Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This is a report on the opening of the exhibition Os artistas pelas Diretas at the entranceway of the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper facilities in February 1984. The management of the newspaper, in conjunction with various artists, conceived the [...]

This document contains Bibiana Suaréz's responses to four of the eighteen questions posed to artists by the organizers of The Puerto Rican Equation, an exhibition marking the occasion of the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States. Suarez [...]

In this essay the critic Mário Schenberg discusses the political and cultural changes he sees in the wake of the uprising led by Getúlio Vargas that was known as the Revolução de 1930. Schenberg believes that the agricultural oligarchy’s loss [...]

As President of the Artistic Solidarity Committee with Chile, Mário Pedrosa addresses then President Salvador Allende Gossens during the reception ceremony for the works that would make up the collection of the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago. [...]

Playwright Augusto Boal declares that all the stories contained within his book are true, and were written based on testimony overheard during different trips that occurred after he left Brazil in 1971, during the height of the military dictatorship [...]

[This document provides] confidential information written by José Meléndez, a police sergeant with the Puerto Rican Intelligence Office, naming those who had attended a meeting chaired by Juan Mari Bras, the president of the Movimiento Pro [...]

This letter by León Ferrari responds to the concepts raised by Ernesto Ramallo in the article “Los artistas argentinos en el Premio Di Tella 1965” [The Argentinean Artists in the Premio Di Tella 1965] published in the newspaper La Prensa [The [...]

This document is a statement by Chicano artist Malaquías Montoya on the relationship between art and politics. The author suggests that these are always inextricably linked to one another and that nowhere is this more evident than in the structure [...]

In the middle of 1968—a critical year in the 20th century—Lygia Clark wrote this brief essay on the position that the artist should pursue in society; in the wake of the student protests that began in Paris in May of that year, demands [...]

This poem, written by Ralph de Romero, a Puerto Rican artist born in New York, was sharply critical of the year 1970. In the text, we can discern a tone that is openly critical of the policies of the U.S. administration under President Richard Nixon [...]

In this text Aluízio Medeiros praises the artist’s sense of social responsibility, calling for a more committed form of art and challenging the idea of “art for art’s sake” that merely leads to evasiveness among artists and intellectuals. He [...]

In this article, the architect and visual artist Sérgio Ferro criticizes the state of Brazilian architecture, especially in São Paulo, during the period in the 1960s, known as post-Brasilia. He takes a radical and critical approach by exposing the [...]

This text suggests that although there is no “Latin American art” as such — that is, art produced by Latin American nations — these countries certainly share a number of “common problems” in terms of the social and political reality of [...]

In this text, Colombian art critic Eduardo Serrano—curator of the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá—presents the exhibition Arte y Política held at that institution in 1974. Serrano asserts that politics is more than a recurring theme in the work [...]

Puerto Rican artist Carlos Irizarry distinguished himself within conceptual art, and introduced “a new modality for protest art that encompasses the nature of the political acts he carried out in his personal life.” The acts of political [...]

This article reports on the closure of the CAyC al Aire Libre [CAyC in the Outside] exhibition by order of the municipal authorities of the city of Buenos Aires. It explains that the arguments presented to justify the closure were based on a view [...]

Oswald de Andrade was invited by the American Contemporary Arts to give this lecture in São Paulo in 1944, in which he discusses the two characters he created for a series of novels (that was never completed) entitled Marco Zero. He used these [...]

In this document, an uncertain political orientation of the Puerto Rican people is commented by attorney and writer, Vicente Géigel Polanco. He considers it a terrible mistake that Puerto Rico missed the opportunity—on the occasion of the Spanish- [...]

This charter document lists the main cultural guidelines established by the self-styled Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas Peruanas (1968–80). The text, which is divided into several chapters, discusses a number of prior situations and [...]

This interview conducted by Irma Valero begins by highlighting aspects of the work of Venezuelan artist César Rengifo. In referring to his Amalivaca mural, the work entitled Nacimiento de América located in the Diego Ibarra Plaza in the Caracas [...]

As part of his submission to the Arte de Sistemas II [Systems Art II] exhibition, the German artist Joseph Beuys provided a plastic bag which was sometimes used as the catalogue’s “wrapper.” Beuys used graphics on both sides of the bag to [...]

The text discusses the work method of the Grupo de los Trece [Group of Thirteen] in relation to its constitution. As the coordinator of the group, David Cooper analyzes, on the one hand, the internal problems of the group, “las ansiedades de cada [...]

While this analysis of contemporary Brazilian art by Otília Arantes focuses on the period that spans from 1965 to 1969, it comments as well on the fifties, seventies, and eighties. For the sixties generation, Arantes argues, making art meant [...]

This is the journalist Juan Gargurevich’s second article about the debate sparked by the decision to award the 1975 National Culture Prize for art to Joaquín López Antay, the altarpiece artist from the Andean region of Peru. Gargurevich supports [...]

In the view of Brazilian historian Aracy Amaral, the widespread prejudice against art with a “conteudístico” (content-based) approach hinders twentieth-century production from tackling sociopolitical issues. From the thirties through the [...]

