Shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition was organized as part of the City of Chicago’s Festival of the Americas to coincide with the Third Pan American Games in the summer of 1959. The exhibition was one of the first in the 1950s, and the first ever held in Chicago, to feature a collection of artworks by contemporary artists of the continent drawn from mostly private collections in the United States. By bringing together artworks of established artists with those of young and emerging ones, the exhibition offered a survey of modern and late-1950s art trends marked by what curator Joseph Randall Shapiro characterized as “international style.” This exhibition is remarkable in that it was organized and installed by Shapiro, a prominent Chicago lawyer and businessman. Shapiro, as chairman of the Visual Arts Program of the Games, traveled for four months around the U.S. at his own expense, visiting galleries, museums, and art dealers to gather the most representative sample of Latin American art in styles that ranged from abstraction and surrealism to expressionism and realism. Shapiro (1904–1996), along with his wife Jory, began their extensive collection of modern and contemporary art in 1942. By the late 1950s it included artworks by Latin American artists [Roberto] Matta, [Wifredo] Lam, Hurtado, [José Luis] Cuevas, Villegas, Vigas, and others. Shapiro eventually bequeathed his art collection to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, of which he was a founding member and president.