Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This is an essay by the researcher and curator Carmen María Jaramillo published in a monograph on the Colombian artist Beatriz González. The author’s goal is to shed light on how González’s work exposes and challenges [...]

In this interview, art critic Marta Traba poses ten questions to Colombian artist Beatriz González. Traba begins by inquiring about the ironic nature of González’s subjects and the kitschy character of the objects she produces. In [...]

In this newspaper article, Marta Traba asserts that Beatriz González’s art epitomizes the Colombian avant-garde. It describes the difficulty of introducing González’s oeuvre at the XI Bienal de São Paulo, and states [...]

In this article, which appeared in El Espectador (Bogotá), Marta Traba defends the portrait of Simón Bolívar (“El Libertador”) made by Beatriz González from the attacks of conservative members of the Academia [...]

Journalist Alfonso Bonilla Aragón writes a review of a solo exhibition of the artist Beatriz González, which took place at the Museo La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia, in 1965. The show encompassed three bodies of work: nine oil paintings [...]

In this April 1964 magazine article, Marta Traba attests to Beatriz González’s artistic talents, reaffirming the decision by MAM (Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá) to exhibit the young artist’s work in a debut solo exhibition [...]

The Colombian critic Germán Rubiano Caballero ponders the theme of “re-creations” in the work produced by Beatriz González. In chronological order, he sets forth a detailed list of her main works, with special emphasis on those that take their [...]

In Venezuela, curator Katherine Chacón reviews the work of Colombian artist Beatriz González, particularly in reference to her re-creation of artistic masterpieces, in painting, drawing, and objects, since 1962. To do so she establishes connections [...]

In a text entitled “El Arte y la violencia en la era del narcotráfico” that deals with art and violence, Álvaro Medina describes and analyzes the radical transformation that the armed conflict in Colombia underwent in the early eighties. In it [...]

This chapter of the encyclopedia Historia del arte colombiano [History of Colombian Art] written by Germán Rubiano is divided into three parts. In the first part, Rubiano discusses the art that is referred to in the chapter and that he considers to [...]

Included in the art history research paper La experimentación en el arte colombiano del siglo XX, written by María Teresa Guerrero and Ivonne Pini, is a chapter entitled “El arte colombiano busca el concepto”. This section refers to the visual [...]

Marta Traba wrote an exhaustive chronicle on “the high and low points” of the Festival de Arte de Cali (1964). She highlighted the performance of the actress Fanny Mikey, the enthusiastic organizer of the event, who became “Califanny” for the [...]

Written by Marta Traba and published in the magazine Arte en Colombia, “El VII Salón Atenas” is perhaps the harshest criticism of the Colombian salons held in November. Traba argues that despite belief to the contrary, the Salon Atenas has not [...]

In this article, the theoretician Marta Traba critiques the 1978 Salón Nacional de Artistas. The Salón has been an annual fixture since 1940, and is considered the most important event on the Colombian visual arts calendar. In her article, Traba [...]

Beatriz González profiles the Colombian photographer Luís Benito Ramos Rodríguez, who produced an important body of work in the years between 1934 and 1950, during the period known as the República Liberal [Liberal Republic]. González, an artist [...]

The text, ¡Al Fin Pintura! (1976) [Painting, at Last!] was an introduction to the exhibition with the same name at the Galería Belarca in Bogotá, organized by Eduardo Serrano. This art critic emphasizes the acceptance of the drawing and the print [...]

The Revista Arte Internacional, published by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, dedicated its 15−16 edition to the theme “Latin America: Identity and Art.” In a special entry of the section “Registro,” Javier Gil, the Colombian art [...]

In this book, Marta Traba asserts that Colombian artist Beatriz González is “the ‘key figure’ to understanding a specifically Colombian strain of art.” Traba argues that on the basis of critical positions on culture in general and on popular [...]

In this article, art historian María Margarita Malagón-Kurka analyzes a series of works by Colombian artists that address the topic of violence. She argues that there are two distinct tendencies that took shape in two different historical moments. [...]

This document is a reflexive text in the style of a curriculum vitae, written by Beatriz González in 1973 about her own work over her lifetime. The first paragraph refers to irony as the identifying stamp of her painting, which can be seen as a [...]

This text is Boletín No. 94, issued in September 1976, included in the volume of Boletines No. 63 to 118 (January 1971 to December 1978), bound [and published] by the Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia in Cali. This was one of a series of [...]

This is the text for Otras Miradas = Other Glances, written by the historian and art critic Carmen María Jaramillo Jiménez for the exhibition that was organized with the help of the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2004. The [...]

This text by Eduardo Serrano is the introduction to the book Historia de la fotografía en Colombia (1840-1950). In it, Serrano explains the importance of the publication of this book for the fields of art and history insofar as it recovers the [...]

This text by Marta Traba—a well known Argentine critic who lived in Venezuela at the time—introduces the exhibition Los novísimos colombianos held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas in 1977. Traba analyzes the overall development of [...]

In this text, researcher María Iovino reflects on the place of performance in Colombian art. She begins with a discussion of María Teresa Hincapié’s work Una cosa es una cosa [A Thing Is a Thing], a performance that was awarded first prize at [...]

In this interview, artist Doris Salcedo and critic Carlos Basualdo—who is from Rosario, Argentina—analyze Salcedo’s career from her student days in Colombia in the late 1970s to the present—the late 1990s—when she had gained considerable [...]

The article “Génesis de una idea” [Genesis of an Idea] was published in La Re-vista in the early 1980s. In it, artist Álvaro Barrios explains his interest in French artist Marcel Duchamp, stating that it was through the study of Duchamp’s art [...]

Entitled “En la historia” [In History], this introduction to Después del límite [Beyond the Limit] summarizes critic and researcher María Iovino’s thinking on drawing and painting. Iovino asserts that Paul Cézanne was one of the artists [...]

In this text, Beatriz González recounts the history of the Salón Nacional, including the years during which it was not held (starting in 1980) and the reasons why. She also discusses the two retrospectives of the event: the first, which was held at [...]

Miguel Garzón, the journalist with the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador reported on the decision to eliminate prizes and honorable mentions at the XXIII Salón de Artistas Nacionales [XXIII National Artists’ Salon] in 1972. In his article, Garzón [...]

In the introduction to the exhibition Solidaridad held at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogota, Colombia, in 1976, Argentine critic Marta Traba—who lived in Puerto Rico for many years—explains that the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende was [...]

This document is the postcard invitation to the inauguration of the Corporación Ciudad Solar [Solar City Association], an independent cultural space in Cali, Colombia, established by Hernando Guerrero, Francisco “Pakiko” Ordóñez, and Miguel [...]

Katherine Chacón’s interview starts out with significant aspects from the life of the artist Beatriz González, especially those that influenced her work. It focuses on her university studies and professors, her family, the city where she was born [...]