Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This document by Shifra Goldman is a review of the 1987 exhibition Hispanic Artists: 30 Contemporary Painters and Sculptors held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1987. Goldman applauds the [...]

In "Comentarios sobre el nacimiento de la arquitectura hispano-americana," Argentinean architect, art historian, and writer Martín Noel asserts that colonial architecture represents the foundation of the Latin American architectural styles that [...]

This document is an essay by Amalia Mesa-Bains in which she argues in favor of developing a new critical language for the evaluation of Chicano and Latino art rooted in the formative experiences of the artists throughout the communities from which [...]

This excerpt from the first chapter of José Vasconcelos’s 1925 book, La raza cósmica, outlines his vision for what he calls “the cosmic race”: a comprehensive, final stage of humanity that would envelope all races in order to build a new [...]

In this text, Guillermo Gómez-Peña declares the new dominant U.S. culture “border culture,” and assesses how Latino culture has infiltrated U.S. culture writ large. U.S. culture has, he argues, become fundamentally multicultural, and the “ [...]

In this prologue, Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges explain how the theme of “the fantastic” underlies the art of the twenty-nine artists included in the exhibition The Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987. They explain how this [...]

Peter Marzio reflects on the experience of organizing and presenting the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters from his perspective as the director of the organizing museum. Marzio tells us he wants to make “ [...]

Jane Livingston and John Beardsley reflect on the process of organizing the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, and they respond to the criticism generated in response to it. They begin by [...]

In this text, Shifra Goldman examines the problematic homogenization of the idea of “Hispanic” art and culture that was promoted by the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors organized by The [...]

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 document, Brazilian poet, journalist, and short-story writer, Ribeiro Couto, states that “true Americanism” rejects the idea of Indianism, yet calls on these same indigenous races to make contributions to “Iberian” man. This fusion [...]

Brazilian poet and journalist Prudente de Moraes Neto remarks on the chance discovery of Alfonso Reyes in European magazines, remarking on how difficult it is to obtain books by Latin American authors in Brazil and the ease by which you can obtain [...]

French anarchist and writer Charles Malato de Corné begins this brief article on Latin America for the first issue of Les Annales de la Jeunesse Laïque by informing the reader of border disputes that have been going on for too long and that are [...]

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 [...]

The Spanish linguist Samuel Gili Gaya (1898–1976) states that the values in Puerto Rican culture should not be derived from what Puerto Rico can copy from Spain or assimilate from Anglo-Saxon civilization, but on what it can distill from its own [...]

Art historian Jacinto Quirarte lays a framework for discussing an artwork or body of work by examining the tradition to which it belongs and the reasons for which (and for whom) it was created. Summarizing the conclusions of the 1979 Symposium on the [...]

In this essay, Kaytie Johnson introduces the premise of an exhibition that examines new trends in contemporary art by a new generation of Latino artists. Using strategies of appropriation, they confront assumptions about “Chicano/a” and “Latino [...]

In these three extracts from the first chapter of his book Última Tule, Alfonso Reyes considers the history of conquest and how it has fostered mythic notions of the Americas. In the text “Colón y Américo Vespucio,” he corrects the historical [...]

In this text, José Vasconcelos describes how since the mid-nineteenth-century forces of “panamericanismo” have generally caused Mexico and Hispanic America to incrementally suffer the loss of cultural and economic independence. His argument [...]

In this text, Waldo Frank urges the nations of what he calls America Hispana to develop their own “backbone” in resistance to economic and cultural domination by the United States. Frank describes this “backbone” in evolutionary terms, [...]

Mariano Picón-Salas discusses the processes and reasons for the “integration” and the “disintegration” of the Latin American peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting with their struggles for independence through the [...]

In this essay the historian Augusto Mijares criticizes the positivist theory that blames the caudillismo [leadership of ‘caudillos’ or local strongmen] trend spawned by the wars of independence on the particular idiosyncrasy of our Latin American [...]

Susana Torruella Leval’s essay examines works by artists David Avalos, Deborah Small, and Alfredo Jaar, and addresses contemporary neocolonial practices thus connecting them to the histories of colonialism in the Americas, which have been often [...]

In this text, the artist Mirentxu Ganzaraín discusses the inadequacy of terminology in use in the United States to describe and categorize the art by artists whose ethnic backgrounds are other than normative ones. As a North American of Chilean and [...]

In the introductory essay to the exhibition ¡Adivina!: Latino Chicago Expressions, the author analyzes the recent boom in Latino exhibitions. This boom, he assesses, seemed to promise a mainstream reevaluation and reappraisal of developments in the [...]

This resolution of the Task Force on Hispanic American Arts, adopted on March 16, 1978, provided recommendations to the National Endowment for the Arts to improve and enhance access by Hispanic-American artists to its programs and granting processes [...]

This text describes the founding of the Raza Art and Media Collective in 1975 and declares its six main goals, all aimed at cultivating art and education among Spanish-speaking people in Michigan. These included: 1) to provide education and [...]

In this text, Jesse Gonzales presents an overview of Latino art in Michigan, from the nineteenth-century to the time when he published this essay, touching upon key moments from the 1920s to the 1990s. Gonzales features early fiestas patrias [ [...]

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- [...]

In this curatorial essay, Victor A. Sorell weighs opposition to the term “Hispanic” with the need to label the Latino artists of diverse origins included in the exhibition, Arte Hispano-Americano en Chicago=Hispanic-American Art in Chicago. He [...]

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 [...]

In “Notas sobre lo americano” Luis Oyarzún shares his thoughts about Latin American culture, art, and literature, which he contrasts with his Eurocentric views. He groups his ideas into six points, in which he critiques what he [...]

José Renau discusses the significance of the first Spanish-American Art Biennial, sponsored by Francisco Franco. According to Renau, the goal of the exhibition was to “establish a link between Spain’s robust pictorial tradition and the effete [...]

This text, attributed to Fernando Gamboa, defines how Mexican Art is to be classified in the coming decades: Pre-Hispanic, colonial, nineteenth-century, popular, and contemporary art. His department’s fundamental goal was to create a Museo Diná [...]