Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay on Marisol [Escobar], Venezuelan curator and gallery director Águeda Hernández analyzes her creative concept by drawing relationships between the works that (at that moment) were in Venezuela, in both public spaces and museums, and [...]

In this essay, the journalist Alberto Anzola assesses the work of Elsa Gramcko. He mentions some of the elements used by the Venezuelan visual artist: scrap metal, storage batteries and other rusty metal. Anzola makes the connection with Renaissance [...]

The Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko is interviewed by Teresa Alvarenga, who describes Gramcko’s house as dark and dismal. The artist tells the journalist about her creative process, and talks about her daily life and her relationship with the [...]

In this essay, Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko offers a very personal overview of her creative process. She describes what drives her to create and the importance of the intellectual relationship between artist and artwork. She believes art to be the [...]

This essay by Venezuelan writer Oswaldo Trejo analyzes the art of Elsa Gramcko. It describes a number of characteristics of the Venezuelan artist’s creative world, specifically how she uses matter as the defining “content” of her work. Trejo [...]

In this essay, the critic Juan Calzadilla discusses the exploration of Informalist abstract movements by Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko, who was in search of new “textures” with which to express her ideas in physical form. Calzadilla describes [...]

In his essay about Elsa Gramcko’s life, the curator Juan Carlos López Quintero provides a chronological account of her work; he reviews most of her creations and lays out a detailed timeline of her various creative periods. He mentions the [...]

This essay by Elizabeth Schön relates the life and work of the Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko. She establishes a chronology of her life, explaining her creative phases, and analyzing her philosophy and artistic work. She also places special emphasis [...]

In this essay, French intellectual Gilles Plazy places emphasis on the essential role played by the concepts of “time” and “space” in Jesús Rafael Soto’s art. Plazy examines how artists from different art movements such as Impressionism [...]

In this critical essay, the historian Alfredo Boulton analyzes several of the elements he sees in the work of Jesús Rafael Soto, the great Venezuelan Kinetic artist, focusing here on space and time. Boulton mentions a number of Soto’s works in [...]

In this essay Jacques Leenhardt philosophically discusses the new idea of “knowledge” as applied to art, as in Paul Cézanne’s work. The French intellectual discusses how Jesús Rafael Soto uses “knowledge” in his work and relies on pure [...]

In her review the researcher Gladys Yunes compares Jesús Rafael Soto’s work with the theories of quantum physics; her main objective is to show that the relationship between art and science has been explored throughout the twentieth century. From [...]

The country was awash in optimism that year, when Brasília was officially declared the new capital city. The tenth edition of the salão paulista de arte moderna was held at the Galería Prestes Maia, organized on this occasion by [...]

This flier, which announces the seventh edition of the Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna, has an excellent minimalist design on the cover. The (ordinal) “ o ” becomes one of the squares in the black and yellow composition, which uses [...]

Artes, the visual arts magazine, devoted a portion of its fifty-seventh issue (December 1983–January 1984) to this lengthy article about Maurício Nogueira Lima, with photos of the artist and a number of his works. The magazine, which is [...]

According to Tadeu Chiarelli, contemporary international art has moved away from personal expression and embraced an industrial aesthetic. This is the result of a serial, modular logic that rejects any attempt to stress the physical and chemical [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon.                                However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

This is a short review of the play by the Italian playwright Ugo Betti: El delito de la Isla de Cabras (Crime on Goat Island), performed by the theater group Sociedad Venezolana del Teatro and directed by the Argentine director Carlos Gorostiza, who [...]

Flávio Motta acknowledges that the diverse biennials that took place in São Paulo established a new phase which sought out art from abroad; although they also resulted in the puzzling [concept of the] “happy native.” They [...]

The art critic Roberto Pontual wrote this text for the exhibition 3x4 - Grandes Formatos organized in 1983 by the Centro Empresarial Rio. The essay’s confessional tone is nuanced by the author’s description of the driving spirit behind the works [...]

This text by the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro establishes the following theoretical categories: “testimony-peoples,” “new peoples,” “transplanted peoples,” and “emerging peoples” as the basis for the [...]

In this article, Damián Bayón analyzes the work of Argentine painter Ramón Gómez Cornet. He states that coming to a just “judgment” of the work will be difficult because he is one of “those [artists] who goes directly to the sensibility of [...]

The young Brazilian painter Jorge Guinle discusses the painting produced by internationally recognized artists of the 1980s (such as Philip Guston, Julian Schnabel, and Enzo Cucchi, among others), and compares their work to the legacy of early [...]

Antonio Risério discusses the origins of the artistic avant-garde in Bahia in the 1950s and 1960s. He notes the syncretic nature of this particular form of art that embraces everything from high culture to popular culture to mass communication. He [...]

The ninth edition of the salão paulista de arte moderna (still written in lowercase letters) was held in June 1960 at the usual venue, the Galeria Prestes Maia de São Paulo. The flier carries over many elements from the previous year& [...]

