Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This chapter provides a detailed and well-documented chronological profile of Dora Ramírez, the painter from Antioquia, illustrated with photographs from her own personal album. It describes her family life, her early marriage (and her six children [...]

In 1927, the painter Eladio Vélez, from Antioquia, fulfilled his dream of going to study in Europe. The letters he wrote to his family when he was a student in Europe have been copied and kept. In the one selected here (written on April 9, 1927), to [...]

In 1957 Aníbal Gil Villa returned to Medellín after studying art in Italy, where he met other Colombians, including Enrique Grau and Fernando Botero. On his return he said: “I am not trying to paint in this or that style because I think that is a [...]

In this interview, painter Dora Ramírez discusses different aspects of her life and her training as an artist. A European professor who saw her work at the Instituto de Artes Plásticas gave her a piece of advice that spurred her to develop her work [...]

By 1986, when this interview was published, artist Débora Arango was in her eighties and afflicted with health problems that prevented her from painting. Despite the fact that she did not grant many interviews due to her failing memory, in this [...]

In 1983, a sculpture garden opened in Cerro Nutibara in Medellín, Antioquia, featuring works by international artists Manuel Felguérez (Mexico); Julio Le Parc (Argentina); Sérgio [de] Camargo (Brazil); Carlos Cruz Díez and Jesús Rafael Soto ( [...]

This article by Mario Rivero forms part of a book featuring a selection of texts on the outstanding draftsman and printmaker Óscar Jaramillo, and some of his drawings. The text places Jaramillo’s work in the context of the aesthetic concerns of [...]

In the second part of his book on the life and work of sculptor Marco Tobón Mejía, painter Jorge Cárdenas discusses Tobón Mejía’s reliefs, commemorative and funerary monuments, and other sculpture. He describes how Tobón Mejía’s study of [...]

This article by journalist Maryluz Vallejo Mejía—reporter and cultural editor of the Medellín-based newspaper El Mundo at the time—recounts the history of “El Jardín del Arte,” as María Antonieta Pellicer de Vallejo’s modernist home was [...]

In his work, Juan Camilo Uribe makes use of the language of Pop art to formulate a reflection on Colombian popular and local culture. In this interview, Uribe discusses different facets of his production such as humor, which he considers fundamental [...]

Poet Elkin Restrepo wrote the introduction to the book that compiles a wide selection of works on paper by José Antonio Suárez, works produced until 1999. It begins by recalling the impact of the works that Suárez exhibited in Medellín after [...]

This is one of the few studies of the work of writer and visual artist José Restrepo Rivera. The topics the author discusses include the impact of Restrepo Rivera’s studies with Francisco Antonio Cano, the poetry he wrote with his brother Jesús, [...]

This article provides an account of the life of painter María Villa. The daughter of a peasant woman, Villa moved to Medellín where she worked as a domestic servant and as a salesperson in a shop. Later, she managed a boardinghouse and local stores [...]

This text highlights the importance of the portrait genre in both the capital of the department of Antioquia and the rest of the province during the 19th century. A wide range of portraits were produced at that time, from those exalting the heroes of [...]

This text on painter, draftsman, and printmaker Francisco Valderrama Rojo was written by a coworker at the publishing house where he worked for twenty years before becoming a university professor. The piece speaks of the humanity and simplicity for [...]

Originally published in La Patria newspaper based in Manizales, Colombia, this text is a journalistic version of the two television programs aired in 1956 that critic Marta Traba dedicated to the work of sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt. Traba [...]

The anonymous author of this article discusses the pessimism prevalent in a milieu dedicated to “gathering gold” and “displaying its purchasing power.” While the author accepts that economic wellbeing is necessary “for the practice of [...]

This book by Dora Mejía addresses work by painter Marta Elena Vélez produced from the artist’s early career in the 1960s to 2008. Mejía analyzes what she calls “the return to classic painting” that occurred after Vélez’s vibrant and [...]

In this interview, sculptor Hugo Zapata reflects on his formative years, as well as his work as an educator and the way the academic bureaucracy limited his development as an artist. He speaks of the period he worked in silkscreen printing and of his [...]

This interview with Ronny Vayda, a sculptor from Antioquia, by artist Félix Ángel provides an overview of Vayda’s life. This text, the only one of its sort on Vadya, discusses the sculptor’s education, the art scene in the region of Medellín [...]

This text is one of the principal chapters in a book on the work of Colombian-based North American artist Ethel Gilmour. The titles of the chapters are “La sala azul,” “El pasillo amarillo,” “El taller,” (which is divided into two parts [...]

A special edition of Imaginario—the Saturday supplement to Medellín-based newspaper El Mundo—was published on the occasion of the premature death of printmaker Fabián Rendón Tobón. The publication contained statements by some of the artist’ [...]

Written in Paris on April 29, 1918, this letter from sculptor Marco Tobón Mejía to his friend Carlos E. Restrepo reveals the nature of the relationship between the Colombian artist and one of the most important representatives of Colombia’s [...]

Yo Digo is the title of the mimeographed publication by artist Félix Ángel that circulated free of charge in Medellín, the capital of the Department of Antioquia, from September 5, 1975 to January 7, 1979. In issue 25, the author defends himself [...]

In this text, Colombian writer Darío Jaramillo Agudelo voices his assessment of works included in an exhibition held at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Medellín in 1983. In his view, these works represent a new form of academicism in Colombia, one [...]

