Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this text, José Carlos Mariátegui argues that no avant-garde artistic or literary movement has been “as significant historically or important as content as Surrealism.” He asserts that, while Futurism attempted to go beyond formal [...]

[This article is] a debate between the German Marxist intellectual Iring Fetscher and the writer Mirko Lauer for the Peruvian magazine U-tópicos Entornoalovisual, moderated by Gustavo Buntinx, the editor of the magazine. This issue of the magazine [...]

This editorial was published in number 4/5 (1984) of U-tópicos. Entornoalovisual, the Peruvian magazine. In the text, Gustavo Buntinx states that, while the Marxist proposal has yet to be carried out, Marxism itself tends to be distorted and reduced [...]

In this essay, the Argentinean critic Héctor Agosti presented the conceptual origins of “artistic critique” from a Marxist ideological viewpoint. He reflects on the complexity of the artistic creativity, which responds, but not automatically, to [...]

In this article, the writer Luis Cardoza y Aragón reviews the Tratado de Estética [Aesthetics Treatise] by Luis Vidales Jaramillo, a few months after it was published. The Guatemalan author contextualizes Vidales Jaramillo’s work, describing its [...]

This handwritten journal excerpt from Carlos Almaraz has a compilation of notes on his thoughts about the potential Marxism of Andy Warhol’s artistic practice. He suggests that Warhol’s work displays Marxist tendencies in its seriality, which [...]

In an earlier article written in 1977, the artist Francisco Abril de Vivero challenged the official populist decision to send arts and crafts to the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. In his opinion, the decision showed “the spirit of demagoguery [...]

Leobardo Reynoso, the representative for the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM) [Mexican Revolutionary Party], questions the president concerning any Communist influence in the government. President Lázaro Cárdenas replies that there is not and [...]

Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar applies semiotic and Marxist theories to analyze social value in art occurring in an historical era that proclaims itself both postmodern and postcolonial. He observes that such discourse renders people oppressed by [...]

Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar applies semiotic and Marxist theories to analyze social value in art occurring in an historical era that proclaims itself both postmodern and postcolonial. He observes that such discourse renders people oppressed by [...]

Santiago A. Ferrari writes about meeting Antonio Berni in New York; he discusses the artist’s everyday life and the changes in his political views concerning Marxism [...]

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 Moog writes a theoretical essay on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Latin America. The author believes that art is a political weapon. He studies the relation between Marxism and art, including the differences in social [...]

This document is a letter discussing the book Happenings, written by Oscar Masotta in 1967: his need to break with painting, that is not concerned with the specifics of a work, but with coming to an understanding with the natural environment through [...]

This text is a programmatic source that reports the active participation of the Concrete Invention at the core of a socialist construction of the world that would be based on the creation of new natural elements, both mechanical and technical [...]

This is an analytical review of the differences between representative art and the “invention” proposed by the Asociación Arte Concreto — Invención [Concrete Art and Invention Association]. The text claims that representative art is not [...]

In this programmatic article, Tomás Maldonado affirms that the Asociación Arte Concreto — Invención [Concrete Art and Invention Association] adheres to humanism by means of a revolutionary path and faith in man’s capacity for pragmatism. At [...]