Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace)

The Kravis Studio will host MoMA’s first presentation of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace) (2020), a multimedia work jointly acquired in 2022 through the Museum’s Latin American and Caribbean Fund and Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Featuring prints, drawings, costumes, sculptures, videos, and a related performance, the work addresses political and personal histories of Guatemala’s civil war (1960–96).

Building upon Ramírez-Figueroa’s archival research on practices of resistance and memory in Latin American theater, Lugar de Consuelo recasts the history of the revolutionary play El Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow), written by the Guatemalan playwright Hugo Carrillo in 1962. During the civil war, the Guatemalan government censored the play, which Ramírez-Figueroa learned about from his uncle, who participated in its original performance. Ramírez-Figueroa’s research, drawn from oral accounts, resulted in etchings, drawings, and sculptures that explore both the contents of the play and the events surrounding its censorship. An installation of costumes and props, as well as watercolor sketches and a film of a prior performance staged at the Universidad Popular de Guatemala, will be on view in the Studio.

Organized by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Julia Detchon, Curatorial Associate, Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints. Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Director, with Aminah Ibrahim, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Art.

Media and performance at MoMA are presented through a partnership with Richard Mille.

Annual support for programming in The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio is generously provided by the Wallis Annenberg Director’s Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art and by the Sarah Arison Endowment Fund for Performance.