Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In a letter signed by “the Nadaístas” [Nothing-ists], a group of Colombian artists protest the incarceration of the Beat poet Noel (Neal) Cassady, who was tried in 1958 in the United States “for the crime of smoking marihuana.” The letter [...]

This is a bilingual exhibition brochure for the Association of the Latino Brotherhood of Artists (ALBA) Festival held at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago on April 2–5, 1974. In the brief text, ALBA members describe the history of the [...]

This article by the critic Carlos Raygada is about the painter and poet César Moro, considered “one of the few exponents of modern art in Peru.” According to Raygada, Moro’s work is unknown because it “never appears in the kind of [...]

This is the sleeve of the 45 RPM vinyl record on which the well-known poet and cultural critic Alejandro Romualdo recorded his most famous poem, Canto Coral a Túpac Amaru, que es la libertad. The cover art is a Pop version of a conventional image of [...]

Written by well-known muralist John Pitman Weber, this essay provides biographical information on Carlos Cortez, a Milwaukee-born and Chicago-based artist and poet of Mexican-Indian and German ancestry. Weber talks about the places and people Cortez [...]

Agustín Yáñez applauds the elements embedded in Carlos Mérida’s work. He mentions his search for Americanism in the color, which he considers “a terribly dangerous route . . . to his exposure to failure . . .”. However, in Yáñez’s [...]

In his role as director of Horizonte, the Estridentista magazine, Germán List Arzubide expresses his opposition to the tribute paid by the mainstream press—specifically Excélsior newspaper—to Salvador Díaz Mirón. He also denounces the crimes [...]

After an epigraph taken from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, María Luz Cárdenas interviews Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada on the occasion of the publication of the book Variaciones sobre Reticuláreas [Variations on Reticuláreas] with [...]

“Declaración de los intelectuales colombianosdurante el paro general” is an open letter dated May 8, 1957 published in issue No. 13 of the magazine Mito. It is signed by twenty-five people, among them politicians, writers, poets, and artists. [...]

Here Clemente Padín sketches a retrospective of his life as an artist—he was an experimental poet, graphic designer, performer, and networker—during the Uruguayan military-civilian dictatorship (that lasted from the June 27, 1973 coup d’état [...]

In this catalogue essay, Victor Alejandro Sorell considers the 36-year career (spanning 1964–2000) of the Chicano artist Carlos Cortez, praising him as the “quintessential artist-reporter,” and emphasizing his virtuosity as a master printmaker [...]

After his 1924 trip to Brazil, the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars wrote this book in which he describes the journey taken by the group of São Paulo modernists headed by Oswald and Mário Andrade. This sojourn within the Brazilian interior sowed the [...]

This text is part of El gran solipsismo, Juan Luis Martínez. Obra visual (Santiago: Editorial Puntángeles, 2002), the collection of essays written by the researcher José de Nordenflycht. The author considers the work in question [...]

This is the text of the speech Gabriela Mistral gave at the special session of the board of directors of the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, in 1946, the year after she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm. The Chilean poet [...]

After the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, the country’s literature underwent a process of transformation that prompted a redefinition of concepts such as, among other things, the roles of writers and readers as well as their limits and [...]

The poet Amílcar Osorio Gómez—who, for many years, signed his work “Amílkar U.”—wrote the second manifesto for the nadaísta [Nothing-ist] group (1958–70), a predominantly poetic avant-garde association that coalesced in Colombia in the [...]

A farewell letter to Argentinian writer Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970), as a result of his departure for Europe, written in neocriollo [neo-Creole] by the Argentinian artist Xul Solar [...]

This article, published in the Revista de Antropofagia, reported that the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret was in Brazil. The text stresses the importance of understanding the functions of the subconscious, going so far as to refer to [...]

Alejandro Otero, a member of Los Disidentes, takes a dim view of the reviews of paintings and other works of art written by poets and literary types. The Venezuelan painter says that these reviews are based on emotional criteria (such as friendship [...]

This article describes the lyrical spirit—pervaded by a proletarian ideology—that characterizes the work of the poet, painter and Mexican worker Rosendo Salazar. The author considers his work part of the school that sees art as a powerful medium [...]

The critic Juan Carlos Palenzuela reviews the acquisition by the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) of forty Leoncio Martínez drawings and caricatures. In addition to being a draftsman and caricaturist, this artist was also a poet and critic. The [...]

The experimental poem by Olivero Girondo “Topatumba” is characterized by a strong rhythm that results from the frequent use of alliteration and proliferation of compound neologisms based on the same semantic roots, lack of punctuation, and the [...]

In this essay, Eugenia Brito discusses three works by the writer, poet, and artist Raúl Zurita: Purgatorio (Purgatory), Áreas verdes (Green Areas), and Anteparaíso (Anteparadise). Through these works, the author created an impact [...]

In this review, Maritza Jiménez discusses Variaciones sobre Reticuláreas [Variations on Reticuláreas], the book of poems by Alfredo Silva Estrada, illustrated with five of Gego’s drawings. Jiménez reports that the book, designed by Gerd Leufert [...]