In the paper, “La comunicación en las artes nuevas: un papel de trabajo,” María Elena Ramos, director of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, presents a keen investigation, a cross-section, and discusses the state of the art at the heart of contemporary Latin American thinking and art. Ramos consulted well-known experimental artists such as Claudio Perna (1938?97), Yeni y Nan [Jeny and Nan] and the art critics Frederico Morais (Brazilian) and both Jorge Romero Brest (1905?1989) and Marta Traba (1923?83) from Argentina. Through these consultations, the writer developed a conceptual and aesthetic framework that allowed her to track aspects of Abstract, experimental and critical art in Latin America.
In the context of the IV Bienal de Arte de Coltejer [Fourth Coltejer Art Biennial] in Medellín, Colombia, in November 1981, with the support of the Colombian art critic, Alberto Sierra, the Peruvian critic based in Mexico, Juan Acha (1916?95) invited critics, artists and art theoreticians to the I Coloquio de Arte No Objetual organized by the recently founded Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Art] of Medellín (MAMM). The symposium sought to establish a Latin American line of thinking on art practices of an experimental nature under development in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Participants included the critics, Nelly Richard, Néstor García Canclini (b. 1939), María Elena Ramos, Mirko Lauer (b. 1947), Alfonso Castrillón and Óscar Olea as well as artworks by Ana Mendieta (1948−85), Cildo Meireles (b. 1948), the No Grupo [No Group], Felipe Erenberg (b. 1943), Carlos Zerpa (b. 1950), and Marta Minujín (b.1943), among others. The Symposium established benchmarks that were alternatives to the theory of the dematerialization of the art object and Conceptualism, as defined in the United States and Europe. Such discussions were unusual at the time in Colombia and other parts of Latin America.