With a typeface that imitates the hand’s motion and elicits a familiar and even nostalgic effect, the exhibition title design for ¡Feria! Folk Art from Regional Fairs in Latin America attempts to recall the feeling of provincial handmade advertisement placards. It’s a whimsical pretense and an effort to attach a sense of the bucolic to the exhibited works at the San Antonio Museum of Art. ¡Feria! highlights the museum’s permanent collection of twentieth-century Latin American folk art with a selection of artisan-created papier-mâché dolls, games, carousel figures and toys.

¡Feria! opens with a small group of caricaturesque archetype papier-mâché dolls from Mexico under a large vitrine. Figures such as a tramp, a blind man, a bandit and a jaguar warrior sit upright in a proverbial early twentieth-century Mexican lineup. Next to the display case appears a set of watercolor lotería cards from Jalisco. Traditionally played throughout Latin America, lotería is like bingo: one person calls out an image at random while players cover a copy of that image if it appears on their cards. The object of the game is to cover the game card.

This set of framed watercolor lotería cards taps into Mexico’s creation of its national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After winning independence from Spain in 1810 and the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the Mexican government used lotería, like other popular arts, as an informal device to create a civic identity that integrated flags, monuments, flora and fauna, indigenous symbols and colonial history into a national iconography.

In the entire exhibition, the lotería watercolors are the only works with wall text and the only works purchased with the museum’s Latin American Acquisition Funds. Given the museum’s vested interest in these sets, it’s surprising that they appear in the corner of the ¡Feria! gallery space. Perhaps the somber tone of the pastoral figures in rustic brown frames didn’t fare as well as the iridescent carousel seats more prominently placed in the center of the gallery. It’s even more unfortunate that ¡Feria!’s curators missed the chance to use the lotería cards as a cornerstone in an exhibition that avoided the pastoral utopianism of ¡Feria! and instead spoke to folk art’s historical and cultural roles.

Unlike the museum’s previous exhibitions,1 ¡Feria! has no apparent trajectory. The exhibition statement is full of generalized observations regarding cultural and ethnic practices and the vitality of the community fair in Latin America, using anecdotal vignettes rather than scholarship. With phrases such as “wide-eyed visitors are often lured into spending their scarce funds on lotería (bingo), roulette, and other games of chance,” the introductory statement glosses over even the artworks to which it refers.

Undistinguished as objects, the remaining works of ¡Feria! merely blend together via shared color palettes and undetermined recreational functions. Organized subjectively—for example there is a large black-and-white reproduction of Leopoldo Méndez’s linoleum print The Merry-Go-Round unnecessarily situated above the carousel-themed pieces—¡Feria! falls into a common difficulty of other folk art exhibitions. The geographical variances, temporal inconsistencies and diversity of folk works often form a significant challenge to curators wishing to craft a cohesive curatorial theme that reaches beyond comparable formal qualities. Where the curators of ¡Feria! could have emphasized folk art’s role in the creation of a calculated national identity, they failed and fell back on a shallow cultural romanticism. Given the programming history of the San Antonio Museum of Art, this seems like an anomalous occurrence with regards to their treatment of Latin American art. However, it provides an apt warning to others seeking to exhibit folk and/or Latin American art.

• 1. Although a relatively modest space, the Golden Gallery is part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art. Their earlier exhibitions leaned towards the more traditional curatorial approach by avoiding a conceptual theme, with 2010’s La Gran Lucha: Popular Graphics from Independence through the Mexican Revolution showcasing works on paper from the ever popular El Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop) and 2008-2009’s Perspectivas Populares: Nontraditional Folk Art from Spain, Mexico and South Texas displaying international folk art.