The Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia [La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art], in Colombia, published the portfolio: Primera Colección de Grabados [First Collection of Prints], under the technical direction of Puerto Rican master Lorenzo Homar. He spent two months at the workshop in 1976, involved in the project and teaching silkscreen printing. The idea for the portfolio was suggested during a conversation that included the artist Pedro Alcántara, Maritza Uribe, president of the Museo La Tertulia, and Gloria Delgado Restrepo, director of the museum. Alcántara had spent a week at the Taller del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña [Puerto Rican Cultural Institute Workshop] in San Juan, and after a close look at Homar’s silkscreen technique she asked him to come to Colombia to teach a group of artists this way of printing. The artists included in the portfolio were: Edgar Negret, Enrique Grau, Juan Antonio Roda, Pedro Alcántara, Luis Caballero, and María de la Paz Jaramillo. Pedro Alcántara had an exhibition in Puerto Rico in 1970. He and Homar became friends and corresponded frequently. Lorenzo Homar (San Juan, PR, 1913–2004) was a printmaker, poster artist, calligrapher, book illustrator, clothes designer, and teacher of an entire generation of Puerto Rican printmakers. In 1952 he was named director of the Taller de Gráfica de la División de Educación de la Comunidad [Community Education Division Print Workshop] (DIVEDCO), a post he held until 1957. In 1955 he organized the Taller de Gráfica del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and remained there until 1973. He later had his own workshop, where he perfected his silkscreen printing technique. This issue of Plástica magazine was devoted to art in Latin America; it was produced by Ernesto Ruiz de la Mata, the Puerto Rican critic, who organized the Centro de Documentación de Arte Latinoamericano [Center for the Documentation of Latin American Art] in Puerto Rico during the 1980s. Some of the articles included in this issue were lectures delivered at various conferences and symposia that were collected here for the first time; other essays were contributed by their authors with no particular subject guidelines. This was the first time that a Puerto Rican magazine addressed the question of contemporary Latin American art. Plástica magazine, where this review was published, was an art publication that appeared fairly regularly in Puerto Rico. It began modestly enough in 1968, as the newsletter of the Liga de arte de San Juan [San Juan Art League], but changed its name in 1978 to Plástica revista de la Liga de estudiantes de San Juan [San Juan Student League Visual Arts Magazine]. Its very specific title notwithstanding, the twenty-one issues of the magazine explored a wide range of subjects within the broad parameters of Puerto Rican and Latin American art, filling its pages with retrospective coverage of subjects, such as the V Bienal de San Juan del grabado latinoamericano y del Caribe [5th San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Prints] (1981), Puerto Rican architecture, and Latin American visual arts. The first editorial board of the magazine included Hélène Saldaña, Delta Picó, Cordelia Buitrago, and J.M. García Segovia. In addition to the many essays written by top Puerto Rican thinkers, the magazine published contributions from some of the leading Latin American artists and critics, such as Luis Camnitzer, Damián Bayón, Jacqueline Barnitz, Samuel Cherson, Joseph Alsop, Omar Rayo, and Ricardo Pau Llosa, among many others.
