Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In his essay, scholar and curator Chon Noriega explores the process of writing alternative histories through three case studies in Chicano visual arts. He presents each example as the result of an engagement with both identity politics and the [...]

Puerto Rican art historian and curator Petra Barreras describes Rafael Montañez Ortiz’s work as startling and demanding of responses from viewers. She calls Ortiz “a shaman” who has continually looked for ways to heal society through art. [...]

In this essay, art historian Marimar Benitez applies Walter Benjamins’s concept of the “aura” of the work of art, and its reduction in the age of mechanical reproduction to the assumed role of the museum as a religious temple of art. Comparing [...]

In this statement, artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz describes the process by which he created Archaeological Find, Number 9. Through a ritualistically-prescribed series of destruction sessions, Ortiz recounts how he ripped the sofa apart, thus “ [...]

Chon Noriega states that as a central figure of the Destructivist movement, Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s (b. 1934) work—between 1957 and 1967—can be understood as a reaction to the social detachment of the postwar avant-garde, thus marking a shift [...]

In this essay, art historian Kristine Stiles provides the most comprehensive essay written to date on the work of Rafael Montañez Ortiz, who is recognized as an innovator in the destruction art movement of the 1960s. Stiles’s essay chronicles [...]