Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

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

This is the catalogue for the exhibition commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the Casa Triângulo. Organized by Maria Izabel Branco Ribeiro, the exhibition presented the history of the gallery during that time, introducing those young artists [...]

This text by Sônia Salzstein is an analysis of the changes in the appearance of Brazilian art starting in the 1950s. She believes that the cultural modernization launched in that decade had a utopian dimension, which lost ground to an [...]

This book is about the works of art assembled by the collector and gallery owner Marcantonio Vilaça, an important promoter of contemporary Brazilian art in the international market in the 1990s. The book includes essays by Paulo Herkenhoff, Angé [...]

The author of this article, Rodrigo Naves, explains that Ronaldo Brito’s essay presents an overview of a movement that was representative of contemporary Brazilian art. Naves also suggests that Brito’s critique attempts to understand works that [...]

British critic Guy Brett sets forth an approximate chronology of his personal contact with Brazilian art between the 1964 and 2005, and considers the importance of that contact with Brazilian creators. During the earlier years, his contacts were with [...]

Adriano Pedrosa wrote this text on Iran do Espírito Santo’s work for the 1999 edition of the Biennale di Venezia. Pedrosa asserts that any perception of “the real” depends on the language used to express it. That is evident in do Espírito [...]

In this introduction to the catalogue for the (2001) exhibition Côte à Côte: art contemporain du Brésil [Side by Side: Contemporary Art in Brazil], Edemar Cid Ferreira states his conviction that art is a key product for commercial trade between [...]

In 1961, the magazine ARTnews sent critic Harold Rosenberg to São Paulo to cover the opening of the VI São Paulo Biennial, which had been postponed due to the sudden resignation of Brazilian President Jânio Quadros a few months earlier. In this [...]

Critic and curator Paulo Herkenhoff presents Brazilian art in the context of the exhibition Art from Brazil in New York, held in 1995. Herkenhoff argues that Brazilian culture has deep roots in “anthropophagia” and that its vast miscegenation has [...]

Artist Milton Machado discusses the response abroad, specifically in England, to the group show Continuum Brazilian Art 1960s–1990s, held in Essex in 1995. Machado comments on the appeal of a certain “exoticism” attributed to [...]

In this essay featured in the catalogue for the exhibition Art from Brazil in New York, critic and curator Carlos Basualdo, who was born in Rosario, Argentina, argues that Brazilian art has made a threefold contribution in terms of the following [...]

This text by art critic Paulo Venâncio Filho, written for the joint 1989 exhibition of Tunga (1952–2016) and Cildo Meireles held in Belgium, addresses the vision of Brazilian art within Brazil and from abroad, among other matters. [...]

In this document, Brazilian art critic Márcio Doctors gathers Guy Brett’s testimony on the fundamental role of Brazilian artists in London, specifically, in the space opened by the Whitechapel Gallery in the late 1960s. The article addresses the [...]

In this interview, Colombian writer and critic Luis Vidales provides an overview of European cultural thought of the late 1920s. First, he discusses the debate between nationalism and internationalism in the sphere of culture in order to flesh out [...]

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 [...]

In this article Marta Traba takes the thoughts expressed by her opponents in their ongoing debate—in particular those by J. R. Guillent Pérez—and distills them down to what she considers to be the focal point of the controversy, which is her [...]

Marta Traba argues in her paper that in the last five years, Latin American art “has suffered from a visible process of depersonalization” and “mimesis.” She points out the principal causes of the phenomenon, among them: artists who move [...]

Ludovico Silva, who had a philosophy background, refutes the thesis of Marta Traba of a “false apocalypse” when she rationalizes that Latin American artists were simulating hardships alien to their reality. According to Silva, the idea of [...]

Making use of his philosophical background, J. R. Guillent Pérez critically analyzes the article by Marta Traba published in Caracas under the title “El arte latinoamericano: un falso apocalipsis.” In his judgment, Traba has not understood the [...]

In this article, J. R. Guillent Pérez confronts what he considers to be Marta Traba’s “attitude of disdain,” in her use of the term “apocalypse” in a negative sense; in doing so he makes use of philosophical sources, such as L’être et [...]

The manifesto shown here uses the term “aesthetic revolution” to refer to the steady discarding of perception (specifically visual) in modern art, and on the other hand, to the resulting development of the “psychological and mental perception [...]

The author of this article, Aracy Amaral, discusses the comment she made concerning exhibitions of “Latin American art” in the United States, explaining that this is an absurd description because there is no artistic school involved, much less a [...]

Aracy Amaral comments in this essay on the term “Latin American” as an aesthetic category, which would suggest being identified as something different and also the need to search for universal values. This would be one of the paths: the denial of [...]

This article discusses the scant interest shown in Latin American art by North American museums, particularly MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. The art critic Aracy A. Amaral highlights the scarcity of exhibitions and mentions the declining [...]

The essay “La puesta en escena internacional del arte latinoamericano: montaje, representaciones” [The International Staging of Latin American Art: Assembly, Presentations], by the French-Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard, is in the archives [...]

In this article, Enrique Molina, President of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, compares the negative impact of World War I with the educational reconstruction undertaken by José Vasconcelos in Mexico, which he refers to as a time of [...]