Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This article by Colombian cultural journalist José Hernández reports the unexpected death of Colombian painter Antonio Barrera. It includes sections of an unpublished interview with Barrera that Hernández had written after visiting his apartment [...]

The introduction to this interview with Colombian artist Doris Salcedo by Santiago Villaveces provides a brief overview of the socio-political and economic situation in Colombia in the early nineties. The interview presents Salcedo in relation to the [...]

The Colombian writer Álvaro Cepeda Samudio published an article that included a “brief biography” of the painter Noé León, in which he writes about the time when the art critic José Gómez Sicre paid León a surprise visit at his “humble [...]

The Colombian publicist and photographer Carlos Duque interviews Karen Lamassonne, the versatile young artist who has worked in the fields of painting, printmaking, the movies, and video art. During the course of the interview, Duque enquires about [...]

Beatriz González reviews eight miniature drawings by José Antonio Suárez Londoño. Based on formal descriptions, she links each little drawing to specific moments in European art or science and to biographical facts about the Colombian artist. Su [...]

The first chapter of the article “Rodrigo Callejas o el paisaje como obsesión” [Rodrigo Callejas or Landscape as Obsession] by the Colombian painter and printmaker Alberto González Rodríguez discusses the distinction he makes between [...]

Raquel Tibol, an Argentinean critic and art historian who has lived in Mexico City since in 1953, and artist Leonel Góngora discuss work by Góngora considered erotic because it provides a sensual interpretation of reality. Tibol invites the [...]

La poetisa, galerista y crítica de arte Gloria Inés Daza conversa con Leonel Góngora sobre las motivaciones artísticas que desencadenaron su “obra erótica”; la muerte que azota a una sociedad “convencional y pacata” como la colombiana; y [...]

From Paris, cultural journalist José Hernández announces an exhibition of textile art being held at the Musée d’Art Moderne (MAM). The show, which featured work by Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, opened on April 29, 1981. It exhibited modern [...]

With this text, Colombian poet and essayist Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda introduces the exhibition of works by painter Manolo Vellojín held at Galería Garcés Velásquez in Bogotá in 1978. In Cobo Borda’s view, Holy Week (a Spanish religious [...]

The text “Utopía” (1992) by the curator and art critic Alberto Sierra introduced a retrospective exhibition by the Grupo Utopía of Medellín. Organized in 1979, this group was made up of the Colombian architects Jorge Mario Gómez, Patricia Gó [...]

In the document Ex-situ / In-situ. Moravia: prácticas artísticas en comunidad 1 (2008), the artists Fernando Escobar, Carlos Uribe and Juan Alberto Gaviria introduce the guidelines for the project Ex-situ / In-situ in Moravia. Regarding this [...]

In this article, artist and critic Jorge Moreno Clavijo contemplates the question of whether Colombian art is at its height or in a state of decline. To answer that question, he calls on artists Erwin Kraus, Gonzalo Ariza, Alipio Jaramillo, Luis [...]

The text “Código fuente: tácticas de combate” (2006) was written by Esteban Rey, artist and professor of art and technology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. It analyzes the processes involved in creating two artworks: both fuenteAbierta [...]

This brief review of an exhibition of work by Ricardo Gómez Campuzano at the Museo Nacional in Bogotá by the art critic who came from Austria, Walter Engel (signs “W.E.”), analyzes two characteristics of the artwork. First, it points out the [...]

The book Guía de la primera exposición anual organizada bajo la dirección del rector de dicha escuela, General Alberto Urdaneta (1886) features a collection of the works assembled for the 1886 exhibition. These works were gathered by Urdaneta, [...]

This article by the art critic Eduardo Márceles Daconte was published in the Sunday Magazine of the Bogotá daily newspaper El Espectador. The writer provides a brief account of the activities of the group El Sindicato, which emerged in Barranquilla [...]

This article, “Miguel Ángel Rojas. Rastrear el origen de una mirada indeleble” [Miguel Ángel Rojas: Tracing the Origins of an Indelible Perspective], is the product of an extensive interview with the artist identified in the title. In her [...]

In her article, “La Galería Santa Fe, una historia en tres momentos”, the freelance curator Ana María Lozano discusses the significant cultural changes that took place in Bogotá in recent decades and how this transformation made the city more [...]

The Colombian critic Miguel González performed a critical analysis of the visual artwork and writings of Clemencia Lucena. The article refers to Lucena’s recently published book, Anotaciones políticas sobre la pintura colombiana. Using a clearly [...]

In this exhaustive interview, Luz Adriana Hoyos, the journalist from Mundo magazine, talks to the Italian painter Umberto Giangrandi (who had lived in Colombia since 1966), discussing his work as a printmaker and promoter of the graphic arts in [...]

The Colombian curator and art critic Miguel González reviews the work of the photographer Patricia Bonilla in minute detail. The review begins with an interesting sentence: “These days it is not unusual to find interrelationships used in ways that [...]

“Observaciones” by Jaime Iregui, the artist and cultural agent, is the text from the first section of Tándem 2, the publication that also reported on the workshops presented at the exhibition Observaciones. Obra en Tándem con Carlos Salas [...]

This essay was written by the artist Rosemberg Sandoval as the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Dibujos sobre lona, video e instalación, Rosemberg Sandoval that was organized by the Galería Casas Riegner in 2009. In his essay, Sandoval [...]

Olga de Amaral: Cuatro tiempos is the title of the retrospective exhibition of works presented by the textile artist at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá from November 1993 to February 1994. It is also the title of the catalogue essay written by [...]