Based in Venezuela due to the 1973 Pinochet coup d’etat, Chilean artist Aníbal Ortizpozo presented this text at the III Bienal Nacional Salvador Valero de Arte Popular (Trujillo, 1991), reflecting on the arts beginning with the question: “What [...]

The journalist Silvia Coronil interviews César Rengifo; she begins the conversation by mentioning that this artist had recently been awarded the CONAC [Consejo Nacional de la Cultura, Venezuela] theater prize. Rengifo discusses his views about art [...]

This interview with Carlos Zilio was written in conjunction with the exhibition Carlos Zilio: Arte e política, 1966–1976 held at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) in 1996. The questions put to the artists by a number of [...]

This essay by the Uruguayan architect and researcher Gabriel Peluffo Linari seeks to explain how aesthetic spaces (understood as symbolic construction zones) and political power spaces are connected in Latin American societies. The author sees a need [...]

The art historian Francisco Reyes Palma briefly describes the construction of an image of 1930s Mexico in accordance with the aesthetic/political strategy of Surrealism. He starts by talking about the relationships that arose among the painter Diego [...]

The gender war is discussed here in macro- and micro-political terms. In fact, macro-politics concerns the expression of individual and group reality, since figures portrayed define identities and certain dual categories, such as gender. Micro- [...]

This article by Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui formed part of the early debates in the leftist press in Uruguay on the relationship between art and politics, debates that largely ensued in the publication of the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales [...]

This article by Francisco R. Pintos is a response to the one by Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui published in the previous issue of Movimiento journal. Whereas Ortiz Saralegui was conciliatory in his approach to the problem of the relationship between “pure [...]

This article advocates “social art” in Uruguay in the framework of the ideological battle between capitalist society and the Soviet Communist regime. The author clearly supports the latter position when he asserts that not even the members of the [...]

In the last few pages of the book Hacia la democracia: contribución al estudio de la historia económica-político-social de Venezuela (Mexico City, 1939), the Venezuelan historian and diplomat Carlos Irazábal acknowledges his country’s [...]

This interview with Hélio Oiticica was conducted by the anthropologist Carlos Alberto Pereira and the literary critic Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda in Rio de Janeiro on October 15, 1979. Here the artist makes a clear distinction between political [...]

Paris-based writer, Francisco García-Calderón acknowledges in the introduction to his book, Les Démocraties Latines de l’Amérique (1912), that Peru, his native country, is part of a larger, more uniform world. According to him, there is a [...]

After being sentenced to life in prison, Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar reflects on U.S. colonialism and the persecution of all those individuals who have fought it one way or the other. Escobar believes that colonialism is a crime of treason [...]

The article by Ibáñez, “La ética social del artista,” was part of a discussion between the author and Rodney Arismendi, another contributor to AIAPE magazine. They refer to literature to speak about such matters as the “quality,” “ [...]

Diego Rivera, author of this essay, conducts a political analysis of the role that workers and peasants played as allies of the government in the struggle against the “reaction;” that is, a coup d’état carried out against the government that [...]

León Ferrari'’s (1920–2013) letter responds to the concepts expressed by Ernesto Ramallo in the article "Los artistas argentinos en el Premio Di Tella 1965" [The Argentinean artists in the 1965 Di Tella Institute Prize] published in La Prensa [...]

The critic for the newspaper La Prensa [The Press], Ernesto Ramallo, writes an unfavorable critique of the works presented at the Premio Torcuato Di Tella [Torcuato Di Tella Prize]. His review tolerates the works of Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos, [...]

This is a speech given by writer Aníbal Machado at the close of the Exposição de Arte Social, which he jointly organized with poet Álvaro Moreyra and artist Tomás Santa Rosa at the Clube de Cultura Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 1935. Machado [...]

This document declares certain principles adhered to by the Asociación Arte Concreto — Invención [Concrete Art and Invention Association]; especially with respect to Concrete art’s contribution to the revolution, as well as its solidarity with [...]

“O Beautiful America” is a satirical poem written by Ralph de Romero, a Puerto Rican artist born in New York. De Romero uses it as a basis for his open criticism of U.S. democracy, the administration, its policies, and the lack of liberty and [...]

This interview covers Óscar Muñoz’s career from the early days in Cali in the late sixties until 2004, the time period that is the focus of interest. Muñoz connects his art with his formation as an artist and with what happened in his native [...]

This 1982 article draws attention to an innovative cultural process⸺the first one since the imposition of the military dictatorship (1964–85) that drove the writer into exile and would last for another three years⸺and was created through an [...]

This is the official transcript of the speech given by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, the president of the Peruvian military junta, at the closing ceremony of the thirty-ninth Congreso Internacional de Americanistas in Lima in August 1970. He used [...]

In this text Nelly Richard identifies some of Walter Benjamin’s ideas that, in her opinion, are relevant to works produced in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973–90) and the start of what was known as the “democratic [...]

This text by Elizam Escobar, a noted Puerto Rican nationalist, artist, and writer, is a largely autobiographical account of his artistic and political evolution in the island and the United States. Written in prison, the essay reflects on his [...]