Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This newspaper article reports that Carlos Cruz-Diez has arrived in Caracas from Paris to receive the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Visual Arts Prize) awarded by the INCIBA (Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes). The [...]

In this essay, Tomás Maldonado discusses modern art—and modern life—and claims that both offer an “institutionalized” kind of art education. His definition therefore includes “the education of the artist,” & [...]

This is a review of the state of art in the capital city of Peru, written by the academic painter Enrique Domingo Barreda on the occasion of the I Salón organized by the Municipality of Lima. In his opinion, this competition exposed “the appalling [...]

This text provides an overview of the work of the Círculo de Bellas Artes school in Montevideo, which was founded in 1905—thirty-three years before this report was published. The text describes the consistent quality of teaching in different [...]

In this 1920 article published in Trabajo, a conduit for the Escuela de Industrias, painter and printmaker Guillermo Rodríguez places emphasis on the practical nature of drawing instruction at industrial schools—an approach advocated by the Unión [...]

This essay by Luis Falcini, a sculptor and professor at the Escuela de Industrias, summarizes the processes at play in a “modern aesthetic.” Falcini also describes the innovative spirit of the teaching methods used at the most important arts and [...]

As the director of the Círculo de Bellas Artes School in Montevideo, painter Carlos María Herrera wrote this letter to Martín Lasala, the president of that institution’s board, with a number of proposals, chief among them was the elimination of [...]

In 1956, the art critic José Pedro Argul published a text written the year before for the faculty at the Colegio Sagrada Familia. In it, he outlined his ideas on visual art, his studies, and his philosophy. It reviewed the concept of “beauty,” [...]

In this essay, the students at the Montevideo Círculo de Bellas Artes vilify the critical situation affecting the institution due to cuts in state subsidies. The publication Movimiento incited the students to fight for restoring quality in the [...]

Critic Juan Calzadilla wrote this text on Venezuelan artist Braulio Salazar on the fiftieth anniversary of his first solo show. That exhibition, Calzadilla explains, took place at a moment when Salazar’s efforts as an artist and as an educator were [...]

Gego—who was an art teacher as well as an artist—wrote “The History of Art Schools” by hand in Spanish in around 1964. In it, she claims that that history is parallel to the creative development of an individual and of his specific works. [...]

Venezuelan cultural journalist Mara Comerlati conducted this interview with Gego in 1980 soon after she had been awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1979. Comerlati provides biographical information about the artist: her arrival [...]

The journalist Lenelina Delgado interviews the artist Alirio Palacios on the occasion of the crisis at the Centro INCE (Instituto Nacional de Cooperación Educativa) de Diseño (Caracas). As the instructor at the print shop at INCE, Palacios [...]

Critic Roberto Guevara presents an exhibition on CEGRA (Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica, Caracas), five years after its creation, analyzing the evolution of CEGRA in response to the state of arts education in Venezuela. He also states that at its start [...]

This is the second of the two textbooks published by Elena Izcue, which were designed to teach art based on pre-Hispanic motifs at Peruvian schools. It includes two introductory texts. The first, addressed to teachers, explains how the pedagogical [...]

This publication reproduces the prologue that Peruvian writer and diplomat Ventura García Calderón wrote to the book El arte peruano en la escuela by Peruvian artist Elena Izcue, as well as an essay by Peruvian educator Elvira García y García [...]

This letter by Mariano Ibérico was written at the request of painter Antonino Espinosa Saldaña. More specifically, Ibérico was asked to share his opinion on the polemic surrounding the course on Incan art given at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas [...]

The author, Augusto Aguirre Morales, questions the stance of painter Antonino Espinosa Saldaña, who does not believe Peruvian precolonial art is “art.” He challenges Espinosa’s premise that cultural differences among men are an obstacle to the [...]

The author, Antonino Espinosa Saldaña, proposes to replace the course name “Arte incaico” [Incan Art]—used by the ENBA beginning in 1930, with “Arqueología pre-incaica y su aplicación a las artes decorativas” [pre-Incan archeology and [...]

This essay is on the newspaper add announcing the commencement of the Inca Art courses and studies at the ENBA (Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes) in Lima by the Peruvian writer Augusto Aguirre Morales. The studies, a program that was fully [...]

Article written by Ernesto More, signed with the pseudonym Jerome, in which he criticizes the direction adopted by the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA), based in Lima, Peru. The author affirms that ENBA was created by an oligarchic government [...]

The Venezuelan critic Roberto Guevara introduces the exhibition of works by the first group of artists to have graduated from CEGRA (Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica, Caracas). In his article, Guevara discusses art instruction and describes CEGRA as an [...]

This newspaper article states that, in the ten years since the death of Daniel Hernández, the first director of ENBA, very little “progress has been made, due to the regrettable guiding principles of a faculty” that is committed to imposing an [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon. However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

On the basis of the reforms enacted by the military government under General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75), Juan Acevedo criticizes capitalist models of education as well as the total unfeasibility of art as a professional career and/or the [...]

