Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This document is a review by Alfred Frankenstein of The Fifth Sun: Contemporary/Traditional Chicano and Latino Art exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum in 1977. Frankenstein begins by describing the show, detailing the [...]

This is an essay by independent scholar Max Benavídez in which he considers the impact of what he calls the “internal exile and displacement,” and decades of social marginalization on the self-identification of many Chicanos. He explores the [...]

This document by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is concerned with the practice of altar-making as a spiritual and cultural endeavor that blends influences from European, African, and indigenous American sources. Typically characterized as a kind of “folk [...]

This document is the transcript of an interview between arts writer Meredith Tromble and Chicana visual artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship awardee, Mesa-Bains talks about her motivations as an artist, and her particular [...]

The essay is a brief artist statement in which Amalia Mesa-Bains recounts her beginnings as an altar-maker at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco in the late 1970s and her subsequent transition from constructing personal altars to public [...]

In this document, Professor Amelia Malagamba discusses the practice of altar making, a traditional form of cultural production from Mexico that has been further developed by Chicano artists living in the United States. Her focus is on articulating a [...]

The Cuban-American artist Paul Sierra begins this lecture, delivered at the Terra Museum of Art in Chicago, by declaring that even though he has been asked to speak about the “sources of Hispanic Art,” he has decided to speak instead about [...]

In this document, scholar and curator Chon Noriega uses the model of identity articulated by José Martí in order to construct a more accurate understanding of U.S. Latino cultural expression and, more specifically, Latino installation art. He [...]

The author, Susan Keller, ponders the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains within the context of the Mexican-American social empowerment movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as the Chicano Movement. A figurehead of her generation, Mesa-Bains looked to [...]

The author, Susan Keller, ponders the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains within the context of the Mexican-American social empowerment movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as the Chicano Movement. A figurehead of her generation, Mesa-Bains looked to [...]

Judith Brodsky, director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, and Isabel Nazario, director of the Center for Latino Arts and Culture at Rutgers University, outline the reasons that led them to invite Latina artists to serve as [...]

Judith Brodsky, director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, and Isabel Nazario, director of the Center for Latino Arts and Culture at Rutgers University, outline the reasons that led them to invite Latina artists to serve as [...]

This essay by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto was included in the catalogue of the 1987 exhibition, Grotto of the Virgins: Installation by Amalia Mesa-Bains, which was held at the INTAR Latin American Gallery in New York. Ybarra-Frausto discusses the [...]

In this review of the exhibition Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings, Victor Alejandro Sorell writes that the border is the exhibition’s overarching and master trope. The exhibition features works of art by the “greater Mexican [...]