The Disappeared Returns November 22, 2009

The word "disappear" was redefined during the mid-20th century in Latin America. "Disappeared" evolved into a noun used to identify people who were kidnapped, tortured and killed by their own governments in the latter decades of the twentieth century in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela (during a single uprising). Colombia with its fifty-year civil war and Guatemala with its own thirty-seven-year civil war further expanded the meanings and uses of "disappear." The exhibition contains work by contemporary artists from each of these countries, who over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century.