Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The Estatutos [Statutes] of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) [Peoples’ Graphics Workshop] were written a year after it was founded. They describe it as a workshop devoted to the art of agitation and propaganda, united by a commitment to two [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero and José Chávez Morado led the call for Mexican artists to orient their artistic production to the guidelines of social realism. They responded “. . .  by rejecting the theories and formalist [...]

In this document, Diego Rivera discusses the details of his conflict with David Alfaro Siqueiros; that is, the international campaign orchestrated by the Stalinist leadership to discredit Rivera for his Trotskyite militancy and for his financial [...]

The exhibition at Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, presented Rufino Tamayo as one of the four great Mexican artists. His works were part of the great modernism and, unlike those of his colleagues, no Communist symbols could be found in [...]

Rivera claims that societal conditions influence a society’s cultural expression, and insists that making art is an integral part of the social fabric. Speaking from an essentially Marxist platform, he explains that art will disappear in future [...]

Carlos Chávez tells the press that he had received an order not to exhibit the painting Pesadilla de guerra y sueño de paz [Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace]. As such he had only two choices: remove the painting or close the museum; he opted for [...]

In the 1990s, the magazine Memoria reported on a controversy that led to the great 1936 exhibition organized by the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. The article explains that the [...]

Hernán Laborde establishes the defense of human rights and peace as a point of agreement among all the intellectual groups gathered there. With regard to art, he begins with a premise of Joseph Stalin according to which writers, and by extension [...]

This is a collection of articles by David Alfaro Siqueiros in which he restates the principles of an art about war, linking it to the great artistic traditions expressed in the work of artists such as Dr. Atl, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera [...]

This is a summary of a lecture on El realismo socialista en la pintura [Socialist Realism in Painting] given by David Alfaro Siqueiros at a union hall (packed with six hundred attendees), in which he shared an instrumental vision of art. He presented [...]

This document is a didactic-political text directed toward the working class organized around identification of its enemies. These include the fake socialist parties (equated with the Italian fascists). And also the intellectuals unable to understand [...]

After outlining Mexican history from Independence in 1821 through Juárez Reformation and the Porfiriato [Porfirio Díaz regime], Diego Rivera asks why a day of national mourning should be observed on November 20th, the symbolic first day of the [...]

This article places Diego Rivera’s Trotskyist period within his phase of painting murals in the United States and in Mexico. It reveals affinities and differences he had with various intellectuals and artists’ organizations, as well as his [...]

This was the headline of the supplement—dedicated to the muralist on the centenary of his birth—that published a document dated December 19, 1929 in which Diego Rivera explained “My Expulsion from the PCM.” The text discusses [...]