Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This article is by Hans Platschek who was living in Montevideo between 1939 and 1953. The German artist makes a self- analysis on the resulting situation of postwar modernism, specifically the debated notion of “Art Nouveau or young art” both in [...]

In this text, art critic María Luz Cárdenas explains the concerns underlying the fifth Salón Pirelli, which in her view, is a concise reflection on the conflicts and dilemmas that new technological media have brought to artistic creation. Cá [...]

Critic Luis Ángel Duque presents a brief history of “vision,” defining it as the happy convergence of the retina and the brain. In his words, it is through vision that a man sees himself, but also everything else that surrounds him; it is one of [...]

The historian Alfredo Armas Alfonzo wrote a biography on the life and work of the Russian artist Nicolás Ferdinandov, from the time when he lived in Venezuela until his death in Curaçao. He commented on the influence Ferdinandov bestowed on young [...]

Critic and curator Luis Ángel Duque offers an abbreviated history of the Venezuelan art salons that featured young artists and recent work; he refers to those that occurred between 1981 and 1995. The second Salón Pirelli was organized in 1995 at [...]

María Luz Cárdenas, the curator of the I Salón Pirelli de Jóvenes Artistas, explains why a new Salon was created for young Venezuelan artists. She identifies the Salon’s immediate history, justifies its creation, and describes the guidelines or [...]

In this text, María Luz Cárdenas explains the key to her curatorial approach and how it sheds light on the context in which the artists participating in the II Salón Pirelli de Jóvenes Artistas developed their ideas. Cárdenas provides an [...]

Gustavo Buntinx interviews Claudia Polar, the director of the Galería Forum in Lima. They talk about the development of a market for young Peruvian art, which the gallery has been supporting since 1974. They discuss the changes in the local [...]

In this essay, Gustavo Buntinx analyzes emerging Peruvian art, seeing it as part of a process that began twenty or twenty-five years earlier. He speculates on “what were or claimed to be alternatives in Peruvian high art during Fernando Belaúnde [...]

This is a letter by Felipe Buendía to the editor of Caretas, a magazine published in Lima, regarding the inauguration of the IAC (Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo) new building. The writer and journalist complains that the institution closed its [...]

The article “Arte Joven con inflación” [Young Art with Inflation] (1991) was written by Ana María Escallón as a review of the seventh edition of the exhibition Nuevos Nombres [New Names] (1991) and published in the Bogotá newspaper El [...]

The article “La ‘tradición’ del arte joven en Bogotá” by Nadia Moreno was published in the July 2009 issue (No. 20) of the Cuban digital magazine Arteamérica. The text, which was written with the support of a research grant given by the [...]

This document discusses Doméstica: una mirada cotidiana [Domestic: A Quotidian Perspective], the name of the latest edition of Nuevos Nombres [New Names], the exhibition of works by young artists that was presented at the Luis Ángel Arango Library [...]

The curator and cultural representative Jorge Jaramillo Jaramillo—who at the time was the director of the Galería Santa Fe at the Planetarium in Bogota—discusses several matters regarding the first edition of the Premio Luis Caballero [Luis [...]

In this letter, José Vasconcelos calls upon the youth of Colombia to lead the way in the triumph of a new, unified, utopian America. Drawing as usual on both the rhetoric of science and mysticism, Vasconcelos explains how the united America of the [...]

As part of a message addressed to young Cubans, Índice magazine reviews Puerto Rico’s situation. The article discusses Puerto Rico’s isolation, diminutive size, and solitude. As though that were not enough, Puerto Ricans are born and raised in a [...]

This tenth anniversary article, written by Nuyorican poet Americo Casiano, recounts the origins of Taller Boricua [Puerto Rican Workshop] as a visual arts organization born from the need to decentralize the dissemination of art from major New York [...]

[This text is] the first issue of Los Disidentes (Paris, 1950) magazine, in which [the group] explains succinctly the “essential mission” of the eponymous magazine and the “immediate aim” which they are pursuing with this [...]

In this letter, probably addressed to Homero M. Guglielmini (one of the editors of the magazine Inicial. Revista de la nueva generación) [Initial. Journal of the new generation], Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset expresses his mistrust [...]