Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Leandro Soto Ortiz interprets the sculptural works of fellow artist Raoul Deal that were featured in the exhibition La Esperanza del Loro Verde. Soto Ortiz positions Deal’s work within a Postmodernist current, contextualizing it at the core of [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 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 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 [...]

In this text, artist Bibiana Suarez’s makes a personal statement about her experience as a self-imposed Puerto Rican exile in Chicago, her negotiations of living “on the edge of two cultures,” and her artistic exploration of feelings of loss, [...]

In this essay, Ron Kovatch explores how issues of relocation, assimilation, and identity are manifest in the group of sculptures by Raoul Deal presented in the installation Reinventing Jimmy Green. Inspired by his grandfather Eugenio Greco’s [...]

In his article, Armando Castellanos interprets Raoul Deal’s work featured in the exhibition Las Esperanzas del Loro Verde [The Hopes of the Green Parrot]. Castellanos argues that Deal’s work confronts the duality, ambiguity, and tension between [...]

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 [...]

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 introduction to the catalogue of the 1959 exhibition The United States Collects Pan-American Art held at the Art Institute of Chicago, curator Joseph Randall Shapiro addresses the issue of the inadequacy of the term “Latin American art” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In this text, author William Friedman analyzes the impact of Mauricio Lasansky—as artist and professor at the University of Iowa—in printmaking during the years 1946 to 1949. During this period, Lasansky and his students were the recipients 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 [...]

In this feature on the Cuban-American artist Paul Sierra, Jeff Huebner writes the artist’s biography, his recent ascent in the mainstream art world, and the attendant conflicts that arose in relationship to his status as a Latino artist. Huebner [...]

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 [...]

This is a bilingual exhibition brochure for the Association of the Latino Brotherhood of Artists (ALBA) Festival held at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago on April 2–5, 1974. In the brief text, ALBA members describe the history of the [...]

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 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, artist Mauricio Lasansky discusses his graphic work, creative process and experimentation in producing prints, intaglio technique, and use of multiple plates in printing.  He discusses at length his 1976 print Quetzalcoatl, [...]

In this text, Amalia Mesa-Bains introduces an exhibition of Chicano art with an account of Chicano cultural history, and a description of how the works of art in the show relate to several themes. She organizes her account of Chicano cultural history [...]

This newspaper column comments on Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s works in the exhibition Los Encuentros at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to mark the Colombian quincentenary. The author weighs how Manglano-Ovalle uses everyday artifacts to [...]

This brochure outlines the background and mission of Artes Unidas de Michigan [United Arts of Michigan], including its relationship with previous initiatives to foster Latino and Chicano art and culture in Michigan and its goals to advance Latino [...]

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 [...]

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- [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 essay, George Vargas attests that Carlos Lopez “serves as a vital historical link connecting American modern art in Michigan with a new Latino history of the state.” During the 1920s–1940s, Carlos Lopez was a Latino artist who did not [...]

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 [...]

This text is the curatorial statement for Central American Realities, a group exhibition in which fifty artists addressed the social and political experience of refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador who sought sanctuary in the USA, specifically in [...]

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 [...]

This essay, with accompanying inventory and maps, considers the Chicago community mural scene from 1967 through 1979, noting that the medium was employed by artists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds to “ . . . express ethnic, historical, popular [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This booklet for the exhibition Confluencias: Leandro Soto and Raoul Deal contains three texts: an interview with the artists by Linda Corbin-Pardee, an essay by Gregory Jay, and a short text by Awam Amkpa entitled “The Story of Oggun.” Jay [...]

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 [...]

This essay examines the impact of Roberto Matta’s presence in the United States during 1939–1948, when, as part of a Surrealist cohort of émigrés, he established temporary residence in New York to escape the war in Europe. The authors [...]

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, Bibiana Suárez addresses the misconceptions of a Latino identity that is portrayed as one-dimensional and homogenous in both mainstream and Latino discourses in the United States. She discusses the new tendency to conflate Latino with [...]

Dorothy McMeekin examines Diego Rivera’s understanding of science and technology and the application of his knowledge to the overall creative and thematic design of the mural cycle Detroit Industry at the Detroit Institute of Arts, painted between [...]

In this catalogue essay, Victor Alejandro Sorell considers the 36-year career (spanning 1964–2000) of the Chicano artist Carlos Cortez, praising him as the “quintessential artist-reporter,” and emphasizing his virtuosity as a master printmaker [...]

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 [...]