Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this text, art historian and activist Victor Alejandro Sorell ponders on arguments for designating Chicano people a nation: the history of the twelfth-century Aztec homeland Aztlán, —located in the U.S. Southwest,— included; the seizure of [...]

Art historian Shifra M. Goldman writes with great acuity and depth about the traveling exhibition, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987, and subsequently went to the Queens [...]

In this series of three letters (housed in the archives of the Art Institute of Chicago), museum officials correspond with representatives of the Mexican Ambassador to the United States and the U.S. Department of State regarding the exhibition Posada [...]

This text by Elizam Escobar, a noted Puerto Rican nationalist, artist, and writer, is a largely autobiographical account of his artistic and political evolution in the island and the United States. Written in prison, the essay reflects on his [...]

This text sympathetically discusses Mexican immigrants in Chicago under several subsections. In the first section, “The New Home,” authors Robert C. Jones and Louis R. Wilson describe the lively and colorful street life of the neighborhood where [...]

In this commentary, Deanna Bertoncini, the founder and executive director of the Latino Arts Coalition and Gallery in Chicago, critiques the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” as applied to the work of Latin American and Latino artists and with [...]

In this text, Carlos Cortez comments on the need for a movement to liberate art from the market, private collections, and those who see the consumption of art as a means of separating themselves from the lower classes. He contends that too often art [...]

In this candid interview in Abrazo, Chicago-based Chicano sculptor Alex Garza discusses his development and process, and voices his thoughts on public art and the Chicano community. Garza reflects on his involvement with ALBA (Association of the [...]

In this editorial column, Carlos Cortez comments on the exhibition of Agustín V. Casasola’s photographs, Mexposición II: Images of the Revolución, noting that all of the heroes of the Mexican Revolution, as well as many average participants and [...]

This group of texts describes an exhibition of Augustín V. Casasola’s photographs—and the public programs that accompanied it—organized by Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) and mounted at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976. In [...]

In this text, Jose G. Gonzalez describes an exhibition of photographs by Agustin V. Casasola of the Mexican Revolution that was organized by Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) and displayed in the Chicago Circle galleries of the University of [...]

In this text, Victor Alejandro Sorell writes that Chicago State University observed the 66th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution with a dedication of an eight-panel portable mural by Raymond Patlan entitled El Grito de la Raza Cósmica, [The Cry of [...]

In this review of the exhibition Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings, Victor Alejandro Sorell writes that the border is the exhibition’s overarching and master trope. The exhibition features works of art by the “greater Mexican [...]

Victor Alejandro Sorell’s essay is a comprehensive study addressing more than one hundred twentieth-century Chicano and Mexican artists and collectives active between the 1960s and 1990s, including film and performance practitioners and activists, [...]

The text Cry for Justice is composed of three parts: a statement entitled “To Listen and to Act,” photographs with extended captions of murals in Chicago since 1967, and an essay entitled “Museum of the Streets.” In the first part, the civil [...]

In this text, the artist Mario Castillo discusses the philosophical reasons that motivated his practice of mixing his own semen with tempera and acrylic paint. He explains that he does this in order to imbue his medium with greater “energy” and [...]

This exhibition catalogue includes a curatorial statement by Chicago-based artist Mario Enrique Castillo, as well as statements and biographies of the seven artists featured in the exhibition Latino Diversity = Diversidad Latina. In his essay, [...]

In this text, Mario Castillo describes the underpinnings of the term Perceptualism, a concept he developed for creating and perceiving paintings, which he has used to characterize his work since 1993. In terms of his creative process, Castillo [...]

This modest, illustrated recruitment brochure provides a descriptive capsular history of the Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) group since its inception in 1972 in East Chicago, Indiana, through its official chartering in 1975 in Chicago’s [...]

This heavily illustrated exhibition catalogue documents sixty-eight artworks—drawings, paintings, prints, and mixed-media pieces—by twenty-two Latina artists identified by ethnicity and/or nationality. Curator Juana Guzmán admits in her brief [...]

This catalogue documents a project created by the Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and twelve students in the Adult Education Program at the Emerson House Community Center in Chicago. Introductory text explains that this project was [...]

These artists’ statements appeared in a catalogue documenting the first exhibition held in Chicago that conjoined Chicano, Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan art and artists in words and images, Arte Hispano-Americano en Chicago=Hispanic- [...]

In this curatorial essay, Victor A. Sorell weighs opposition to the term “Hispanic” with the need to label the Latino artists of diverse origins included in the exhibition, Arte Hispano-Americano en Chicago=Hispanic-American Art in Chicago. He [...]

This seminal essay by Victor Alejandro Sorell is an early attempt to gauge the history and evolution of Hispanic-American (now Latino) barrio/community muralism in greater Chicago, from its inception in the mid-1960s through its development into the [...]

This text describes the beginnings of the mural movement in Chicago in 1967, the initial leadership of black artists, and the involvement of community activists and artists among Latino, Chicano, and white populations. Also, it points out the [...]