Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The anthropologist and art critic Natalia Gutiérrez examines some representative works by Colombian artists in order to analyze Colombian art of the 1990s. She believes this method helps her to avoid using general theories that “pigeonhole” them [...]

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 article “Arte Joven con inflación” [Young Art with Inflation] (1991) was written by Ana María Escallón as a review of the seventh edition of the exhibition Nuevos Nombres [New Names] (1991) and published in the Bogotá newspaper El [...]

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 [...]

In this article, critic and art historian Charles Merewether points out that works like those of Doris Salcedo have an ethical and social role to play in societies where violence is a daily event. In such societies, the pain of the victims and their [...]

Doris Salcedo gave this lecture in 2003 at the National Museum in Colombia. She discusses three of the projects she presented in the1990s in Colombia, Holland, Turkey, and Germany: Atrabiliarios [Defiant] (2), Un acto de memoria [An Act of Memory], [...]

In this interview, Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael Herzog discuss the different stages of Salcedo’s artistic career, and the concepts and ideas important to her, specifically: her vision of herself as a “political artist” from a third world [...]

In this interview, Doris Salcedo replies to the following questions, which were asked of all the artists who took part in the exhibition Nuevos Nombres-Seguimiento [New Names—Follow-up]: How would you define contemporary? How does your work [...]

Entitled “The Dynamic of Violence,” this article by researcher and art critic Olga M. Viso analyzes specific works by Doris Salcedo such as Atrabiliarios [Defiant]and Casa Viuda [The Widowed House], as well as Sin título [Untitled] furniture ( [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 article, Colombian anthropologist Pilar Riaño Alcalá presents the concepts underlying her reflections on the connection between art and social processes, as well as between public art, art in general, and memory in Colombia.  On the basis [...]

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 article, the British critic Rod Mengham reviews Doris Salcedo’s installation Neither (2004) in terms of the Colombian artist’s career, identifying significant changes in her work since 2002. Up until that point, Salcedo had produced [...]

Gerardo Mosquera considers the usefulness of the idea of Latin American art, ultimately taking a firm position against it as it has been understood up to now. He begins by describing Latin American culture’s “neurosis of identity” as the [...]

In this article, curator and art critic Dan Cameron analyzes and discusses the works Atrabiliarios [Defiant], La Casa Viuda [The Widowed House ],and La túnica del huérfano [Orphan’s Tunic], which form part of Doris Salcedo’s Unland series. [...]

This text by Carolina Ponce de León discusses the flurry of exhibitions on the topic of Latin American art that took place in the early nineties in the United States and Europe on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery [...]

Susan Best, the North American researcher and art critic, suggests that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on perception and aesthetic experience are especially well suited to interpreting (non-representational) contemporary works [...]