Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In “Individualismo y nacionalidad,” Argentine journalist and writer Ricardo Rojas deconstructs the terms “race” and “nationality.” Rojas argues that a person can adopt a new race or nationality, replacing that of their native country. [...]

Pietro Maria Bardi discusses the alarming number of Brazilians leaving the country, specifically mentioning Eugênio Hirsch, who had worked as a graphic artist in Rio de Janeiro, and was in Madrid working as the art director of a collection of books [...]

This article discusses a text by Argentine painter Luis Felipe Noé in which he asserts that the responsibility of Latin American artists begins when they leave the region to become part of the international art scene. While Noé [...]

This anonymous article discusses the exodus of Latin American artists departing for North America and Europe. It also addresses the lack of professionalism within the local art scene especially with regard to public support for art. Mention is made [...]

This text by the art critic Aracy Amaral (b. 1930) describes an exhibition of work by Latin American artists living in Paris, which she curated at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) in 1985. The objective of this [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

Lygia Pape interviews Hélio Oiticica after he had returned from having lived for a period in New York. When asked about the term “Latin American art,” Oiticica says that he does not believe his work fits into that category, which he considers [...]

The main topic of this interview is the graphic work of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino exhibited in 2002 at the Drawing Center and Art in General in New York. During the conversation, Maiolino clarifies that in the seventies her art became [...]

While living in New York, Rubens Gerchman announced that he would no longer paint, and began producing objects instead. Nonetheless drawing continued to be his starting point. Throughout his text, he offers observations on the arts scene of the city [...]

While in the United States on a travel scholarship, the artist Rubens Gerchman wrote to Walter Zanini—who at the time was the director of the MAC-USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo)—to tell him that he was in New York [...]

While traveling in New York, philosopher Vilém Flusser, who had lived in Brazil for two decades, visited the studio of Brazilian artist Antonio Henrique Amaral to see his Campos de Batalha series, which consisted of the works on canvas on the banana [...]

In the early 1970s, when Amílcar de Castro was in New York for the group shows where he was exhibiting, he was surprised by the number of galleries in the city. His enthusiasm is reflected in his assessment of the commercial success of art that [...]

In Olinda (Pernambuco state), painter José Claudio uses an exceedingly colloquial tone to discuss the significance of artist Sérvulo Esmeraldo’s “return” to his native city (Crato, in the state of Ceará) after having resided in Europe for [...]

This essay, written by the art curator María Clara Bernal and published in the catalogue for the exhibition Displaced (2007), explains why it is important to address the subject of displacement as an essential feature of the contemporary world of [...]

In this text, Gerardo Mosquera introduces the exhibition Ante América [Facing the Americas] with an essay describing the common social, political and economic framework that has fostered the art of what he calls “el Sur” or “Nuestra América [...]

In this artist statement for the exhibition In Search of an Island (1991), Bibiana Suarez discusses how her work reflects her search for self-identification and the problems of living between two cultures—that of Puerto Rico and the United States [...]

In the third chapter of El exilio artístico español en el Caribe: Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto Rico 1936–1960 [Spanish Artists in Exile in the Caribbean: Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico, 1936–1960], the Puerto Rican art historian María [...]

In this letter written by the Planning and Organization Commission of the Symposia on Uruguayan Culture in Exile, José Artigas expresses gratitude for the contribution to and solidarity with Uruguayan culture in exile, and for the defense of that [...]

Chilean artist Mario Toral speaks of his experiences when he arrived in New York as an exile in 1973, immediately after the coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet. He compares the squandering of North Americans, who throw everything away, with [...]

With a nod to the ideas of the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz, Puerto Rican artist José Antonio Torres Martinó observes that some writers suffer from two kinds of exile. In addition to the exterior exile, or physical separation from their country, [...]

Julia P. Herzberg opens her interview with Carlos Alfonzo by asking him about the period of transition following his immigration to the U.S. from Cuba in 1980. Alfonzo touches on the two- to three-year period in which he did not paint, referring to [...]

This article by Ricardo Pau-Llosa focuses on the motif of the human body as the one theme that constantly recurs throughout the work of Cuban-American artists. He notes that this is unique given the distance that they live from one another. So that, [...]

This Spanish version of Ileana Fuentes-Pérez’s essay published in Outside Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same title held from 1987 to 1989 in six cities of the U.S., focuses on the reasons why so [...]

Ileana Fuentes-Pérez’s essay published in Outside Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same title held from 1987 to 1989 in six cities of the U.S., focuses on the reasons why so many Cuban artists went [...]

Graciella Cruz-Taura’s bilingual essay introduces the exhibition, Outside Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists (1987-89), and the contributing essayists for the catalogue. She notes that, in Cuba’s artistic production, external influences— [...]

According to Arnold Belkin, “the Canadian son of Mexican mural painting,” the imperialist policy of the United States of America toward Latin America, as well as the prevailing climate of repression there, prompted many Latin American artists to [...]

This essay commemorates the first anniversary of the arrival of the Sinaia, the French ship that brought the first wave of Spanish refugees to Veracruz in 1939, and mentions that the date coincides with the shameful Nazi occupation of Paris (June [...]

