Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This essay about the interview by Pablo Mañé Garzón with Ángel Kalenberg, the director of the IGE (Instituto General Electric de Montevideo [General Electric Institute of Montevideo), discussing the programs carried out by the institution that [...]

This text, entitled “Lo permanente,” is the first of three chapters in Víctor Guédez’s book Armando Barrios: Lo permanente, lo novedoso y lo influyente on Venezuelan artist Armando Barrios. In the section “La pintura y la música,” Gué [...]

This document shows a fragment of the score, Music of Changes, by the American composer John Cage, to be presented as an accompaniment to Gego’s environmental work, Reticulárea, in the exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele [Play Room/Play Space] at the [...]

This manifesto is divided into three sections that reflect the swamp zones [“mangues”] encircling Recife (the capital of the state of Pernambuco): (1) Mangue, the concept; (2) Manguetown, the city; (3) Mangue, the scene. (1) The text maintains [...]

This essay by the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro was published in the História geral da arte no Brasil. The essay includes the following subjects: 1. Introductions: The Indians. Art genres (art on stone, weavings, fabrics, ceramics, and music). [...]

This newspaper article reports on the raid carried out at the Teatro Ruth Escobar, in São Paulo, on June 8, 1968, when federal police violently shut down the Iª Feira Paulista de Opinião, an event produced by the Teatro de Arena group and directed [...]

This essay analyzes images of Brazil created by song writers who compose in the Tropicália style, expressing aspects of the country’s cultural past from a modern perspective. Like surrealist works—as in the case of the “Jeu du cadavre exquis [...]

Antonio Risério discusses the origins of the artistic avant-garde in Bahia in the 1950s and 1960s. He notes the syncretic nature of this particular form of art that embraces everything from high culture to popular culture to mass communication. He [...]

In this text, Jorge Mautner looks at Brazilian artists working in different disciplines (in the visual arts, music, literature, film, and theater), and the parallels between their past and present work. His thesis is that there is a liberating [...]

This article describes Tropicalism as an enigmatic and ambiguous movement. It emerged from a fusion of a number of cultural expressions and forms in the wake of the rivalry that pitted the Jovem Guarda (who were fans of British Yeah-Yeah-Yeah and [...]

This article by Décio Bar is an interview with singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso; it includes a biography, as well as reflections on the turn that Brazilian culture took in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the peak of “the extremely optimistic [...]

In this article, Camilo Vega describes the production of the television show Loop in Cali, with special editions from Bogotá, New York, London, and Paris. The magazine program was broadcast on what was called the cultural hour or cultural space of [...]

This essay includes a chronological review of the emergence and development of electro-acoustic composition as an initial approach to the use of sound as an expressive visual art material in Colombia. Juan Reyes considers the European musical [...]

In this essay Juan Reyes expresses his opinion on what the contemporary artist “should be” in countries like Colombia, and on trans-disciplinary relationships as the basis for the development of knowledge. Throughout the essay, Reyes repeatedly [...]

This document is a short handwritten entry from the journal of Carlos Almaraz. He begins with a discussion of how his art should be a product of daily practice. He then comments that his aim is to achieve a sense of poetry in his work but at a visual [...]

Curator and artist Juan Sánchez compares colonialism to an epidemic that causes physical and mental harm. He maintains that the will of the Puerto Rican people to survive colonial oppression is manifested in their culture. Quoting from the writings [...]

This text is the monthly bulletin of the Sociedade Pro Arte which includes the list for the catalogue of works presented at the III Salão da Pro Arte, a few of which it reproduces within. The following artists participated in the exhibition: Alberto [...]

The erudite music composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a letter to a couple also staying in Paris, Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral. He comments on the difficulties involved in presenting different types of art produced in Brazil as [what is] “ [...]

The author declares his love for Latin America, which is portrayed as a lover whose color is white foam and whose sky is a flag. Soy loco por ti [I’m Crazy About You] talks about a (nameless) country distinguished by its features (rivers, stars, [...]

Julio Le Parc’s text details the experience that took place in the workshops at Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes [Fine Arts Circle], which included the work of an artist in charge of thirty pupils, recorded by a university art history student [...]

This is the invitation to the First Experimental Music Workshops, held at the Cine Centro República on October 12, 15, 16, and 19, 1966, as part of the 3rd Latin American Art Biennial in city of Córdoba, Argentina [...]

This is a text that analyzes the interferences among the arts. It relates music to painting by noting, in the first place, the correspondence between the application of the tonal scales and the laws of perspective to be followed between dodecaphony [...]

The article constitutes a written critique to a text published in Revista del Pueblo nº 8 (linked to the Boedo group) by Leónidas Barletta, about Swiss composer Arthur Honegger’s music—which was premiered in Buenos Aires by Ernest Ansermet, [...]

León Ferrari exhibits his work in Brazil, explaining the technical side of the instrument as well as the theoretical aspects of visual, auditory, and tactile relationships. He ponders some possibilities of expression in the curved lines of space, [...]

The art critic here composes a poetic account of how León Ferrari showed him the variety of ranges in his work, comparing it to the medieval construction of cathedrals, and evaluating how the representation of motion is carried out [...]

The (anonymous) critic mentions the public’s reception of León Ferrari’s performances. The writer of this text discusses both the instrument sculpture — the inverted pendulum — and the music, which the artist himself describes as non- [...]

This article continues the controversy between Leónidas Barletta and Juan Carlos Paz regarding the music of Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, which had debuted in Buenos Aires under the conductor Ernest Ansermet, of the Suisse Romande orchestra. The [...]

Masami Kuni believed that dance had not yet developed its own method of expression. In this article the Japanese choreographer proposes a concrete form of dance, consisting of non-figurative movements and with no specific meaning, such as he had [...]

Hans-Joachim Koellreutter wrote this letter from Teresópolis, Brazil, in August 1950. In it, the German-Brazilian composer mentions the research he is doing, exploring new relationships between sounds that will lead to a Madí style of music [...]

Programmatic document by Raúl Lozza that establishes the structural grounds for Inventionist music, which is based on the succession of parallel sounds. At the same time, Lozza highlights the differences with respect to the “decadent” music [...]

Juan Carlos Paz defines New Music and that which contributes efficacious elements and solutions and points out the importance of the rise of dodecaphony for these new proposals. He stresses that dodecaphony is responsible for the experimentation [...]

This article points out the importance of the microtonal writing system developed by Alois Hába, who Juan Carlos Paz believed was continuing Arnold Schönberg’s contributions to atonal composition; the rupture with tonality; and the twelve-tone [...]

This article discusses the advantages of musical composition that uses the twelve-tone system which is based on the objective properties of tones. According to Werbin, this tonal method allows composers to arrange the basic elements of music in [...]