Telenovela Tropes Take Center Stage at Americas Society

The exhibition "Telenovela" is now open at the Americas Society in New York, running through March 27. It gathers 52 artworks made from the 1970s to the present by 57 artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States, spanning photography, video, painting, and drawing.

"Telenovelas are a historical phenomenon," Americas Society chief curator Aimé Iglesias Lukin told ARTnews. "They are a very important part of Latin America, but also international culture. They were the most consumed television product of the 1990s. And it's a way to make, through art, a history of that period and a history of that moment of culture."

The show opens with a staged telenovela set: four wall-mounted screens playing melodramatic scenes from Pablo Helguera's installation Entre la gloria y el olvido (Between Glory and Oblivion), part of his ongoing Instituto de la Telenovela (2007–). Visitors experience the telenovela from three viewpoints — the writer at the desk, the actors in front of the cameras, and the audience watching it unfold.

"I thought it was so beautiful to think about the possibilities of art but also of telenovelas—to do this jump between fiction and reality and to allow a space of fantasy that also allows us to rethink our everyday life," Iglesias Lukin said of Helguera's work.

Beyond the introduction, the exhibition argues that telenovelas are media constructs that influence public discourse, reinforce stereotypes, and shape social norms around gender, class, and power — through three mainstay tropes: the emotional woman, the macho cowboy, and the loyal maids in extravagant mansions.

The Construct of Melodrama

Phil Collins and Christian Jankowski both edit telenovela scenes into video works that expose these recurring motifs. Collins's 2008 telenovela-style adaptation soy mi madre depicts class conflict among emotionally driven women. Jankowski's Crying for the March of Humanity (2012) examines the macho cowboy as a stabilizing force. Stefan Ruiz's photographic series "The Factory of Dreams" explores loyal maids in lavish settings — Azucena Preciado Hernández and Claudia Janet Prado Terrazas, Amarte es mi pecado (2003) shows its named subjects in uniform, seated at a dining table.

Wilson Diaz captures the genre's foundation in TV Guía o El amor nunca deja de ser (TV Guide or Love Never Stops Being, 2026), a mixed-media installation of 24 LP soundtracks and painted canvases. Diaz centers music as the emotional vehicle that gives the character tropes their philosophical structure and psychologically seduces audiences into internalizing ideas of social dynamics.

"The telenovela shouldn't be understood merely as entertainment, but as a cultural phenomenon that links different social dynamics through the emotions, conflicts, and experiences that make up people's daily lives," Diaz told ARTnews. "It's a fascinating subject because it connects so many different points—from the personal, the auto-geographic, and auto-ethnographic, to the broader context of society."

For TV Guía, Diaz pairs vintage vinyl from famous telenovelas produced in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela with LP-shaped canvases of women expressing pain, anger, worry, and sadness, with only a few scenes of joy. Diaz drew on his own childhood in Colombia, watching telenovelas with his mother, and on how their music shaped his internalization of stereotypical behaviors of women — translated here into a commentary on the hardships women endure.

Emotional Women

Telenovelas have largely reinforced the image of Latin American women as unstable figures who reach happiness only through a sequence of obstacles. Collins's soy mi madre stages this stereotype through the relationship between a wealthy woman and her servants.

"I spent a lot of time watching 1980s telenovelas like Cuna de lobos [Den of Wolves] and El extraño retorno de Diana Salazar [The Strange Return of Diana Salazar], where you also see this huge excess in the ways in which people look and the ways people act. These ideas about economies and rich and poor. These became very much at the heart of [this adaptation]," Collins said.

The idea took root while Collins worked on a commission in Aspen, Colorado, where Latinx workers sustaining the town's manicured perfection told him they went home to watch telenovelas after exhausting workdays. In his adaptation, the rich protagonist Señora Sabel and the young servant Solana yell, hurl insults, and dwell in sorrow and jealousy, presented as dramatic, one-dimensional figures ruled by emotion. When Solana and her mother Clarita seek financial help for Solana's dying husband, Sabel offers zero empathy — highlighting how the poor and working class survive within the parameters of inequality.

Loyal Maids in Extravagant Mansions

Ruiz's portrait of two actresses playing servants, seated in their employer's lavish entertainment room, flips the class divide by challenging the power structure. "What [this piece] meant to me was to put them on the same stage, give them equal billing, treat them in the same way as I treated the stars and anyone else," Ruiz said.

Ruiz, who grew up watching telenovelas with his grandmother, spent eight years in the early 2000s photographing actors inside Televisa, the Mexican production company behind the global telenovela factory. Ironically, the industry mirrored the tropes it broadcast: the actors were divided by class in ways that resembled their on-screen roles.

"The women who portrayed the maids were definitely from a lower class themselves. They were surprised that I wanted to photograph them," Ruiz said. "They definitely felt like they were more on the periphery of the filming."

Macho Cowboy

At the top of the telenovela power structure sits the macho cowboy, whose jealousy, anger, and confrontation pass as strength or romantic gesture. Jankowski's Crying for the March of Humanity challenges this by remaking an entire episode of the Mexican telenovela La que no podía amar (The One Who Couldn't Love, 2011), replacing all 40-some minutes of dialogue with crying. After some convincing, Televisa let him film an extra round of one of its productions for the artwork.

"In each of the scenes, the crying just goes on and not a single word is spoken between the actors, but they simply give the whole spectrum of human suffering or crying to each other," Jankowski said.

Stripped of dialogue, the macho cowboy cries as vulnerably as the "emotional woman" beside him. "In a way, I think for me, this piece writes history as a new extreme development," Jankowski said. "It's the essence of the essence in my points of a telenovela and, for me, it sums up the telenovela, too."

Through March 27, "Telenovela" positions the genre not as disposable melodrama but as a record of how Latin America watched — and was shaped by — its most consumed cultural product.