Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This text was written for the series Art of Latin America Today: Venezuela by the critic and art historian Clara Diament Sujo. The text historically summarized the development of contemporary art in Venezuela from the Pre-Columbian, colonial, and [...]

This is a flyer invitation to a “Fabulous Halloween Party at LACE” at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Gallery at 240 S. Broadway Street organized by artists Gronk and Patssi Valdez of the Asco Collective on October 31, 1978. The [...]

This document is an example of a Xerox mail art by Harry Gamboa, Jr. and Patssi Valdez of the East Los Angeles-based Asco Collective. Titled Pistol Whippersnapper, the piece stems from a Chicano Cinema No Movie created by Gamboa in 1976 as part of [...]

In this text, Teresa del Conde argues that the vast majority of what has been written about Francisco Toledo “ . . . highlights his magical qualities above the structural, compositional and iconographical aspects of his work.” Chronicling and [...]

In this unpublished protest statement, the Alliance for Cultural Equity (ACE) demands the cancellation of The Chicago Show, unless its organizers establish a dialogue to achieve the exhibition’s stated goal of showcasing the talent and cultural [...]

This document is an announcement issued by the Comité Provisional del Mejoramiento de Nuestra Comunidad [Temporary Committee for the Betterment of Our Community] for a public meeting on March 28, 1978, at the Rockwell Baptist Church in West Town, a [...]

In this interview, Marcos Raya expresses his belief that young artists must “get out of their mental and real ghetto, the Mexican ghetto,” in order to advance in their art. They must, he says, “be part of the whole city of Chicago and still be [...]

This press packet is a collection of twenty-nine articles from local and national publications and press releases from Chicago artists’ organizations that convey the controversy surrounding The Chicago Show. Meant as a blind-juried art exhibition, [...]

This document is the Last Will and Testament of Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl, written on August 25, 1992, and signed and witnessed on August 1, 1994. He leaves whatever money remains to his wife/companion, Marianna Drogitis Cortez. Any personal effects [...]

This press release, issued by the Provisional Committee to Better our Community, announces a press conference on March 31, 1978, at which the East Humboldt Park Community would call for the city of Chicago to halt its plans to demolish a residential [...]

In this article, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl announces an exhibition of Movimiento Artístico Chicano’s (MARCH) collection of silkscreen posters by the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) at the MO MING Dance and Arts Center Galleries in Chicago. He [...]

This document is a 1977 calendar produced by the Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH), which includes biographies and reproductions of works by twelve Chicago-area Chicano artists, one for each month. Significant dates in Chicano history are also [...]

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 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 [...]

This text recounts an exhibition that Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) which was organized around Agustín V. Casasola’s memorable photographs of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. In this article, Mary Kay Vaughan recounts the films, lectures, and [...]

This article introduces readers to Casa Aztlán, a Latino social services center and cultural organization founded in Chicago in 1970, and widely known in the Midwest for its cultural programs. It describes Casa Aztlán’s location in Chicago’s [...]

In this article, Alice Piron considers the public art collection at the Chicago Harold Washington Library Center, notable for having the largest “Percent for Art Program” budget—at the time in excess of $1 million—and for having specific [...]

Author Dorothy Chaplik provides an overview of the life and art of Alejandro Romero, a recognized Chicago-based Mexican painter and muralist. She traces his artistic career from his childhood in Tabasco and youth and Mexico City, when he first [...]

In this artist statement, Bibiana Suarez discusses how her work reflects her search for self-identification and the problems of living between two cultures—that of Puerto Rico and the United States—as a self-imposed exile. Suarez also describes [...]

In this artist statement for the exhibition In Search of an Island (1991), Bibiana Suarez discusses how her work reflects her search for self-identification and the problems of living between two cultures—that of Puerto Rico and the United States [...]

In this brief consideration of Alejandro Romero’s œuvre, author Victor A. Sorell discusses the impact of Chicago, Romero’s adopted home, on his works. Romero invokes the industrial ambience and architectural totems of this city in his pieces, [...]

In this 1989 article published in the magazine/journal Newcity, art journalist and freelance writer, Jeff Huebner, explores the misconceptions of defining contemporary Latino art within the framework of an American art market. In his interviews of [...]

In this interview David Torrez discusses his devotion to the arts of his Mexican-American heritage, his involvement in founding organizations such as the Mexican Historical Society of Saginaw, Michigan, and his many artistic projects. Among these [...]

In this text, Victor A. Sorell considers the works of the three Chicago-based, Mexican muralists Aurelio Díaz Alfaro, Marcos Raya, and Vicente Mendoza through the prism of what he characterizes as three language types—“private,” “public,” [...]

In this article, John Weber considers pioneering Chicano artist Ray Patlán’s work with teenagers creating a mural in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago during the summer of 1971. The youths were part of the Community Mural Project that, beginning in [...]