The Chilean poet, Jorge Millas, who at the time was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, wrote the introduction of the exhibition catalog on Eugenio Fernández Granell’s works, the Spanish artist living in exile in Puerto Rico. Millas [...]

In these 32 interviews, Gustavo Valdés, Jr. brings together five generations of Cuban artists living and working in both exile and the Diaspora, ranging from those born in the late 1910s, to those raised and educated in the United States who define [...]

This is an obituary essay by Alejandro Anreus on the Dominican painter Darío Suro (1918–97). A former student of Diego Rivera and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano during his stay in Mexico in the 1940s, Suro’s trajectory as a painter—evolving from [...]

In this text, celebrated intellectual Celso Furtado—the former minister of economics—contemplates the possibility of the conciliation of ideological and intellectual processes given the outdated social structure of Brazil. He argues that the “ [...]

In this article, Samuel B. Cherson, a Cuban critic living in Puerto Rico, writes about Cuban artists in exile. He mentions the artists who organized an exhibition in Puerto Rico, and who have made a name for themselves on the island, as well as [...]

Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s essay discusses six generations of modern and contemporary Cuban artists, most in exile, and their art as it deals with alienation and uprooting. According to Pau-Llosa, the first generation (1920s) includes the founding fathers [...]

Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s essay discusses six generations of modern and contemporary Cuban artists, most in exile, and their art as it deals with alienation and uprooting. According to Pau-Llosa, the first generation (1920s) includes the founding fathers [...]

This appeal asks Latin American thinkers to attend the Conferencia Panamericana de Ayuda [Pan-American Aid Conference] in support of Spanish Republicans, to be held in Mexico City, February 14–17, 1940. The goal was to express solidarity with those [...]

Using the theoretical framework of “broken memory,” defined by Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones as memory "deliberately denied by political power or broken by official repression or cultural exclusion," Juana N. Goergen analyzes signs and imagery of [...]

In this article, Pere Calders refers to the Catalan sculptor José Giménez Botey—who lives in exile in Mexico—as a Latino, Mediterranean artist who was profoundly influenced by both his native land, Cataluña, and by Mexico, the country where he [...]

The anonymous author of this essay discusses landscapes by Enrique Climent, the painter living in exile, referring to the artist’s restraint and sparseness, and exemplifies, as in his painting of a simple track with a clump of trees to one side. [...]

This brief text refers to a 1935 newspaper article by Manuel Abril about the Concurso Nacional de Escultura [National Sculpture Contest] whose theme was “Conmemoración a Lope de Vega” [In Remembrance of Lope de Vega]. Abril reports that the [...]

In this section of his four-part essay, Juan Larrea discusses the creation, development, transcendence, and objectives of Surrealism, referring to a particular case to express the significance of the movement. He mentions Víctor Brauner, the [...]

Juan Larrea, the Spanish writer living in exile in Mexico, refers to an article by André Breton (“Situación del surrealismo entre las dos guerras” [The State of Surrealism between the Two Wars]), in which the leader of the movement outlines a [...]

José Renau discusses the significance of the first Spanish-American Art Biennial, sponsored by Francisco Franco. According to Renau, the goal of the exhibition was to “establish a link between Spain’s robust pictorial tradition and the effete [...]

In this article the Mexican painter Chávez Morado reviews the first group exhibition presented by Mexican and Spanish artists living in Mexico; the event was conceived as a riposte to the Iberian-American Art Biennial proposed by Francisco Franco’ [...]

In this article Ceferino Palencia, the Spanish art critic and painter living in exile in Mexico, sketches a brief biography of Roberto Fernández Balbuena, portraying him as a well-known architect and painter with a clearly defined vision. He [...]

Manuel Andújar discusses José García Narezo’s work. It has been several years since the former has seen the latter’s paintings, and he remarks that he now finds them more complete, and discerns a new stage in the artist’s process and motives [...]

In this article, Lorenzo Varela reviews the work of two of the artists who took part in a Hispanic-American exhibition: the Mexican painter Juan Soriano, and Mariano Rodríguez Orgaz, the Spaniard living in exile in Mexico. Focusing his critical eye [...]

By evoking Córdoba, Spain, Antonio Rodríguez Luna’s native city, Daniel Tapia approaches the work of this painter by playing with the terms: “from what is lived to what is painted.” The tragic aspect of living in exile is what his works most [...]

In the late 1940s, Margarita Nelken reflects on the difficulties facing artistic creation during a period marked by a “lack of poise and harmony.” The new art must not distance itself from society: “The individualist formula that has lasted [...]

This article provides thoughts on the meaning of land and the mother country. For José Moreno Villa, a Spanish artist exiled in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War, the mother country is made up of “my friendships, my stuff—or small material [...]

José Bergamín, a writer from Madrid living in exile in Mexico, draws up a welcoming speech as a member of the Junta de Cultura Española addressed to all of those who worked in Spain for its cultural life and for his defense. He further addresses [...]