Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this article, the critic Roberto Guevara harshly rebuts the theses of Marta Traba, who argued in the mid-1960s that Latin American art had been “depersonalized” and contaminated by the “mimicry” of international art. Guevara, who felt the [...]

In response to J. R. Guillent Pérez, art critic Marta Traba defines the term “apocalypse”—used by her in an article that unleashed a great controversy in Caracas—as the chaos and dissolution of existing social structures, as well as the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Open letter to Philosophy Graduate J. R. Guillent Pérez. In this letter the artist Alejandro Otero highlights his differences on the ideas of Marta Traba, which had already been questioned by the addressee. Otero, openly in opposition to Traba, felt [...]