Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This exhibition essay discusses several Central American and Caribbean artists who draw on rituals in their performative works, including Ernesto Pujol, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, José Bedia, Pepón Osorio, Tania Bruguera, [...]

This exhibition essay charts Ana Mendieta’s artistic trajectory between 1970 and 1980, including her tenure at the University of Iowa (where she completed two master’s degrees: one in painting and one in intermedia), her time in Mexico, [...]

This magazine article addresses Ana Mendieta’s early work during her graduate studies at the University of Iowa in the early 1970s. The article argues that though Mendieta’s work has been extensively analyzed, this period in her [...]

Curator Julia Herzberg’s exhibition essay for The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s explores the construct of “identity” in the art of the 1980s. It discusses the twenty-five Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, Latin American [...]

In this document, curator and art historian Susana Torruella Leval considers works by several artists whose practices reflect an interest in articulating a particular historical consciousness that is tied to their cultural identity as Latin Americans [...]

In “Teoría y prácticas no-objetualistas en América Latina” [Non-Objectualist Theory and Practice in Latin America], Juan Acha, the Peruvian art critic who lived in Mexico, explains the basis of his theory concerning [...]

In this essay, Arturo Lindsay documents the confluence of Post-modernism in the U.S. and the mestizaje [racial and cultural intermingling] of Latinos in order to create a “Latino aesthetic”—one that is grounded in syncretic spiritual beliefs. [...]

The prominent scholar Robert Farris Thompson examines in this essay the presence of Afro-Cuban culture in the artworks featured in the 1991–1992 exhibition Cuba-USA: The First Generation. Thompson discusses the photographs of Ramón Guerrero, which [...]

In this short, early artist statement, Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta explains that the first part of her life was spent in Cuba from where she believes her interest in primitive art and culture probably originated. As a child growing up in Cuba, she [...]

Iván de la Nuez’s entry for the exhibition catalog Cuba siglo XX: Modernidad y sincretismo [Twentieth-Century Cuba: Modernity and Syncretism] focuses on Cuban art made on the island as well as art made in exile from the onset of the 1959 Cuban [...]

This is the transcript of an interview between Eva Cockcroft, writer of the journal Art & Artists, and Juan Sanchez—Nuyorican artist and curator of the exhibition Ritual and Rhythm: Visual Forces For Survival (1982)—as well as a couple of the [...]