Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This article by Marcel Gromaire was published in AIAPE magazine—a champion of social realism in art—at a crucial point in the debate over aesthetics in Montevideo: the beginning of painting’s slide toward a “politically committed” form of [...]

Mário Schenberg, the author of this text, considers José Roberto Aguilar a pioneer of Brazilian “magic art”—an important movement that, in his view, has been misunderstood. Unlike nouvelle figuration, which spread through Europe after [...]

In this critique ---which has a biographical tenor--- of the work of engraver Darel Valença Lins, poet and diplomat Vinicius de Moraes juxtaposes Darel’s origins with those of writer José Lins do Rego.  Although both were raised near sugar [...]

This essay, written by the art critic Roberto Pontual, is a biographical and artistic profile of the artist Roberto Magalhães, in which the author underscores Magalhães’ penchant for working independently from his colleagues in the Nova Figura [...]

This article is an attempt to address what is known as “Realismo Mágico” [Magic Realism], which the author asserts, is not a movement, school, or philosophy, but quite simply “Rex”—that is, the artist Wesley Duke Lee, his character “ [...]

In order to emphasize the differences between the art life of the Brazilian printmakers Oswaldo Goeldi and that of Lívio Abramo, the writer focuses on Abramo. For Goeldi, time well spent took place on the beaches of South Rio (a tourist area) such [...]

Curator and art critic Leslie Judd Ahlander introduces¡Mira! [Look!], the exhibition that was presented at the Canadian Club of Hispanic Art in 1989, curated by Susana Torruella Leval, Inverna Lockpez, and Ricardo Pau-Llosa. This exhibition offered [...]

In this introduction, Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges explain how the theme of “the fantastic” underlies the art of the twenty-nine artists included in the exhibition The Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987. In explaining their [...]

This document includes two articles from the catalog for the exhibition Myths: Recent Paintings by Alejandro Romero held at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago from April 19–July 7, 1991. The first article considers Romero’s use of [...]

Art historian Shifra M. Goldman writes with great acuity and depth about the traveling exhibition, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987, and subsequently went to the Queens [...]

In this newspaper article, Eduardo Robles Piquer (alias RAS) describes the exhibition Homenaje a la necrofilia and interviews the painter and writer Carlos Contramaestre, whose work is shown at the exhibition, and who is a member of El Techo de la [...]

In this essay for an exhibition of seven contemporary Latino artists entitled HOT!, Grant Samuelsen considers the term "magical realism" and its inadequacy as a label applied to contemporary Latino art. Samuelsen states that such labeling robs these [...]

In this feature on the Cuban-American artist Paul Sierra, Jeff Huebner writes the artist’s biography, his recent ascent in the mainstream art world, and the attendant conflicts that arose in relationship to his status as a Latino artist. Huebner [...]