Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The critic Carlos Silva wrote a study of the work of the Venezuelan sculptor Edgar Guinand, pointing out two fundamental periods in his life in art. The first is defined by the writer in the visual arts context that follows the Latin American Post- [...]

This essay by the curator Julieta González is a preface to a book published by the Museo Alejandro Otero (2000) that collected articles related to the debate about “identity” in Latin America in 1965. The debate arose as a response to an article [...]

This short essay by the French-Mexican critic, curator, and writer Olivier Debroise grapples with the phenomenon of neoexpressionist figurative painting in Mexico in the mid- and late-1980s. The author interprets appropriations of the official [...]

The text “Entrance” serves as the introduction to the book, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, by Mexico-based Argentinean academic and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini. Written in 1995, the work rapidly became [...]

Ana Mae Barbosa points out the consequence of the internal diaspora of visual artists from Northeastern Brazil toward the major centers (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) starting in the 1960s. In her opinion, those artists were better prepared for a [...]

The journalist Angela Prysthon clearly differentiates modern from postmodern cosmopolitanism. In the modern form, the center/periphery dialectic prevails, and there are tensions between traditional reality and internationalist aspirations; the [...]

Looking to her background in philosophy, Otília Arantes analyzes the transformations that have ensued in the relationship between the viewer and the work of art. Structural changes in museums, she argues, have given rise to “new museums” [...]

In this text, researcher Otília Arantes reflects on the impact of recent initiatives in France to restore the country’s position as a world center of twentieth-century cultural production. The projects undertaken and investments made form the [...]

This commentary by Mário Pedrosa centers on the large audiences that admired and interacted with the works exhibited at the IX São Paulo Biennial (1969). He states that: “art has ceased to be that distant and humorless thing, that terribly [...]

Critic Mário Pedrosa terms Hélio Oiticica’s recent work “post-modern,” given that he no longer relies on criteria established by Cubism, but rather on other innovative stimuli. In his judgment, this “post-modern” work begins a new cycle [...]

“Balas privadas, corazones públicos” [Private Bullets, Public Hearts] (1994) by the Colombian critic José Hernán Aguilar (b. 1952) is a chapter from the book Nueva imagen [New Image], which presented an overview of sociopolitical and artistic [...]

In this retrospective article on Colombian art in the 1980s, critic José Hernán Aguilar condemns the unexpected turn that took place on the local art scene when Conceptualism gave way to “the artistic and ideological pluralism” prevalent in art [...]

Puerto Rican painter Elizam Escobar reflects on Postmodernism and the ideology and the proposal for a “radical statehood” set forth by some Puerto Rican thinkers. In his opinion, although Postmodernism did become institutionalized in Puerto Rico [...]

In this essay, Ron Kovatch explores how issues of relocation, assimilation, and identity are manifest in the group of sculptures by Raoul Deal presented in the installation Reinventing Jimmy Green. Inspired by his grandfather Eugenio Greco’s [...]

In this article, Roberto Pontual ponders the concept of “discovery,” and discusses the development of a Latin American awareness that has been imposed from elsewhere. This external view establishes a sense of foreign domination that sees the [...]

Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar applies semiotic and Marxist theories to analyze social value in art occurring in an historical era that proclaims itself both postmodern and postcolonial. He observes that such discourse renders people oppressed by [...]

Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar applies semiotic and Marxist theories to analyze social value in art occurring in an historical era that proclaims itself both postmodern and postcolonial. He observes that such discourse renders people oppressed by [...]

This essay was included in the catalogue for the Exposição de Pintura Brasileira held in London in 1944. Organized by the critic Rubén Navarra, the show presented a broad selection of Brazilian paintings that covered the transition from the 1930s [...]

New World [Dis] Orders & Peripheral Strains: Specifying Cultural Dimensions in Latin American and Latino Studies is highly complex, largely due to its jargon laden dense text, but it is an indispensable and provocative document. Through words and [...]

This article reviews the Marcelo Pombo and Miguel Harte exhibition held at the ICI (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana) del Centro Cultural de España during the months of April and May 1991. It describes the characteristics of the works of [...]

This text is a brief summary of the characteristics of the works by the artists Santiago Spinosa, José Garófalo and Edgardo Lamelas, whom the author describes as “three young artists who are in the launching stage, consolidating their images with [...]

Under the guise of an interview with visual artist Sebastián Gordín, this article sets out to review the exhibition that he presented in 1992 at the entrance to the ICI (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana [Institute for Iberian-American [...]

The question asked by French art critic Pierre Restany in this article is this: how is the political and general cultural context of the 1990s, characterized by the double presidential mandate of Carlos Saúl Menem, related to artistic [...]

In this text—the foreword to the exhibition catalog El Tao del Arte exhibition (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, May 13–June 8, 1997)—, Jorge Gumier-Maier narrates how the conditions of the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, “a place [...]

This article reviews the exhibition La Conquista (Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta, March 1992). It argues that “the response of the forty participating artists are varied. There is no unifying artistic trend.” It gives a detailed [...]

This article reviews a number of exhibitions, including Alfredo Londaibere’s show at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas. The reviewer describes Londaibere’s work as “a nod to a variety of styles used in romantic landscape painting that includes [...]

In this article, the art critic Fabián Lebenglik reviews Tutti fruti, the exhibition of works by the photographer Alberto Goldenstein at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (October–November 1991). He discusses the works and compares them, at a [...]

Carlos Basualdo links the works gathered in this exhibition, The rational twist [(New York: Apex Art, February, 1996) with the “memory” of Argentinean Concrete art; almost nonexistent, as such, for economically developed countries, since, at the [...]

This article is critical of the nature of contemporary art in Buenos Aires, referring specifically to the formal aspect of artworks, the roots of creative inspiration such as social or political issues, and the scope in terms of reception, among [...]

The article reviews the exhibition by artists Jorge Gumier-Maier, Benito Laren, Omar Schiliro, and Alfredo Londaibere in the Espacio Giesso, which took place in August 1992. Besides briefly describing the works of each of the artists, it makes a [...]

The text informs about the curatorial characteristics, artists, and works that are presented at the exhibition organized by the Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires), which is sponsored by Página/12 (Buenos Aires), under the title La vuelta [...]

The article reviews the exhibition of Miguel Ángel Nigro and Graciela Hasper, developed in the hall of the Teatro de las Provincias, characterized by the author as a “place…doubly eccentric because of its location and the artists that it [...]

The essay “La puesta en escena internacional del arte latinoamericano: montaje, representaciones” [The International Staging of Latin American Art: Assembly, Presentations], by the French-Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard, is in the archives [...]