This brief obituary was written by the historian Daniel Arias Argáez following the death of the artist Ricardo Moros Urbina. It includes a short but detailed biographical profile that mentions Moros Urbina’s art studies at the Escuela de Bellas [...]

This brief essay, written by the artist Ricardo Moros Urbina, the priest Juan Crisóstomo García, and the historian Enrique Otero D’Costa, discusses the architectural and historical value of the building that houses the Convent of the Dominican [...]

“Las vanguardias son impuestas desde arriba” is the title of an article published in Sobre arte, a transcript of a magazine interview with the Colombian artist Leonel Góngora in August 1977. The brief introduction to the interview criticizes the [...]

In this article, Felipe González Espinosa discusses Judith Márquez’s activities as an artist and an intellectual agent in the public arena and in political and professional circles from 1954 to 1960. The article reviews the complex sociopolitical [...]

The chapter titled “Diario de viaje” [Travel Diary] is the first section of the essay Paisajes de la memoria [Landscapes of Memory] that Lorena Kraus wrote about her experience translating the German travel diaries into Spanish kept by her [...]

This essay appeared in the catalogue of Carlos Caicedo, Reportero Gráfico, the exhibition presented at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1976. In his essay, the writer and journalist Daniel Samper Pizano discusses the work of the [...]

This essay by the critic Jaime Cerón appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Ruven Afanador presented at Fotomuseo in 2002. Cerón divides his essay into three sections, as follows: i) “Entrada” [Entrance], in which he describes photography [...]

This article is from the brochure for one of the first video installations ever to be exhibited in Colombia: Gilles Charalambos “Tortas de trigo”; it was shown at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1981. In the article, José Hernán Aguilar [...]

In this essay, Rodrigo Facundo introduced his art project En la punta de la lengua, which took an in-depth look at how countries (for example Colombia) use photographic images in official reports on events, and the role played by memory, both [...]

“Cuerpo final: el máximo lienzo” [Final Body: The Ultimate Canvas], an article written by Santiago Echeverry, appeared in the second edition of Clave 019–17, the magazine published by Multimedia Creation Major in the art department at the [...]

This article about the recent exhibition of works by José Horacio Martínez appeared in the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo. The writer of the article describes some of the paintings in this artist’s series about food that were on display at the Galer [...]

This chapter provides a detailed and well-documented chronological profile of Dora Ramírez, the painter from Antioquia, illustrated with photographs from her own personal album. It describes her family life, her early marriage (and her six children [...]

In this article, José Ignacio Roca critically reviews Twin Murders, and Other Exercises (2001), the exhibition of works by the Colombian artist François Bucher that was presented in the exhibition hall at the Alliance Française in Bogotá. The [...]

The article “Jaime Ávila,” written by Natalia Gutiérrez, was published in issue number 110 (June 2007) of the Revista Arte en Colombia. It was a critical and historical review of the work of Jaime Ávila Ferrer. Gutiérrez, an anthropologist, [...]

The article “De Obregón a nuestro tiempo: el tiempo del arte contemporáneo del Caribe colombiano”, written by the historian Danny González Cueto, was published in May 2007 in the “Notas de arte desde el Caribe” section in issue number [...]

The article by Álvaro Barrios “La geometría como proceso en Sara Modiano” was published on May 10, 1979 in the Barranquilla newspaper El Heraldo, on the occasion of the solo exhibition of works by the Colombian artist Sara Modiano at the Galer [...]

“Sara Modiano: Orden y Geometría” was written by the Colombian historian José Agustín Blanco Barros and published on May 10, 1979, in the Barranquilla newspaper El Heraldo. The article was written to coincide with the opening (also on May 10) [...]

“Un exquisito ‘déjà vu’”is an article written by the critic and historian José Hernán Aguilar. It is a review of an exhibition of paintings by Carlos Salas. The article begins by describing what the author sees as a paradoxical problem [...]

In 1973, the Colombian printmaker Luis Ángel Rengifo published the book Caminos, paisajes y museos, an account of his forty-five-day journey through Europe. The book traces his steps from the time he boarded a plane in Bogotá on April 26, 1970, [...]

Rodrigo Orrantia’s essay is about En la punta de la lengua (1997), the work that the Colombian artist Rodrigo Facundo installed at the Bogotá Galería Santa Fe Planetarium for the II Premio Luis Caballero (1997). Orrantia’s analysis of the [...]

“Pedro Manrique Figueroa. Precursor del ‘collage’ en Colombia” [Pedro Manrique Figueroa: Harbinger of Collage in Colombia] (1999) consists of an appendix and three sections, as follows: “The Zero Years,” “The Pink Years,” and “The [...]

The article “La Bienal de Venecia de Bogotá – BVB” [The Venice Biennial in Bogotá - BVB] (2008), written by Franklin Aguirre, was published in the sixth issue of the Chilean magazine Plus. This magazine was printed and published under the [...]

These remarks by the printmaker Luis Ángel Rengifo, who was interviewed by the journalist Dolly Mejía, were published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Salón Gregorio Vásquez at the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia in September 1953. [...]

The law of September 22, 1867 that was passed by the Congress of the United States of Colombia created the Universidad Nacional de los Estados Unidos de Colombia, a national, public, and free university in keeping with the Humboldtian concept of [...]

The text “Negret” by the Argentine art critic based in Colombia, Marta Traba, consists of an analysis of the entire body of work of the sculptor Édgar Negret up to 1964. This is probably one of the first articles on the artist to present all his [...]