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Fifteen minutes into the art museum field trip, having encountered a monumental canvas painted entirely blue, my sixth-grade self decided art definitely wasn’t for me. But we had an entire hour to explore, and by that time the elevators looked fun. So up my friends and I went, determined to see every foot of the museum as fast as possible, working from the top down.
We blitzed through exhibits of priceless indigenous textiles and Asian pottery and French Impressionist paintings. We cocked our eyebrows at pre-Warholian pop art and local examples of abstract expressionism, then made our way into a series of galleries that, I learned only much later, featured pieces from one of the largest and finest collections of Latin American art in the world.
That’s where I encountered my…
