Drawn from the permanent collection and archives of the Art Museum of the Americas, Streams of Being brings to light a multiplicity of ideas and identities emerging within contemporary Latin American art.  Featuring forty-five artists from sixteen countries across the Americas, the exhibition explores the permeable boundaries and dimensions of life through interrelated themes of scale and place, human and animal bodies.  The exhibition’s open structure emphasizes the myriad and active relationships between the objects on view and the wider world that they, and we, inhabit.  A nexus of suggestively infinite “streams of being,” the galleries channel the interplay of existence and embodiment through a diversity of mediums, encompassing watercolor, collage, lithography, serigraphy, painting, pencil and ink drawing, and an artist’s book.  In its inter-American reach, Streams of Being also meditates on the specificity of the hemispheric purview of the Organization of American States and its commitment to cultural exchange.

A new collaboration between the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States and The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland, Streams of Being reflects each institution’s commitment to education and outreach.  Graduate and undergraduate students in the university’s Department of Art History & Archaeology worked with Assistant Professor Abigail McEwen to shape this exhibition over the course of the current academic year.