Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This document is the official version of the press conference given by the de facto president, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, at the Palacio de Gobierno in Peru on June 24, 1972. While the issues addressed revolve around international relations of [...]

In this text, Manuel Araníbar voices his opinion about the controversies surrounding the image of the indigenous forefather of Peruvian independence, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Túpac Amaru II. In Araníbar’s view, the movement to uphold the [...]

This brief but eloquent article reports on the ceremony in which General Juan Velasco Alvarado, the president of the military junta in power from 1968 to 1975, unveils the portrait of Túpac Amaru II, the indigenous forefather of Peruvian [...]

This article from El Comercio, a Cuzco newspaper, refers to the competition organized to choose a sculpture to honor Túpac Amaru II to be placed in Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas, and reports that the winning design had been rejected. The correspondent [...]

In this text, researcher Otília Arantes reflects on the impact of recent initiatives in France to restore the country’s position as a world center of twentieth-century cultural production. The projects undertaken and investments made form the [...]

In this text, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles recalls the late sixties when he and other artists “first came into contact with what was truly of interest,” mainly acting directly on real “situations” rather than creating representations of [...]

This is a description of Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux, the work by Cildo Meireles that consists of a pile of 160 thousand match boxes. The exhibition was installed at the Centro Cultural Cândido Mendes, in Rio de Janeiro, on April 25, 1979. There [...]

The artist Antonio Manuel describes two works that were conceived for an exhibition at the MAM-RJ (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro) in 1973, an event that the museum canceled on the eve of its opening in an attempt to avoid “difficult [...]

Using newspaper sources, Esther Acevedo explores the diverse ways in which different groups of artists and intellectuals arose during 1920-1924 around the concept of “what is national,” particularly in the visual arts. She also investigates the [...]

Carlos Chávez announces the opening of the Mexican art exhibition organized by the governments of Mexico and France, in which a very carefully selected collection of masterpieces would be presented, beginning with the pre-Cortés era and continuing [...]

Diego Rivera, author of this essay, conducts a political analysis of the role that workers and peasants played as allies of the government in the struggle against the “reaction;” that is, a coup d’état carried out against the government that [...]