Critiques in, and of, their context

For instance, the Peruvian artist Alfredo Márquez made works in 1989 borrowing Andy Warhol’s depiction of Mao, and he was sent to prison, accused of being a member of the Maoist insurgent group Shining Path. They were actually a critique of Shining Path. He was released after four years. His bold, comic “La Linea Lila,’’ a triptych in gold, black, and red, echoes those incendiary works: Márquez’s screen prints with paint leave only the radiant outline of the head of Warhol’s Mao, but add voluptuous lips from Warhol’s depictions of Marilyn Monroe, unmanning the communist dictator.

Falconi provides copious notes for Márquez and certain other artists. There’s Roberto Jacoby, an icon of artistic activism in Argentina for more than 40 years. His “Venus Banknote’’ is the official currency for a community he founded during the economic crisis of the early 2000s, when the Argentine peso had little value. And Chilean Lotty Rosenfeld, whose photograph “Palacio de la Monedo’’ documents her protest outside the Chilean military’s executive office in 1983, during the Pinochet regime. She glued strips across lane dividers in the street to create white crosses as a memorial to victims of the attack against the democratically-elected President Salvador Allende during the coup in 1973.

For many other works, Falconi fails to provide the social context of their making, which is what this show is supposed to be all about. Mario Navarro’s “Engine,’’ for example, is a series of four striking photos depicting the trails from spinning white lights. When asked for an explanation, Falconi responded by e-mail: Each image has at its center an acronym for a Latin American guerrilla movement, Falconi noted, such as FARC, MIR, EZLN. “The artist seems to suggest that by looking at the projection of their name in space we might be able to see the model (the social model) they offer and fight for,’’ Falconi wrote.