Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay about the work of the sculptress Marisol, the gallery owner Clara Diament de Sujo provides a brief biographical sketch of the artist’s childhood and youth, and a list of the group exhibitions in which she has participated. She [...]

Divided into eight chapters, this text by scholar Susana Benko is a study of contemporary Venezuelan art. The first part serves as an introduction, and consists of a brief overview of the Clara Diament Sujo collection. Afterward, she turns her focus [...]

In this article, Argentine critic and gallerist Clara Diament Sujo—who lived in Caracas for a time before settling in New York—describes the activities that German-Venezuelan artist Gego engaged in during her one-year stay in the United States. [...]

In this text, gallerist Clara Diament de Sujo offers a poetic description of the work of Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko. She mentions specifically how the work transforms form and matter and uses light and color. Sujo places emphasis on the [...]

Gallery owner Clara Diament Sujo reviews the book Who’s Who in Graphic Art (Zurich: The Graphic Press, 1962), which gathers together the most renowned graphic designers and illustrators in the world. The author describes the characteristics of the [...]

This is the script for a documentary about Jesús Rafael Soto, written by Clara Diament de Sujo—the noted essayist and gallery owner, who lived in Caracas at that time—and produced by Ángel Hurtado for National Television – Canal 5 (Venezuela [...]

The fifth issue of the magazine CAL contains an array of articles on literature, the visual arts, poetry, philosophy, photography, and criticism relevant to the Venezuelan cultural scene of the day. Outstanding in this issue are the following [...]

In this essay on sculptor Marisol [Escobar], North American curator Roberta Bernstein provides a chronological description of her work, analyzing the vast majority of her creations and the different phases of her production. She describes the [...]

In this essay, Iris Peruga analyzes most of the work created by Gego between 1955 and 1990. The curator examines the similarities between Gego’s artwork and that of her contemporaries. Examining the artist’s relationship with the trends of [...]

This essay by José Ramón Medina studies the production of artist Marisol [Escobar]. Medina discusses specific traits of the artist’s personality pertinent to her work, among them an incisive sense of satire, a spirit of protest, and an interest [...]

In this interview with Armando J. Florez, Jacobo Borges states that an artist should have a global perspective when it comes to politics and mankind’s real values, and should be free of any limitations imposed by ideologies. The painter believes [...]

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 [...]

This catalogue includes the writings of five Venezuelan researchers and critics who studied the works of the exhibiting artists at Confrontación 68 (Ateneo de Caracas, 1968). Juan Calzadilla introduces the architect Domingo Álvarez, and mentions [...]

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 [...]

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, 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

This article is written in the form of an interview; it consists of a series of questions that the critic Juan Calzadilla asked the Venezuelan visual artist Elsa Gramcko. The questions focus on Gramcko’s artistic development and especially on her [...]

In this interview, Claude-Louis Renard seeks insights into the Venezuelan visual artist Jesús Rafael Soto’s thinking and character. Chronologically structured along biographical lines, the conversation begins with Soto’s early days as an artist [...]

This newspaper article by Carlos Díaz Sosa is about Jesús Soto—and Alejandro Otero and Víctor Valera—at the XXXIII Biennale di Venezia (1966). It talks about his career, from his early days in Ciudad Bolívar to his recent work in Paris, where [...]

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 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, 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 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 [...]

In his review of the XIX Salón de Arte Venezolano (1958), the critic Perán Erminy notes the ingenious reliance on historical criteria in the arrangement of works selected for the event, from the old landscape masters to the new style of Abstract [...]

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 her essay “Diego Barboza: El festín de la nostalgia,” published in the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition, curator Katherine Chacón, after providing information on the artist’s youth, studies, and his start in painting and drawing in [...]

The journalist Raquel Chonchol wrote under the pseudonym, “Ray Ponte,” for The Daily Journal, a Venezuelan English language newspaper. She reviewed this exhibition on the occasion of a visit by some high-profile members of The International [...]

In the book 11 tipos. Arte en Venezuela en los años setenta, the researcher Juan Carlos Palenzuela makes an exhaustive study of Venezuelan art in the1970s, a time when conceptual art was unquestionably being produced in that country. The author [...]

The journalist Edith Guzmán interviews Alirio Palacios about his printmaking and the exhibitions he was involved in at the time. Palacios explains that he has taken up woodcut printing again and has been experimenting with that technique, using what [...]

The researcher Federica Palomero reviews the history of Venezuelan art in the 1960s, which she describes as “the prodigious decade.” She discusses the major artists, movements, works, exhibitions, salons, biennials, and exhibition spaces of the [...]

The critic Carlos Silva wrote a study of the work of the Venezuelan sculptor Edgar Guinand, pointing out two fundamental periods in his life in art. The first is defined by the writer in the visual arts context that follows the Latin American Post- [...]

Marta Traba begins the fourth chapter of her book Historia abierta del arte colombiano [Open History of Colombian Art] (1970) with a quote from the Colombian art historian Eugenio Barney Cabrera, from which she extrapolates the three points around [...]

Colombian anthropologists Clara Isabel Botero and Jimena Perry Posada describe the influence of educational and cultural policies on scientific and artistic projects during what was called the República Liberal in Colombia. In the authors’ view, [...]

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 [...]

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 flier for the eighth edition of the salão paulista de arte moderna has been redesigned and relies mainly on lowercase letters, double-page spreads, and a simple cover design. Willys de Castro is a member of the jury responsible for the [...]

In this essay “El caso Simón Bolívar o el arte como zona de disturbios” (The Simón Bolívar Case, or Art as a Site of Civil Unrest), Nelly Richard addresses the outrage expressed in the Santiago press and by the general [...]

In this article, written after the final debate at the Ateneo in Caracas, Marta Traba reviews the controversy that was unleashed by her ideas in 1965. She comes to the conclusion that there was no controversy, just an ongoing rebelliousness, as shown [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Alejandro Otero writes this article for Revista Cal to reflect on the work of fellow pioneer in abstract art (and his wife) Mercedes Pardo. It focuses on Pardo’s series of Signes, on view at the Sala Mendoza in Caracas. The Venezuelan modernist [...]

In this essay Rodrigo Quijano describes the period as having “contributed to the consolidation of a specific direction in Peruvian contemporary art” that, in his opinion, was characterized by “a virtual fragmentation of subjectivities” and by [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]