Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this first chapter of his book Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario, Carlos Rangel Guevara presents the Europeans’ mythical view of the Americas. He emphasizes that even today, the myth of the “noble savage,” associated with a Golden Age [...]

The Brazilian art researcher Luciano Alves Duffrayer believed that thanks to the nationalism of the 1920s and the assimilation of the European avant-gardes led the way to overcoming the 19th century prejudices tacitly fostered by art academies. These [...]

In this text, María Luisa Torrens responds to Aracy Amaral’s article arguing that the installation entitled Etsedrón, which appeared at the 1975 (XIII) São Paulo Biennial, constituted a promising new direction for Latin American art. Torrens [...]

This document includes two articles from the catalog for the exhibition Myths: Recent Paintings by Alejandro Romero held at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago from April 19–July 7, 1991. The first article considers Romero’s use of [...]

In the introduction to his questionnaire, the visual artist Julio Le Parc notes that art, being a product of social importance, needs group feedback. The first part of the questionnaire focuses on the definition, function, and social relationship of [...]

Rafael Montañez Ortiz describes the assemblages of Marcos Dimas as an extension of the artist’s childhood experience of digging up bits of Taíno artifacts in the fields of Puerto Rico. Ortiz proposes that Dimas’s works are the result of his [...]

Making use of his philosophical background, J. R. Guillent Pérez critically analyzes the article by Marta Traba published in Caracas under the title “El arte latinoamericano: un falso apocalipsis.” In his judgment, Traba has not understood the [...]

In this artist’s statement, the Cuban-born painter Paul Sierra writes about the meaning of his art as an exploration of myth and memory, and about his search for identity located in the midst of two cultures and in both the past and the present. He [...]