The Cuban-American artist Paul Sierra begins this lecture, delivered at the Terra Museum of Art in Chicago, by declaring that even though he has been asked to speak about the “sources of Hispanic Art,” he has decided to speak instead about [...]

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 [...]

Written by Harold Allen, Chicago-based photographer and husband of Mexican folk artist María Enríquez de Allen, this biographical sketch covers the life of Enríquez de Allen from her childhood in Allende, Cohauila to her years in Chicago, where [...]

Mario Castillo, the distinguished Chicano/Mexican multimedia creator, writes in this artist statement that his work has always dealt with birth, life, death, and the afterlife, and that he has always tried to relate it to his Mexican heritage. He [...]

"Art Liberation Movement" is Mario Castillo’s personal manifesto, which appears on the artist’s website. The Chicano/Mexican artist who works from Chicago expresses in this statement his desire to liberate himself from "the aesthetic constraints [...]

Written by well-known muralist John Pitman Weber, this essay provides biographical information on Carlos Cortez, a Milwaukee-born and Chicago-based artist and poet of Mexican-Indian and German ancestry. Weber talks about the places and people Cortez [...]

In this text, John Weber, a distinguished muralist and co-founder of the Chicago Mural Group, responds to a recent article about murals in Chicago and denies that Chicago’s mural scene is unique. He fears that such a term implies that the scene is [...]

This exhibition catalog, Chicago Latino, was part of an intercultural dialogue initiated by two “socially-minded arts groups,” the 369 Gallery of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Near Northwest Arts Council of Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition [...]

Carlos Tortolero wrote this text in response to an article by Lonnie Bunch, “Museums, Diversity, and the Will to Change” (which appeared in the July/August 2000 issue of Museum News), noting that, while Bunch’s article was well written and [...]

In this essay from 2004, historian Rick A. López argues that the Hull-House in Chicago played an important role in promoting a Mexican nationalist aesthetics among the Mexican migrant community that settled in the city in the 1920s. Behind the [...]

In this text, Gary Hesse considers the direction Martina Lopez’s work took after she was introduced in 1986 to computer imaging that became the main means with which she created her photographs. With this new tool, Hesse explains, Lopez has [...]

Carlos Tortolero, founding father and director of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now the National Museum of Mexican Art), writes that mainstream museums are elitist and discriminatory institutions that either claim they have already diversified [...]

In this interview, Carlos Cortez talks about his artistic influences, including the Mexican muralists, Käthe Kollwitz, and Rembrandt, among others. He considers the social, political, and economic motivations that underpin his art. He also describes [...]

This document is a proposal for The Puerto Rican Equation, an exhibition to commemorate the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States, and which would feature Puerto Rican artists who were born and lived in either Puerto Rico or the United [...]

In this essay for an exhibition of seven contemporary Latino artists entitled HOT!, Grant Samuelsen considers the term "magical realism" and its inadequacy as a label applied to contemporary Latino art. Samuelsen states that such labeling robs these [...]

This document contains Bibiana Suaréz's responses to four of the eighteen questions posed to artists by the organizers of The Puerto Rican Equation, an exhibition marking the occasion of the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States. Suarez [...]

In this lecture given in April 1989 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago-based, Puerto Rican artist Bibiana Suarez states that the value of art is dependent on its power to reveal the artist’s innermost world, and to preserve that [...]

In this lecture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Puerto Rican-born artist Bibiana Suarez presents an overview of her work and considers the role of race and ethnicity in her art. She begins the lecture by explaining her ethnic background and [...]

In this panel presentation at the 1992 Women's Caucus for Arts, artist Bibiana Suarez spoke about how her images reflect her reality as a Puerto Rican living in the United States who feels caught between two cultures and who insistently searches for [...]

In this lecture, the artist Bibiana Suarez recounts how a student's question prompted her to consider her own reasons for producing art; including the motivation of greed, which, although ostensibly negative, she considers as a motivator. Suarez [...]

In this statement, the Chicago Artists' Coalition (CAC) voices its objection to the mid-competition change of rules and procedures for selecting artists for The Chicago Show. It calls the organizers’ decision to add an invitational component to [...]

In this text, James Yood offers a scathing critique of The Chicago Show, an exhibition mounted at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1990. He describes the process by means of which this exhibition—conceived of as a juried exhibition to showcase the [...]

Shifra M. Goldman wrote this text about María Enríquez de Allen to honor her for her contribution to art in the areas of flower making, Santos carving, and crafts. She especially praises Enríquez de Allen for enriching the visual vocabulary of [...]

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 newspaper article describes how residents of Chicago’s Humboldt Park community kept a 24-hour watch over the building that housed the mural Breaking the Chains (1971 by John Weber and collaborators) in order to prevent it from being razed by [...]