Graciela Sacco. Enfrentados (serie Tensión Admisible), 2011; photographic inlay on wood, installed on wall. Courtesy of Diana Lowenstein Gallery and Artist.

The work of the six Latin American and Latino artists in Hidden Histories personalizes the staggering statistics of displaced, marginalized, and murdered individuals, both historically and presently. Using commonplace materials, these artists attempt to give voice to those who have been silenced or forgotten. At the front of the gallery, a broken wooden barricade overlaid with an image of Argentinian protesters confronting military police juts outs from the wall. Graciela Sacco’s Enfrentados (serie Tensión Admisible) [Confronted (Admissible Tension Series)] has a fractured barrier and an air of resistance; it stands as the lone positive response to the struggle against injustice.

Teresa Margolles. La Búsqueda (The Search), 2014; multimedia installation with sound; 112.5 x 71 ¼ x 47 ¼ in., 112.5 x 38 x 47 ¼ in., and 112.5 x 52 x 47 ¼ in. Photo: Thomas Strub.

In Untitled (Mobius), artist Luis González Palma fabricated a roll of felt resembling a blanket or rug that reveals the face of a young woman obscured by red threads. The woman is from one of Guatemala’s vulnerable indigenous communities. Lacking basic human rights, these communities have been held back and suppressed. The contradiction of revealing and obscuring, along with the title’s reference to a Möbius strip, alludes to the past and present marginalization of these people.

Doris Salcedo. Untitled, 1995; wood, concrete, steel, glass, and cloth; 110 × 47 × 14 ½ in. Photo: Ken Howie.

The Colombian civil war and ensuing unrest and violence motivated Doris Salcedo to create works wrought with emotional and psychological tensions. Her untitled piece from 1995 is one of a large group of sculptures combining domestic wooden furniture with cement. An armoire has been filled with cement and rendered dysfunctional; the furniture and its associations with domesticity and the body become evocative of death and entombment.

Vincent Valdez. The Strangest Fruit, 2014; pencil on paper; 40 x 26 in.

In contrast to Salcedo’s more abstract references, there are two figurative drawings by Vincent Valdez from his The Strangest Fruit series. Inspired by the history of lynched Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the late 1800s well into the 1930s, the title is borrowed from Abel Meripool’s poem “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday’s 1930s recording of the same name. The haunting lyrics use the metaphor of “strange fruit” to characterize victims hanged from trees. Valdez individualizes the erased histories of Latinos by drawing his friends in the positions of the dead. Depicted in modern clothing, the young men in these drawings poetically reference the current state of racial discrimination toward Latinos in the United States.

Annie Lopez. Sighting Mexicans in Phoenix, 2012; cyanotype on paper; 26 ½ x 17 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Similarly, Phoenix-based artist Annie Lopez is a fourth-generation Mexican American who incorporates her personal history into works that echo the sentiments of discrimination that underpin the exhibition. Sighting Mexicans in Phoenix (2012) is a photograph of her mother and aunt walking happily down the street in the 1950s, printed with gun sights over their bodies in reference to current-day racial profiling. Naturalized Citizens (2013) uses her family’s naturalization papers to create a cyanotype paper dress that alludes to the need to display one’s citizenship when it is so often called into question just by outward appearance.

While the works in Hidden Histories bravely assert a multitude of issues in Latin America and the U.S., the question lingers as to why the exhibition is sequestered in a small gallery wrapped around the freight elevator. The Phoenix Art Museum’s concurrent exhibition features works by such heavy-hitting Latino artists as Alfredo Jaar, Vik Muniz, José Bedia Valdés, Félix González-Torres, and Luis Molina-Pantin, among others. It would have been refreshing to see the Hidden Histories works, more than half of which are by women, expanded in a larger space to allow the sound of those voices to go from a whisper to a shout.

Hidden Histories in Latin American Art is on view at the Phoenix Art Museum through August 23, 2015.

