAMM’s collection from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.
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