Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The prologue to Forjando patria: pro nacionalismo, published in 1916 by leading Mexican anthropologist and archaeologist Manuel Gamio, compares the forging of metal out of an amalgam of bronze and steel to the ideal societal intermixing of Mexicans [...]

This text was written by Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo to accompany his series of paintings inspired by “Apu Inka Atawallpaman,” an elegiac Quechua poem by an anonymous author. The poem describes the death of the Inca Atahualpa, and the [...]

This is the promotional leaflet for the Primeros Juegos Deportivo–Recreativos Túpac Amaru, the Games for Agrarian Organizations and Courier Races held in 1974. The event was organized by INRED (Instituto Nacional de Recreación, Educación Física [...]

This text is the first of three parts of the essay “Cómo la pintura ha buscado al Perú” written by Sebastián Salazar Bondy. The text was not intended to be “an aesthetic theory,” but rather “a sociological interrogation” geared towards [...]

Antonio Berni muses on the originality of Latin American colonial art, and suggests a way to distinguish between each of the three periods involved by naming them: pre-Columbian, colonial, and “contemporary” (post-independence). He goes on to [...]

In this periodical article on the Parisian International Exposition [of Art and Technology in Modern Life] in 1937, the engineer Alberto Jochamowitz questions the “nudism” found in the modern styled architecture. In his opinion, the pavilions of [...]

This article by Alberto Gerchunoff, a Russian writer and journalist based in Buenos Aires, criticizes “los predicadores del americanismo, (…) a la vez nacionalistas y continentalistas” [the preachers of Latin Americanism, (…) who are both [...]

Diego Rivera believed that art materialized when primitive communities began to show signs of humanity; pre-Columbian, African and European art are proof of this. Those ancestral works already contained all the elements needed to function as [...]

This article signed S. P. B. (Samuel Pérez Barreto) forms part of the “El Perú y la cultura” column published in the Lima-based newspaper La Prensa in 1950. According to the author, a return to the pre-Hispanic essence is the only way to create [...]

This article by Ramiro Pérez Reinoso was written in response to a piece by Alberto Gerchunoff published in the Buenos Aires daily newspaper, La Nación (January 31, 1926). The writer reviews the opinion of the Russian/Argentine intellectual, who [...]

Although the title “Arte incaico” [Incan Art] and its syllabus reveal a literary approach to the topic, the course at the ENBA sought to make the pre-Columbian legacy a referent for the establishment of a “national art.” In Peru in 1930, its [...]

Cayetano Córdova Iturburu defines Libero Badii's work from two different perspectives; on the one hand, he speaks of the robust plasticity of certain pieces, referring to their ancestral background, deeply rooted in the Pre-Colombian art in the [...]

Peruvian historian and anthropologist Luis E. Valcárcel published “Glosario” in his 1925 book De la vida Inkaica: algunas captaciones del espíritu que la animó. In “Glosario,” Valcárcel reexamines the history of Incan civilization, [...]

In 1989, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar showed his series of works titled Homenaje a los Artífices Precolombinos [Tribute to Pre-Columbian Artisans] at the III Bienal de La Habana [Third Havana Biennial]. The Colombian sculptor wrote an essay for the [...]

In this essay, Victor Zamudio-Taylor explores the valorization of Mexico’s pre-Columbian roots as a key element in the development of cultural identity within the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by the ideology of mexicanidad— [...]

In "La habilidad manual indígena," Mexican painter Dr. Atl describes what he considers the astounding manual dexterity of indigenous Mexicans. He explains that this dexterity makes Mexicans uniquely suited to working as mechanics, surgeons, and [...]

This letter was written by the U.S. archaeologist and historian, Phillip Ainsworth Means, to the Peruvian Minister of Education in connection with the opening of a rug factory in Cotahuasi. Means points out “la vital importancia de la arqueología [...]

In this essay, a local editor reported that the New York exhibition comprised both works by the Izcue sisters (Elena and Victoria) as well as pre-Hispanic pieces. Such an approach, he writes, demonstrates “a revival” based on the “search for [...]

This article was written from Europe by the Peruvian writer and politician César Falcón. In his opinion, “Incan art” constitutes a legacy lacking in ideological direction and, in his judgment, transcendence. He attributes it with a dearth of [...]

TheBuenos Aires magazine Hoy en la cultura [Today’s Culture] proposes an interview with three basic questions: Mexican Muralism and its continuity, the validity of pre-Columbian culture and folklore for artists, and the local features of [...]

In this article the writer Mariano Picón Salas provides a concise summary of what he believes to be the most distinctive aspects of Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century as viewed, in particular, from the perspective of a cultural [...]

Journalist Mara Comerlati interviews Omar Carreño for his exhibition at the Museo Boggio in Caracas. The show brings together work from the artist’s figurative period, before his stay in Paris (at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s) [...]

This document by Jacinto Quirarte begins by proposing possible definitions for the terms “Hispanic” and “aesthetic” and their potential implications for a study of Chicano art. Quirarte states that the focus of his essay is an exploration of [...]

In this article, the critic Roberto Guevara harshly rebuts the theses of Marta Traba, who argued in the mid-1960s that Latin American art had been “depersonalized” and contaminated by the “mimicry” of international art. Guevara, who felt the [...]

This is a brief literary essay by Antonio Berni on pre-Columbian structures atSacsahuaman (Cuzco), Machu Picchu, Peru, in which he suggests a way to understand the culture of the Incas by means of intuition or thought [...]

In this article Alejandro Romualdo questions the “esoteric” label that is placed on “primitive” and pre-Colombian art. The author rejects the idea that it has an “impregnable, supernatural nature,” promoted by intellectuals that [...]

According to the Cuban journalist, there is “a rich tradition of indigenous art” behind the paintings by Fernando de Szyszlo that were exhibited in Havana: a form of popular art whose roots can be traced back to pre-Hispanic culture in the Andean [...]

The book from which this essay was taken is a compendium of and apology for Mexican art from the pre-Columbian era through the twentieth century. Like many of her compatriots, the author Marion Lucille Arendt visited Mexico in the mid-1920s, [...]

In this article, the well-known art historian, Marta Traba, summarizes the content of the three lectures she gave at the Museo de Bellas Artes [Museum of Fine Arts] in Caracas in 1965. The purpose of the lectures, Traba explains, was to provide the [...]

In this essay, Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz analyzes Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo’s relationship with Mexican popular art and Pre-Columbian art. According to Tamayo, popular art should not be seen as art but as a functional [...]