Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This introductory text by Otto Hahn analyzes some of the consequences of modern life within an industrialized city, such as uniformity, anonymity and the acceptance of triviality. He places the work of Robert Rauschenberg within this framework, as [...]

This essay by the architect Lina Bo Bardi is about A Mão do Povo Brasileiro, the exhibition she organized and presented at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. The exhibition reflects her interest in preserving the traditional arts and culture of [...]

In its bulletin, GRUPO 8, created in Montevideo in 1959, exposed the need to organically and institutionally tie national industries to those Uruguayan artists affiliated with modernity. The objective was to promote labor sources for Uruguayan modern [...]

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 [...]

In March 1919, after the First World War, Dr. Pedro Figari wrote an open letter to the president of the República Oriental del Uruguay, Dr. Baltasar Brum (who held that office twice, from 1919 to 1923, and from 1931 to 1933, when he committed [...]

Bruno Zevi discusses the event that prompted the cancellation of Civilização do Nordeste, the exhibition that was to have been presented at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma, as expressly instructed by the Brazilian embassy on orders from the [...]

In this essay, Rogério Duarte defines “industrial design” as the concept of  form in its serial reproduction. As he references the origins of Renaissance-style typography, he weighs in and deliberates about various theories on the subject, as [...]

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 text by architect Lina Bo Bardi voices a criticism of the resolutions made at the XII Congress of Architecture (Madrid, 1975), targeting the vision of the notion of the collective and “social commitments” as a betrayal of the modern movement [...]

Sixteen years after having worked in northeastern Brazil, specifically in the state of Bahia, architect and cultural administrator Lina Bo Bardi evaluates the state of drawing in a dependent and capitalist country that underwent intense [...]

Mariano Picón-Salas discusses the processes and reasons for the “integration” and the “disintegration” of the Latin American peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting with their struggles for independence through the [...]