Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In the introduction to their anthology of essays, María Amalia Bulhões and Maria Lúcia Kern explain their goal of assembling works by thinkers who suggested alternatives to the problem of territorializing art practices in Latin America. This [...]

Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre states that Latin American art was able to develop because of  individuals who laid the foundation that paved the way for subsequentgenerations. In order to stimulate art, scrutinize the situation, and further [...]

This text by Inverna Lockpez, curator and director of the INTAR Latin American Gallery in New York City, introduces the six Latin American and Latino comic strip artists whose work was included in the 1985 exhibition Six Hispanic Artists. The [...]

In his introduction to the catalog, The Latin American Graphic Arts Biennial, Luis Camnitzer relates the graphic arts exhibition presented by the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA) in 1986, to the tradition of the 1960s of Latin American [...]

In this introductory essay, French journalist Marcel Niedergang provides an overview of twentieth-century Latin American economic history. The author begins by situating Latin America within its geographic location, briefly touching on the cultures [...]

In this text, Thomas Messer explains the logic behind how he selected the works for his exhibition The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960s. He also considers the questions that the exhibition raises about how [...]

Stanton Loomis Catlin and Terence Grieder introduce their exhibition Art of Latin America since Independence. They begin by arguing that U.S. audiences should naturally find this art of interest because it was produced by fellow “Americans,” and [...]

In this introduction, Luis Cancel explains the logic behind how he and his colleagues organized the exhibition The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970. He also explains, at length, the curatorial team’s larger [...]

In this introduction, Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges explain how the theme of “the fantastic” underlies the art of the twenty-nine artists included in the exhibition The Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987. In explaining their [...]

This text is an introduction to the 1959 exhibition South American Art Today, presented at the Dallas Museum of Art. It is written by the curator, Cuban art critic and writer José Gómez Sicre. Gómez Sicre explains that the exhibition South [...]

André Siegfried’s introduction to Amérique latine (1934) begins with the term “the Americas,” used to conceptually reference the New World. The essay begins by pointing out that the term “North America” evokes a geographical personality [...]

Waldo Rasmussen introduces the exhibition, Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, with the history of participation by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the promotion of Latin American art. Rasmussen refers to the important role played by [...]

This essay by Rolando Castellón is the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, Mano a Mano: Abstracción/Figuración, which he curated in 1989. According to Castellón, even though Latin American artists have contributed to the development [...]

The Mexican historian and art critic Jorge Alberto Manrique discusses the concept and the definition of both “Latin America” and “Latin American-ness” within the context of the visual arts. He bases his ideas on Simón Bolívar’s theory [...]

This document invites the Unión de Artistas Plásticos (UAP), a division of the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay (C.T.I.U.), to the Exposición Internacional de Artes Plásticas Revolucionarias, an event organized by the [...]

French anarchist and writer Charles Malato de Corné begins this brief article on Latin America for the first issue of Les Annales de la Jeunesse Laïque by informing the reader of border disputes that have been going on for too long and that are [...]

In this second chapter of French academic Guy Martinière’s book, Aspects de la coopération franco-brésilienne: Transplantation culturelle et stratégie de la modernité (1982), he presents a history of the use and political implications of the [...]

In his presentation, the theorist and critic Juan Acha—whose central theme is on the analysis of the processes of artistic work and its technical divisions—makes a cursory historical overview on the topic before addressing the case of Latin [...]

Anthropologist Ronald J. Duncan analyzes work by 125 of the 315 artists that participated in the IV Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano [IV Latin American Print Biennial, San Juan] in an attempt to determine basic demographic patterns. In [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas analyzes a fragment of modern Latin American art history, presented through the form of “penetrable” works. The critic describes the development of the form with respect to its representation as [...]

In 1988, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding with a series of exhibitions of works in its permanent collection. Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer voices his disappointment with the museum’ [...]

The director of the Museo de Bellas Artes [Museum of Fine Arts] in Caracas, María Elena Ramos, presented a paper at the I Coloquio de Arte No Objetual [First Symposium on Abstract Art] (Medellín, 1981) under the title, “La comunicación en las [...]

Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer asserts that the authorities that control the government of a colonized country determine its art and also dictate the principles underlying its education; any opposition is disregarded. During certain [...]

Perán Erminy discusses sculpture in relation to what he sees as its origins in Judeo-Christian mythology: the Bible states that man was molded out of earth, which Erminy understands as the first sculptural form. Erminy upholds the historical [...]

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 interview by journalist Héctor Muñoz for the newspaper El Espectador was one of the first with painter Norman Mejía, from Cartagena, to be published in the press after he was awarded first prize at the 1965 edition of the Salón Nacional de [...]