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Doris Salcedo. Plegaria Muda (detail), 2008-10; mixed media. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

After weaving through this opening work, one encounters a series of room-scale installations. As one moves through this archipelago of galleries, the somber stillness of Plegaria Muda continues. In one room, a waxy cloth the color of dried blood extends out from the back wall, its waves and wrinkles creating something of a topographic plane. In another, delicate garments made of thread and needles hang—empty and ethereal—on the wall. In yet another, the visitor finds coffin-like compartments embedded directly into the white gallery walls. Covered with semi-translucent skins, these grotesque shadow boxes contain single or mismatched shoes resting claustrophobically within.

Much has been written about Salcedo’s motivation for making her works and the raison d’etre for the artist’s many objects. Political violence in Salcedo’s homeland, Colombia; gun-related deaths in the cities in which she has worked; grief in response to inexplicable loss of human life; racism and other schisms that divide us violently, one from another—these are the subjects that captivate the artist’s interest. Working in response to these devastations, Salcedo has been creating sculptural and installation-based works for decades. As she remarks in the exhibition catalog: “The only possible response I can give in the face of irreparable absence is to produce images capable of conveying incompleteness, lack, and emptiness.” Both with and without this contextual admission, Salcedo’s works are often interpreted as evocative of human bodies.

Doris Salcedo. Atrabiliarios, 1992-2004 (detail); installation view, Doris Salcedo, MCA Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Salcedo’s most recognizable and affecting work is a series of concrete-laden armoires, dressers, chairs, bed frames, and other domestic furniture. This series, produced across two decades, is brought together here in a single large room. The rich wooden frames of the furniture are transformed into solid masses, their bowels filled with rebar and concrete; negative space is erased. In some of these structures, we can see ghosts of other objects—bits of lilac lace pressing, relief-like, against the edge of the concrete, or the partial frame of a chair appearing as if it is floating to the surface of a concrete pool. Posed in a frozen choreography, these objects stand like sentinels around the gallery. Despite the fragility, scale, and expense of these works (auction prices are set at hundreds of thousands of dollars), there are no barriers; they rest on the floor, allowing the audience to wander among them. For me, these are the objects that come the closest to translating intimacy and loss—through an impenetrable presence rather than an absence.

Installation view, Doris Salcedo, MCA Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

As I walked among Salcedo’s dressers and wardrobes, the words of Michael Fried and those of Gaston Bachelard came to mind. As Fried pointed out, minimalist (or “literalist,” to use his preferred term) sculptures scaled to the human body are read as anthropomorphic “presences” in our encounters with them. The act of viewing moves into one of bodily interaction with these forms that approach “the unitary and the wholistic” scale of “other persons,” an effect that Fried would call “disquieting.” In Bachelard’s romantic vision, these sorts of domestic furnishings—grouped as “Drawers, Chests, and Wardrobes” in a single chapter of his The Poetics of Space—are among the most intimate and personal. He writes: “Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life… They are hybrid objects, subject objects… A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.”

If we are to interpret Salcedo’s objects as analogs for bodies, these are bodies that are frozen, inert, trapped, and heavy. The intimate spaces—the voids that Bachelard describes—are filled with cement, the individualities of these objects stamped out definitively. These objects seem to embody oppression, making them strong examples of Salcedo’s inclinations toward the political and tragic. As objects, Saledo’s wardrobes are mysterious and macabre, but also figurative and open-ended. The rest of her retrospective echoes this duality, carrying through Salcedo’s ability to create uncanny environments that are nonetheless explicitly abstract. And yet, as they are framed here—and as they have been elsewhere, in no uncertain terms—these work are meant to speak specifically to loss of life, to political tragedies, and to the artist’s experience as a third-world citizen.

This is where the disconnect lies, for me: between rhetoric and reality. The installation includes little text, but offers an accompanying booklet that spells out the intent and meaning behind each of Salcedo’s cumulative abstractions. In one far corner of the exhibition, an entire gallery is set aside for a video screen on which Salcedo speaks about the meanings of her works. Instead of letting these objects rest—powerfully—in their own ability to communicate loss, alienation, and grief, the artist and the institution found it necessary to recite their meanings for them. Despite the beauty and the power of her installations, I left the exhibition wishing that Salcedo’s works had been framed and appreciated as the strong, sensory, and at times stunning objects that they are—that the exhibition’s organizers had placed enough faith in the powerful voices of the objects to allow them to speak for themselves.

Doris Salcedo is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through May 24, 2015.