Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The artist, agent, and art critic Leonel Estrada discusses a series of paintings by Armando Villegas that were exhibited at the Chamber of Commerce in Medellín. These works, in Estrada’s opinion, reveal a departure from the artist’s earlier [...]

Published in the Bogotá-based newspaper La Prensa on October 31, 1996, the article entitled “Generación Instalada” by journalist María Margarita García is a critical and descriptive review of the fifth edition of the Bienal de Bogotá. The [...]

Curator and historian Álvaro Medina wrote an essay that addresses the socio-political and aesthetic history of Colombia during the second half of the 20th century. One section of the essay, “El arte y la violencia bipartidista,” deals with the [...]

This essay was written by the historian and political thinker Germán Arciniegas for the deluxe edition of the book on Fernando Botero produced by the Edilerner publishing house (1970). This essay is the text for the book, which focuses mainly on the [...]

This article by the researcher Camilo Sarmiento, “El Automático, entre la literatura y el arte” [El Automático: Between Literature and Art] appeared in Café El Automático: arte, crítica y esfera pública [Café El Automático: Art, Criticism [...]

This catalogue was published by the Banco de la República of Colombia in February 1963 in conjunction with the exhibition of twenty-three paintings from the bank’s Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango art collection. The exhibition was held in the [...]

This document is the catalogue to the Salón de Arte Moderno held in the exhibition hall of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in November 1957. In addition to an introduction, the catalogue contains a list with basic information (style, dimension, [...]

Critic Marta Traba’s premise in this essay is that the process by which art emerges has been a constant in the history of Colombia’s national culture. Traba uses the word “emerging” in reference to artistic expressions that transcend local [...]

The book Las artes plásticas en la América Latina: del trance a lo transitorio [The Visual Arts in Latin America: From Trance to Transitory], written by the Brazilian art critic Frederico Morais, is essentially divided into two parts: (i) “ [...]

In this article, art critic Marta Traba comments on the group exhibition held at “El Callejón” gallery in 1956. She asserts that the exhibition is of interest for two main reasons. First, because of the individual works and creators included and [...]

In this article, Walter Engel, an Austrian critic who lived in Colombia, reviews the group exhibition held on the occasion of the opening of “El Caballito” gallery in Bogotá in 1956. Engel asserts that the opening of the gallery represents a [...]

Published in the catalogue to the exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Primer Salón de Arte Moderno, this text by Sylvia Juliana Suárez presents the idea, process and results of a curatorial and editorial project formulated by [...]

In the text published in the foldout poster for the show El dibujo colombiano década del sesenta (1981), Miguel González argues that, in the sixties, drawing—whether produced by young artists or by well established figures from [...]

The director of the Museo de Bellas Artes [Museum of Fine Arts] in Caracas, María Elena Ramos, presented a paper at the I Coloquio de Arte No Objetual [First Symposium on Abstract Art] (Medellín, 1981) under the title, “La comunicación en las [...]

Art critic Marta Traba assesses the work on exhibition at the Salón de Arte Moderno [Salon of Modern Art] that took place at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango of the Banco de la República de Colombia. Traba claims that this event was the best [...]

In this article, Argentine art critic Marta Traba presents the outcome of the Primer Salón Intercol de Artistas Jóvenes [First Intercol Salon of Young Artists] (1964), which she describes as a way to come into contact with emerging trends in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This foldable brochure summarizes in list form the activities that took place at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá (MAM) in 1964, when it was directed by the art critic Marta Traba. The text contains seven headings, each of which is followed by a [...]

In this interview, originally published in 1956, painter Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo speaks of his childhood and formative years. Regarding his childhood, he reports that with the support of his mother, he started “doodling” at a young age. Indeed, [...]

This document was written by the Colombian critic and historian Álvaro Medina by way of an introduction to Gustavo Zalamea’s 1975 exhibition El gran Burundún-Burundá, presented in the gallery Viva México, in the city of Caracas, Venezuela. This [...]

This text is an excerpt from the first book published about the painter Fernando Botero, who was twenty years old at the time. It was illustrated with twenty of his works (rendered between 1950 and 1952), in which we can see the influence of Mexican [...]

This is the introduction to the catalogue for the Salón de Artistas Jóvenes Latinoamericanos [Young Latin American Artists Salon]—held at the Pan-American Union in Washington, DC in 1965. It was written by José Gómez Sicre, director of the [...]

Chilean art critic Miguel Rojas Mix provides an overview of the exhibition Art in Latin America held at the Hayward Gallery in London in mid-1989. Rojas Mix’s account attempts to explain the curatorial criteria underlying the show, its organization [...]

This text by Marta Traba—a well known Argentine critic who lived in Venezuela at the time—introduces the exhibition Los novísimos colombianos held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas in 1977. Traba analyzes the overall development of [...]

The article “Propuesta para una doble lectura” is a statement of principle as well as a thesis that Marta Traba formulated on the occasion of an exhibition of Modern Colombian art in Paris. In this text, Traba provides a periodization of [...]

This article reads like an indictment of the IX Salón Anual de Artistas Colombianos held in August 1952 at the Biblioteca Nacional in Bogota. Critic Luis Vidales Jaramillo voices a resounding personal judgment of some of the works exhibited and of [...]

In this essay, Bernardo Salcedo criticizes Fernando Botero’s paintings on the subject of violence in Colombia and other countries, accusing the well-known artist of hypocrisy. Salcedo claims that Botero did not choose to address the subject of [...]

The author of this document claims that Colombian painting has no past. According to the Argentine critic Marta Traba, the visual arts produced in Colombia from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century are of no interest [...]

In these two supplements, Viennese historian and critic Walter Engel describes exhibitions and artists that in his view shaped the modern art scene in Colombia from 1934 to 1957. Engel distinguishes two distinct periods: 1934 to 1951, and 1952 to [...]

In an attempt at historical reconstruction, and due to the intense political situation in Venezuela (between 1974 and 1978), art critic Roberto Montero Castro attempts to detect the presence of “the Venezuelan identity” in certain artistic [...]

In this article, the author Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses her opinion that a particular artistic process is an intrinsic aspect of modernity: repetition. She analyzes the portrayal of the human body in the works of Frida Kahlo, Ismael Nery, and [...]

The Puerto Rican critic Efraín Barradas writes about the full schedule of exhibitions in the United States, where he lives; according to him very few include Latin American art, since little is known about Latin American artists and their work. Be [...]

Argentine art critic Marta Traba—who lived in Puerto Rico with her husband, Uruguayan literary critic Angel Rama—considers then-contemporary Neo-figurative art a true provocation. She makes reference to critics who believed that Neo-figurative [...]

In this review, the Argentine art critic Marta Traba discusses the exhibition of works by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Traba describes the exhibition as a fitting tribute to the artist who “ [...]