Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 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 [...]

This essay includes a compilation of statements made by members of the Tribu No, a group devoted to experimental poetry and art that was active in Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it also includes statements by other individuals who were [...]

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 this article, Justo Pastor Mellado explores the immediate connections that Nicanor Parra created for objectual (object-based) drawing in his Trabajos Prácticos series on the occasion of his exhibition in Madrid. The author raises [...]

Ronald Kay published this collection of works by Nicanor Parra in News from Nowhere, in the only issue of Manuscritos magazine (Santiago: Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos, Universidad de Chile, 1975). Kay underscores the value of these [...]

This was an interdisciplinary poetry project produced by Nicanor Parra in 1952. Parra worked with Enrique Lihn and Alejandro Jodorowsky to create Quebrantahuesos, a sheet of paper measuring 55 x 40 centimeters which they covered with newspaper [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Roberto Merino discusses La nueva novela [The New Novel] by Juan Luis Martínez, concentrating on specific pages in the book and questioning its operations. He addresses the photograph that Lewis Carroll took of Alice Lidell, which Martí [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]