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 [...]

This text by Marta Traba—a well known Argentine critic who lived in Venezuela at the time—introduces the exhibition Los novísimos colombianos held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas in 1977. Traba analyzes the overall development of [...]

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 [...]

“Obregón en contexto” is the title of an essay by the art historian and critic Carmen María Jaramillo, written in 2001, that appeared in the book El mago del Caribe on the artwork of Alejandro Obregón. The essay includes a text by the writer [...]

In this essay on Puerto Rican artist Carlos Raquel Rivera and his career as a printmaker, critic and historian Teresa Tió speaks of his work at the División de Educación de la Comunicad (DIVEDCO) (1956–63) as an illustrator of books, designer, [...]

This article by journalist Clara Isabel Rojas de Lora presents the exhibition Arte de los años 80 [Art of the ‘80s]. Specifically, the article reflects on the nature of the art object and the role it plays in the exhibition, which was held at the [...]

In this text, researcher Roldán Esteva-Grillet writes about the history of drawing in Venezuela from the pre-Hispanic era through the end of the 20th century. He begins by describing the practice of drawing in ancient indigenous cultures in [...]

The creator of the work “Ida Píngala II,” Alfred Wenemoser, wrote a text organized into two parts describing the work, which was shown at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1981. In the first part, the artist summarizes in six steps the content of his [...]

In this presentation of his research, Rubens Fernandes Júnior attempts to provide an overview of photography from the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, placing it in wider historical and geographic context. The author not only summarizes the most [...]

In this essay, artist and curator Lucas Bambozzi analyzes the development of video production from Brazil starting in the eighties. Bambozzi argues that although promising video artists emerged in Brazil in the late seventies, the eighties will be [...]

Testimony by painter José Cláudio on the social implications of his African ethnicity while operating as an artist in the northeastern region of Brazil. He affirms that there is no exact boundary between whites and blacks within this cultural [...]

In this text, Mário Chamie distinguishes the Tropicalism of sociologist Gilberto Freyre from the Tropicália of singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso using the different postures of their native states, Pernambuco and Bahia respectively, in relation to [...]

The painter Anita Malfatti describes her career in art and the various events that led up to the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week] (1922). She discusses her time in Berlin and her training in the workshop of painters Fritz Burger and Lovis [...]

In 1933, the artist Flávio de Carvalho discussed the founding of the Teatro da Experiência at the premises of the CAM [Modern Artists Club] in São Paulo. Speaking from his broader experience as an architect and set designer, he sees the theater as [...]

In this interview Juan del Sena chats with Diego Rivera in the Anfiteatro Bolívar in Mexico City, where Rivera is starting work on the mural he calls La creación [Creation]. The painter describes both the method of using encaustic as well as the [...]

The flier’s cover is illustrated with a work of geometric abstraction (with no mention of the painter’s name), but includes no title for the event. The eleventh edition of the salão paulista de arte moderna, organized by the state [...]

After President Getúlio Vargas committed suicide in August 1954, Brazil embarked on a program of renewal focused on two basic areas: industrialization and development. The democratically elected government of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1960) [...]

This flier announces the second Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna, presented by the Secretaria do Governo do Estado de São Paulo at the Galeria Prestes Maia in 1952. Francisco Matarazzo (the creator of the Bienal de São Paulo) and [...]

In his 500ª Conferencia (the five hundredth lecture given in the six years since he returned to Montevideo in 1934), Joaquín Torres García (JTG) presents what he calls “a new theory.” This is his final attempt to adapt his universalist model [...]

This is a typewritten copy of the lecture given by David Alfaro Siqueiros at the John Reed Club in Hollywood on September 2, 1932. Siqueiros talks about the creation of what he called the Los Angeles “Mural Painters’ Block” [BPM: Bloque de [...]

In this article, the critic Rafael Pineda discusses the unpublished diary kept by the Venezuelan artist Emilio Boggio while he was living in Caracas in 1919. Pineda writes about Boggio’s return to the country where he was born, his reunion with [...]

In his curatorial text for the catalogue Lorenzo Jaramillo published on the occasion of the retrospective of that artist’s work held at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá, Colombian art historian Germán Rubiano Caballero describes the [...]

This book is about the presence of northeastern Brazilian colonial architecture in two West African countries: Benin (the former Republic of Dahomey) and Nigeria. This particular style was taken there by merchants and slaves (ex-slaves and their [...]

The critic Ariel Jiménez begins his essay “Tradición y ruptura” (written for the exhibition La invención de la continuidad, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, 1997) by discussing the two problems of cultural dependency and the need for [...]

“Antes de que el mundo fuera” [Before the World Existed] is the essay that María Iovino wrote for the book LUIS ROLDÁN (Segmento I) published in 2007, that presented a retrospective of the artist’s work, which has always been concerned with [...]