Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this brief essay, Gabriela Mistral makes a cultural reconstruction of the images of America, a “terrestrial Valkyrie,” that includes the social conflicts at the time, the responsibility of its inhabitants to see about the future of their [...]

In this essay Adriana Valdés discusses the production of women artists, and takes a sweeping look at women artists in Latin America and Chile. She follows María Zambrano’s lead regarding the cultural and historical forces that [...]

This article was written by Gaspar Galaz on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of works by Claudio Bravo at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Galaz refers to a debate about art and how it should be defined that was [...]

The art critic Antonio Romera identifies the uniquely Chilean aspects of Chilean painting in his study of four constants that, in his opinion, are repeated throughout its history: landscape, color, French influence, and character. Similarly, the [...]

This is Pablo Oyarzún’s critical review of Nelly Richard’s book Márgenes e Instituciones (Margins and Institutions). He acknowledges her role in the field of Chilean art and her contributions to a new approach to art [...]

The artist Roser Bru provides a first-person account of the founding of Taller 99, specifically at the time when Nemesio Antúnez first started teaching. When he was unable to start a workshop at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas in Santiago, [...]

Pedro Millar interviews Nemesio Antúnez, and they discuss printmaking based on their personal and group experience. The conversation touches on what prompted Antúnez’s interest in printmaking, the years he spent in the United [...]

This is Antonio Romera’s visual review of Luis Durand’s literary work. The first thing he notices is the sensual nature of Durand’s writing; his narrative style creates currents and movements that trace the outlines of objects and [...]

In this article, the writer Gonzalo Muñoz discusses the art produced in Santiago, Chile, between 1974 and 1985, which he describes as being highly political and, therefore, very focused on the military dictatorship that was in power at that [...]

This essay by Mario Soro was one of the chapters in the catalogue for the exhibition Chile 100 años (Chile 100 Years) covering the second period, 1950–73, titled “Entre modernidad y utopía” (Between Modernity and [...]

“El infinito de la obra” by Francisco Brugnoli is the introductory essay in the catalogue for the exhibition Centenario Carlos Hermosilla, 1905–2005, which acknowledged the centenary of the birth of the famous printmaker from [...]

This was an interdisciplinary poetry project produced by Nicanor Parra in 1952. Parra worked with Enrique Lihn and Alejandro Jodorowsky to create Quebrantahuesos, a sheet of paper measuring 55 x 40 centimeters which they covered with newspaper [...]

This article by Ana María Risco was included in her book Crítica situada. It was originally written as an academic thesis in which she explored the network of authors with whom Enrique Lihn communicated in the field of the visual arts. [...]

This essay is a brief text written by the historian and art critic Antonio Romera on Carlos Hermosilla’s work in the context of his participation at the IV Bienal Americana del Grabado in Santiago, Chile in 1970, whose core topic was on Chilean [...]

The text by Ronald Kay is presented as a written-visual statement in the quote from the edition of “El quebrantahuesos” that explored a form of experimental poetry, developed in 1952, which Kay here reclaims and editorializes. This essay outlines [...]

This text is part of El gran solipsismo, Juan Luis Martínez. Obra visual (Santiago: Editorial Puntángeles, 2002), the collection of essays written by the researcher José de Nordenflycht. The author considers the work in question [...]

This is the text of the speech Gabriela Mistral gave at the special session of the board of directors of the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, in 1946, the year after she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm. The Chilean poet [...]

This essay by Alberto Madrid is the research on the evolution of Chilean engraving at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Viña del Mar. For this the author utilized references of national geographic elements associated with printmaking, which [...]

In this essay, the printmaker Pedro Millar reflects on the lira popular [that is, printed poetic forms illustrated with singular woodcuts], a Chilean folk tradition, as the antecedents to wood engraving in Chile. Accompanying the article was an [...]

This article by Ana María Risco was included in her book Crítica situada. The latter was originally written as an academic thesis in which she explored the network of authors with whom Enrique Lihn communicated in the field of the [...]

This article by Ana María Risco was included in her book Crítica situada. The latter was originally written as an academic thesis in which she explored the network of authors with whom Enrique Lihn communicated in the field of the [...]

The theorist and visual artist Francisco González-Vera describes his text as a “model” that can be used to help position the work of Pablo Burchard within the framework of Chilean painting. To that end, he suggests taking an [...]

In this article, Justo Pastor Mellado explores the immediate connections that Nicanor Parra created for objectual (object-based) drawing in his Trabajos Prácticos series on the occasion of his exhibition in Madrid. The author raises [...]

In this text Gaspar Galaz writes about the prints produced by Jaime Cruz. He discusses the ones from the 1960s, which are representative of Cruz’s early work in this medium. Galaz also refers to the dominant trends in art at that time, the [...]

In this essay Justo Pastor Mellado discusses four works produced by Alicia Villarreal in 1996–97 that were shown at various exhibitions. He sees similarities in them, in both thematic and material terms, based on their focus on books and [...]

Adriana Valdés wrote this essay for the catalogue for an exhibition of works by Mónica Bengoa. Organizing her text around six themes, Valdés writes about stories, pixels, the unspeakable, “To the sound of a smooth, soft [...]

Ronald Kay published this collection of works by Nicanor Parra in News from Nowhere, in the only issue of Manuscritos magazine (Santiago: Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos, Universidad de Chile, 1975). Kay underscores the value of these [...]

In this essay Gonzalo Díaz discusses his association with Adolfo Couve, his drawing and painting teacher. The Chilean artist describes his mentor, recalling a series of vignettes from Couve’s life, such as: his studio (where Díaz trained in 1964 [...]

This essay is a review by Enrique Lihn on Pedro Millar’s exhibition at the Instituto Cultural de Providencia, and it being part of the IV Bienal Americana del Grabado in Santiago, Chile in 1970. Lihn characterized Millar’s work as [...]

“Pedro Millar, grabador” is the transcript of a conversation between CAL magazine and Pedro Millar. The interviewer asked the printmaker for his views on subjects such as the relationship between his work and contemporary art, his [...]

In his review of Quadrivium, the installation by Gonzalo Díaz, Alberto Madrid claims that it consists of didactic sheets that can be interpreted as a display of different “lessons about things.” The project, which was dedicated to [...]

This essay is Pedro Millar’s brief biography on Santos Chavez’s integration into Taller 99, in which he also gives an account on his artistic trajectory through the interpretation of his iconography. He states that in an encounter [...]

In this article, the critic and curator Justo Pastor Mellado reviews SEMI YA [a phonetic pun on the Spanish word for ‘seed’], the exhibition of works by the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña at the Galería Gabriela Mistral in [...]