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 [...]

In these three texts, Torres-Caicedo considers how Latin American states should organize themselves into some kind of larger, governing body. In the first, he argues in favor of a Confederation of Latin American states as opposed to a Federation. He [...]

In this text, Manuel Felguérez considers the problems associated with identifying and defining a Latin American aesthetic within contemporary artistic production. He begins by explaining that the Brazilian government’s display of aspects of [...]

In this text, Luis Felipe Noé explains his theory that the shared impulse that defines Latin American painting is its preoccupation with “inventing history.” He argues that this impulse is a direct result of Latin American artists’ experience [...]

Jorge Glusberg, founder of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación [Center for Art and Communication] (CAyC in Buenos Aires), says that “there is no such thing as a Latin American art but there is a common set of challenges that creates an identity.” [...]

Marta Traba, an Argentine critic living in Puerto Rico, asserts that painting is a means of communication, a language that attempts to say something. As such, its message must be deciphered in order to be understood and read. She maintains that avant [...]

The Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest states that he generally agrees with the lecture that Juan Acha gave at the XVII Congreso Extraordinario de la AICA [17th Extraordinary Conference of the AICA], held in Caracas in 1983. However, Romero Brest [...]

In his text, Luis Felipe Noé launches the following questions: Does a Latin American art exist? Should it exist? Taking into account what assumptions? What is the artist’s responsibility? Should an artist leave or remain in his country? In his [...]

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 [...]

In this article, “La unidad de Latinoamérica. Batalla diplomática en San Francisco” that appeared in Mañana [(Mexico City), no. 92 (June 2, 1945), pp. 12–13, 15], Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz (1914–1998) discusses Pan- [...]

In this text, Jean Casimir considers what unifies Latin American countries, ultimately arguing that they should seek a sense of unified purpose in resistance to the dominance of the United States. He begins by asking if the countries south of the “ [...]

In this article, critic Perán Erminy takes stock of Marta Traba’s controversial visit to Caracas in 1965, arriving at the conclusion that the resulting debate was “extremely positive.” As a Venezuelan, Erminy maintains a favorable view of her [...]

This article considers the work produced by the Lithuanian-born painter Lasar Segall as it explores the question of how “Africanism” became part of the local identity in Latin America following the emergence of modernism. Jorge Schwartz [...]

In this text, Robert C. Smith compares the great developments in Latin American painting since the 1920s with the mediocrity of Latin American art during the colonial period and nineteenth-century. In the first third of his text, Smith criticized [...]

Art historian Shifra M. Goldman writes with great acuity and depth about the traveling exhibition, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987, and subsequently went to the Queens Museum in [...]

This article written by Puerto Rican anthropologist Arlene Dávila, analyzes the debate over El Museo del Barrio’s change in mission from a grassroots organization concerned with the empowerment of Puerto Ricans to a museum of Latin American art. [...]

In this 1989 article published in the magazine/journal Newcity, art journalist and freelance writer, Jeff Huebner, explores the misconceptions of defining contemporary Latino art within the framework of an American art market. In his interviews of [...]

This exhibition catalogue includes a curatorial statement by Chicago-based artist Mario Enrique Castillo, as well as statements and biographies of the seven artists featured in the exhibition Latino Diversity = Diversidad Latina. In his essay, [...]

In the book Problemas sociales en las artes plásticas [Social Problems in the Visual Arts], the critic Walter Engel reviews different periods in the universal history of art, discussing how some cultures and artists depict social issues?such as [...]

In this article published in the Parisian journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, (1948) renowned French historian Fernand Braudel responds to Luis Alberto Sánchez’s ¿Existe América Latina? Braudel considers Sánchez’s text (1945 [...]

This selection of documents begins with Raymond Poincaré’s—the future president of France (1913-20)—preface to Francisco García-Calderón’s book, Les démocraties latines d’Amérique. Poincaré praises Calderón’s book and traces the [...]

Liliana Porter’s response to the summons to side against the 1971 São Paulo Biennial. In her response, she states that the artist always assumes a position. Thus, participating in this counter-biennial is a way of being aware of the positioning as [...]

In this statement, Arturo Uslar Pietri posits that the history of Latin America has been a process of raising awareness of the region’s evolution, which serves as the basis for the development of a new world born of the modern age. In an encounter [...]

This document is a continuation and second part of the essay “Lo latinoamericano y lo occidental” by the then Paris-based Venezuelan philosophy student J. R. Guillent Pérez (1923−89), a member of the group Los Disidentes. In the first section [...]