LONG BEACH, CA.- The Museum of Latin American Art will inaugurate The Lexus Gallery with Photoshopping and More: MOLAA Collects Photo-Based Art, an exhibition of 20 photo-based media works from the MOLAA Permanent Collection. Since its inception in 1996, the MOLAA Permanent Collection has focused on collecting works of art created in the traditional media of painting, sculpture, drawing and prints. In 2006, the museum began to include photography in the collection due to an art donation from the Puerto Rican artist Carlos Betancourt. Subsequently, with additional donations from collectors and artists, the museum's photo-based art collection has grown and now includes more than 20 photo-based media works

"Lexus recognizes the passion and dedication these artists have put into their works," said Dave Nordstrom, Lexus vice president of marketing. "We're proud they are being showcased in The Lexus Gallery and hope that MOLAA visitors are engaged and intrigued by this artwork."

In the last twenty years, thanks to advances in technology, the photographic medium has become recognized as a fine art medium. In 1990, Logitech came out with the world's first completely digital consumer camera known as the Dycam Model 1 Black-and-White Digicam. Also released in 1990, was the computer software program Photoshop, a digital based technology. The program has allowed artists a broader range of experimentation and is the preferred and primary market software used for image manipulation.

As artists experimented with digital technology, the limits between conventional photography and other media became blurred; it is not uncommon to find works of art that combine painting, drawing, sculpture, etc., with forms of photography, subsequently, introducing a new era of photo-based art.

Latin American artists have had easy access to this technology and have fully embraced the incorporation of digital technology in their artistic practice. This is one of the reasons Latin American photography exploded onto the international art scene in the 1990s. With this exhibition, MOLAA presents a selection of traditional photography, digital-manipulated photographic images, videos and photo-installations from the molaa Permanent Collection and Holdings.