This essay by writer and thinker José Carlos Mariátegui formed part of the “Peruanicemos al Perú” series published by Mundial magazine. In this text on the problem of art education in Peru, the author criticizes the neglect of art in public [...]

The book Conferencias sobre perspectiva y otros asuntos de dibujo, dictadas en el Colegio de San Bartolomé was published in 1881 by the artist and arts promoter Alberto Urdaneta. The publication begins with a quotation from Leonardo Da Vinci on [...]

This decree issued by Francisco Javier Zaldúa (1811–1882), president of the United States of Colombia, enacts Law 67 of 1882, which authorizes the creation of the publically funded Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Bogotá. This government [...]

This is the fourth chapter of En blanco y negro: Marta Traba en la televisión colombiana, 1954–1958 [In Black and White: Marta Traba on Colombian Television, 1954–1958], in which the author, the artist and researcher Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, [...]

This document records the passage of Law 67, on September 11, 1882, which created an Instituto de Bellas Artes [Fine Arts Institute] in Bogotá. It refers to the Colombian government initiative that was separate from the university system of the [...]

This document is an excerpt from the first chapter of Curso de historia del arte [Art History Course] (broadcast by Radiotelevisora Nacional de Colombia [Colombian National Radio Television], 1957–58), the television series that was directed and [...]

Colombian artist Gonzalo Ariza defends the autonomy of Latin American art and the internationalization of culture in a column written in response to a text by Argentine art critic Marta Traba, published in the magazine Mito. In her text, Traba [...]

In "Rectificaciones sobre las artes plásticas en México," Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros states his opinions on a variety of polemical issues in Mexican and Latin American artistic practice. He proposes a reform of the system of arts [...]

This article was written by the Peruvian politician and writer, Magda Portal, focusing on the work of the artist, Elena Izcue. In Portal’s opinion, looking at the past would not represent a step backward, since the past is where we find the promise [...]

This essay is about the proposal of the author Gilberto Freyre about the need for teaching the sociology of art within a planned fine art curriculum, highlighting the importance of this and anthropology. In his opinion, one must try to understand a [...]

This is a letter published in the newspaper O Estado by the art critic Mário Baratta, written posthumously to the modernist poet Mário de Andrade, a year after his death. Baratta wanted to convey to the reader a hypothetical letter that he would [...]

This article is about the painter from Minas Gerais, Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s early years as an art professor in the city of Belo Horizonte. He taught a free course on painting and drawing, originally at the Parque Municipal and later at the [...]

The artist and Professor Tomás Maldonado detects positive qualities in popular design and mass communications, which he considers useful because they are the only means available that can satisfy the aesthetic needs of the people. In his opinion, an [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon.                                However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

In this interview, sculptor Hugo Zapata reflects on his formative years, as well as his work as an educator and the way the academic bureaucracy limited his development as an artist. He speaks of the period he worked in silkscreen printing and of his [...]

In this text, Colombian writer Darío Jaramillo Agudelo voices his assessment of works included in an exhibition held at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Medellín in 1983. In his view, these works represent a new form of academicism in Colombia, one [...]

This unusually incisive and analytic speech given by Pedro Nel Ospina at the concert held in Medellín in 1898 to support painter Francisco Antonio Cano demonstrates the social situation of the artist from the Antioquia region at the turn of the [...]

The Cartilla de dibujo [Drawing Handbook], published in Bogotá in 1935 by the artist Miguel Díaz Vargas, was essentially created for teaching drawing in elementary school. The book’s structure is clearly pedagogical. It has a brief introduction [...]

This document, drafted in the late nineteenth century by Alberto Urdaneta, is a copy of the regulations for the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Republic of Colombia. The official publication of the regulations fulfilled an academic plan to provide [...]

In 1951, the weekly magazine Crítica published this interview with the Colombian poet Luis Vidales Jaramillo, in which the first two questions explore his teaching vocation, his historically and sociologically inspired methodology, and his [...]

In this text, Colombian intellectual Baldomero Sanín Cano offers a number of observations about art and the artist, asserting that the time has come for both to move closer to the masses. Sanín argues that the belief that art is only for a segment [...]

Modesto Brocos claims that the concept of national art is not limited to paintings produced in one particular country, but is a term that applies to art that expresses its own period and historical reality. In this article, the Spanish artist [...]

In his prologue to the catalogue for a show of the Taller Libre de Arte (TLA), Luis Berroterán asserts that the Liceo Fermín Toro played an important role in the origin of the TLA. He explains that the members of the TLA aspire to work with other [...]

This forty-eight page catalogue consists of the following sections: “Manifiesto de los artistas independientes a los artistas de las Américas” [Manifesto Dedicated by Independent Artists to the Artists of the Americas] (two pages); “La [...]

In this open letter to the people of Puerto Rico, the members of the Asociación Pro Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico [Puerto Rican Association to Promote the School of Visual Arts] request “espiritual y económico” [spiritual and [...]