Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This magazine questionnaire on Mexican sculpture surveyed four sculptors, two painters, and an architect. The questions were as follows: (1) Is Mexican sculpture involved in our current period of revolutionary construction? (2) Given its admirable [...]

Antonio Rodríguez begins his text by justifying, to a degree, José Luís Cuevas’ harsh denunciation of the Mexican muralism movement to Marta Traba. The writer states that Cuevas, as a young painter and critic of his time, should be allowed such [...]

Carlos Mérida starts this lecture by commenting on the effort made by U.S. artists to found a center for the Union Artists Gallery, which would surely lay the foundation for the future of art in the United States. He notes the close affinity between [...]

Antonio Rodríguez reports that José Luís Cuevas’ statements to Marta Traba concerning the Mexican muralist movement provoked resentful feelings in many painters that consider them to be unpatriotic. He states that Traba repeatedly attacked [...]

In his essay, “El arte negro” [The Black Art], Manuel Álvarez Bravo mentions several factors that substantiate photography’s standing as an art form. In this photographer’s opinion the practice, like other forms of artistic expression, [...]

Carlos Mérida comments that the mere imitation of the motifs of popular art, constantly repeated in the artistic production, may lead to the creation of “standard” painters, without any purpose, since the production of the popular artists will [...]

The architect begins his article by saying that painting achieves its maximum expression when it is applied to architecture. However, he mentions that true collaboration happens only infrequently between painters and architects, because the painter [...]

This article by Mathias Goeritz looks at the level of plastic integration achieved by the Benito Juárez Multifamily Urban Unit, a project under the architectural direction of Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral, working together with the plastic artist [...]

In her essay, Ida Rodríguez [Prampolini] makes clear that she has not rededicated herself to the new art trends, given that when she did so, there were bitter reactions to her commentaries. She is incapable of hiding her disillusionment with the [...]

This article by Carlos Mérida sets forth the different formal and basic elements for the integration of several art fields: scale, rhythm, color and harmony. In the artist’s opinion, the new generation of Mexican painters possesses a tendency [...]

Carlos Mérida discusses the creative limitations of sculpture, which in contrast to painting, has lacked a natural evolution in spirit and experimentation; he believes it has also lacked contact with other manifestations of universal sculpture and [...]

This essay is the first sketch of some of Carlos Mérida’s original concepts on Integración Plástica [Arts Integration]. He states that functional painting—the only path in contemporary art—should be created for the majority of people, in [...]