Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This document is a handwritten excerpt from the journal of Carlos Almaraz in which he discusses what he sees as the problem of “art for art’s sake” and the ways in which this kind of artistic outlook prevents certain sectors of society from [...]

This document is a short handwritten entry from the journal of Carlos Almaraz. He begins with a discussion of how his art should be a product of daily practice. He then comments that his aim is to achieve a sense of poetry in his work but at a visual [...]

This document is a handwritten letter from the journal of Carlos Almaraz to William Wilson, a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. He was responding to an exhibition review by Wilson, titled “30 Works from the Grass Roots.” In it, the author [...]

This handwritten journal excerpt from Carlos Almaraz has a compilation of notes on his thoughts about the potential Marxism of Andy Warhol’s artistic practice. He suggests that Warhol’s work displays Marxist tendencies in its seriality, which [...]

This document is a proposal for a symposium on the state of Chicano/Latino art practices and education in California. According to the anonymous author, the conference would be organized around panels of visual artists, musicians, and various other [...]

In this document, Margarita Nieto details the influence of the School of Mexican Painting on the artistic production in the United States during the twenty-year period preceding World War II. She argues that contact between the two countries during [...]

This document is a handwritten agenda for a meeting held in 1974 of the Chicano artist collective known as Los Four. It lists six items for discussion: criteria, attitude, technical skills, philosophical notions, educational goals, and financial [...]

This review by Washington Post staff writer Paul Richard is of the 1988 group exhibition, Ceremony of Memory: Expressions in Spirituality among Contemporary Hispanic Artists, organized by the Washington Project for the Arts, in Washington, DC. [...]

In this document, independent scholar Max Benavidez sets out to establish a working definition of post-Chicano art. He suggests that early on there were two commonly held views of Chicano identity articulated in visual production: one that glorified [...]

This document is a brief introduction to the major conceptual underpinnings of the 1990 exhibition and symposium, Post-Chicano Generation in Art: Breaking Boundaries. Liz Lerma Bowerman suggests that while the definition of post-Chicano art has yet [...]

In this interview of art historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto by professor Michael Dear, the latter asks a series of questions related to Ybarra-Frausto’s impressions and experiences of the Chicano cultural project since its development in the 1960s as [...]

This document is a transcript of a conference presentation given by art historian Shifra M. Goldman. In her talk, she defends the validity of contemporary Latin American and Chicano art as fields of study for art historians, criticizing detractors [...]

This document by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto details the founding of La Galería de la Raza in San Francisco Mission District in July 1970. Conceived as a space for the development and promotion of Chicana/o visual artists, the Galería also functioned as [...]

This document is an essay by Shifra M. Goldman in which she proposes that contemporary art criticism is in a state of crisis, a situation she attributes to the “problematics of modernism.” Goldman argues that art criticism’s internal turmoil is [...]

This document, written by curator Rolando Castellón, introduces the exhibition, Aesthetics of Graffiti, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art between April and July 1978. The statement defines the scope of the show, suggesting that two [...]

This document is a grant proposal made by the Concilio de Arte Popular: State Coalition of La Raza Artists to secure funding for the development of a twelve-member organizing board to make collective decisions regarding various aspects of Chicano/ [...]