In this lucid text, Mexican mural artist David Alfaro Siqueiros describes Colombian sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, a young man at the time, as a talented artist and pioneer of sculpture in Mexico. Siqueiros explains that Betancourt Arenas’s [...]

In 1901, after having studied painting in Europe, Francisco Antonio Cano returned to Colombia and resumed his work teaching painting in Medellín. His students included Luis Eduardo Vieco, who wrote these notes on Cano’s lessons, chiefly on color [...]

The decision of the jury at the painting salon presented at the Club Unión in Medellín in November 1939 incited indignation and protest amongst traditional painters from the Antioquia region. The main voices of the traditionalists were Eladio Vé [...]

This unusually incisive and analytic speech given by Pedro Nel Ospina at the concert held in Medellín in 1898 to support painter Francisco Antonio Cano demonstrates the social situation of the artist from the Antioquia region at the turn of the [...]

In this interview with Débora Arango Pérez by an anonymous journalist for the liberal Medellín-based newspaper El Diario, the artist discusses certain aspects of her life. She also explains her ideas about the nude genre and the relationship [...]

This text analyzes two events important to contemporary art from the Antioquia region that took place in 1981: the first was the fourth and final edition of the Bienal de Arte de Medellín, and the second was the Coloquio de Arte No Objetual y de [...]

This is an interview, complete with editorial comments, that was published in the newspaper El Heraldo de Antioquia on the occasion of the exhibition of works by the Colombian painter Débora Arango in Bogotá in 1940. Arango mentions the reactions [...]

On the occasion of an exhibition at the Instituto de Bellas Artes de Medellín that included paintings by Colombian artists such as Paulina Uribe de Escobar and Carlos Correa, the journalist José Mejía y Mejía published an article in which he [...]

In this first part of a long article, published in two installments, the artist and curator Félix Ángel charts the rise of the generation of Colombian artists who came to be known as the “Once antioqueños” [Eleven Antioquians] in a critical [...]

Scientist and humanist César Uribe Piedrahita delivered this speech at the opening of the 1938 exhibition of painter Carlos Correa held at the Sociedad Colombiana de Ingenieros [Colombian Society of Engineers] in Bogotá. Uribe Piedrahita described [...]

In this prologue to the catalogue of the 3rd Coltejer Art Biennial, held in Medellín in 1972, the president of the sponsoring company, Rodrigo Uribe Echavarría, explained what he considered to be the double significance of the Biennial, the most [...]

In this article, journalist Fidel Cano, founder of the newspaper El Espectador (in circulation in Medellín since 1887) writes enthusiastically about Horizontes [Horizons], an oil painting that Francisco Antonio Cano had made in Bogotá; the work was [...]

In this interview written in the first person by journalist Soad Aljure, Colombian painter Fernando Botero discusses certain aspects of his life, his method, and his artistic credo from a perspective born of maturity and with a confidence born of [...]

Colombian painter Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo was awarded first prize at the First Salón Anual de Artistas Colombianos held in 1940. In this incendiary text, painter Eladio Vélez—who had previously been embroiled in a heated debate with Pedro Nel G [...]

In this article, conservative journalist José Mejía y Mejía provides a lucid and surprising defense of Colombian painter Débora Arango, whose exhibition had opened at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá on October 5, 1940. In José Mejía y Mejía’s [...]

This biographical overview—the first one ever published in Antioquia on an artist from the region—begins by describing Colombian artist Francisco Antonio Cano’s humble background and difficult childhood. From a young age, Cano took an interest [...]

The writer Gonzalo Arango Arias interviews Fernando Botero, and includes literary remarks about the painter and the Colombian city of Medellín. He weaves in references to Botero’s experience in Europe, stressing “the poverty he endured and his [...]

Professor Nicolás Bayona Posada, who was also a journalist, interviews the caricaturist Ricardo Rendón, who states that “the essential element in a caricature is not the drawing; it is the model.” Rendón also says that to capture the spectacle [...]

In this text, the lawyer and humanist Felix Betancourt submits one of the earliest philosophical reflections on aesthetic matters ever to be expressed in Antioquia. Betancourt claims that “perfect and ultimate beauty” arises from things and from [...]

This interview was conducted in 1961 on the occasion of an exhibition of the work of the painter Carlos Correa in Medellín. The interviewer describes Correa as an “authentically Colombian figurative artist” and a “fortunate harvester of the [...]

This article?written by the Colombian educator Adelfa Arango Jaramillo on the occasion of an exhibition of French art in Medellín?champions new concepts that she believes are key aspects of modern art: the absence of an attempt to please, and an [...]

The exhibition of watercolor nudes by Débora Arango created quite a stir in artistic and social circles in Medellín in late 1939. The ultraconservative opinions of the journalist José Mejía y Mejía, writing in the newspaper El Colombiano, did [...]

Twenty-five years after the scandal caused by his painting Anunciación [Annunciation] (1941), Colombian painter Carlos Correa compiled a wide range of articles related to the case that appeared in the press during a twenty five-year period. The [...]

In this little known interview, Colombian painter Francisco Antonio Cano provides an emotional account of his early days in Yarumal, “a village nestled in the mountains of Antioquia [Colombia].” He mentions his early accomplishments in Medellín [...]

In October 1950, a painting exhibition was held in Medellín on the occasion of a “civic week”; a number of artists from the Antioquia region participated in the event. According to the author of this article, Jaime Piedrahita Cardona, a [...]