Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this chapter from América Latina en sus artes Jorge Alberto Manrique begins by describing the artistic movements of the 1920s and comparing this period to a giant hinge that moved backward to the nineteenth century and forward to the twentieth [...]

Brazilian literary critic and essayist Afrânio Coutinho wrote this article in the late- 1960s. His article states since inception that to him the term “Latin American,” is at odds with the historical, social, cultural, literary, and artistic [...]

This document contains Bibiana Suaréz's responses to four of the eighteen questions posed to artists by the organizers of The Puerto Rican Equation, an exhibition marking the occasion of the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States. Suarez [...]

In this artist statement, Bibiana Suarez discusses how her work reflects her search for self-identification and the problems of living between two cultures—that of Puerto Rico and the United States—as a self-imposed exile. Suarez also describes [...]

In this artist statement for the exhibition In Search of an Island (1991), Bibiana Suarez discusses how her work reflects her search for self-identification and the problems of living between two cultures—that of Puerto Rico and the United States [...]

Aracy A. Amaral asserts that there is no such thing as a unified expression of Latin American art, but instead a desire for cultural integration that has not yet been resolved. She understands that the countries of the Americas share common problems [...]

In this leaflet Nelbia Romero expresses her goal of recognizing the identity and ethnicity of the indigenous race that once lived on the land that is now Uruguay. That race was, in fact, exterminated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [...]

In this lecture, the artist Bibiana Suarez recounts how a student's question prompted her to consider her own reasons for producing art; including the motivation of greed, which, although ostensibly negative, she considers as a motivator. Suarez [...]

In this lecture given in April 1989 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago-based, Puerto Rican artist Bibiana Suarez states that the value of art is dependent on its power to reveal the artist’s innermost world, and to preserve that [...]

In this text, celebrated intellectual Celso Furtado—the former minister of economics—contemplates the possibility of the conciliation of ideological and intellectual processes given the outdated social structure of Brazil. He argues that the “ [...]

The group—calling itself the Colectiva de Artistas Puertorriqueños—articulates the concern that the policies of El Museo del Barrio marginalize the production of Puerto Rican artists in New York in favor of promoting well-established artists [...]

This text for the Lawrence Alloway exhibition relates the language of art to the national identity; it analyzes the diversification of distribution channels and, as such, points out the international dissemination of artistic production. Alloway [a [...]

In this text, artist Bibiana Suarez’s makes a personal statement about her experience as a self-imposed Puerto Rican exile in Chicago, her negotiations of living “on the edge of two cultures,” and her artistic exploration of feelings of loss, [...]

In this essay, Ron Kovatch explores how issues of relocation, assimilation, and identity are manifest in the group of sculptures by Raoul Deal presented in the installation Reinventing Jimmy Green. Inspired by his grandfather Eugenio Greco’s [...]

Critic Mário Pedrosa analyzes the work of Ruben Valentim and defines his “authentic Brazilian painting.” His work is removed from the well-known, anecdotal, and picturesque regionalism that abounds in the art of the state of Bahia, where [...]

In this essay, Annateresa Fabris addresses the issue of identity and its connections to the visual arts in Latin America. She refers to the concept of a “sense of place” in the development of the symbolic system that posits the idea of a “ [...]

In this article, critic Sheila Leirner formulates the tie between the place where a work of art is produced and the work itself. In her view, artists can be divided into those who engage problems innate to art and those who make use of images for the [...]

This text dealing with the exhibition O Brasil dos Viajantes analyzes the possibility of conceiving of Brazilian identity from a foreign perspective. According to the text, the aim of the exhibition is to compose history from diverse points of view [...]

In this article, John Weber considers pioneering Chicano artist Ray Patlán’s work with teenagers creating a mural in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago during the summer of 1971. The youths were part of the Community Mural Project that, beginning in [...]

In this essay, Ramón García explores the foundations and essential qualities of Chicano camp (rasquache) and its artistic and literary manifestations. García begins with a discussion of the walking murals of the Los Angeles conceptual art group, [...]

Le Parc’s text points out that the I Encuentro Iberoamericano de Críticos de Arte y Artistas Plásticos [First Latin American Art Critics and Visual Artists Encounter] (Caracas, 1978) was indeed positive because it allowed for the exchange of [...]

The well-known member of the avant-garde, Arturo Uslar Pietri, tracks the evolution of the portrayal of the Indian since the idyllic vision proposed by Columbus and Father Bartolomé de las Casas (both of whom were inspired by the myth of the Noble [...]

In “América Latina: Arte e Identidad,” Germán Rubiano formulates a criticism of the exhibition The Spirit of Latin America held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1989. He questions a reading of Latin America that, in his view, [...]

In this article, J. R. Guillent Pérez confronts what he considers to be Marta Traba’s “attitude of disdain,” in her use of the term “apocalypse” in a negative sense; in doing so he makes use of philosophical sources, such as L’être et [...]

In this text, Antenor Orrego argues that nationalist culture should not be based on the traditional cultures of Peru, but rather on a totally new Pan-American sensibility. Orrego argues that a contemporary “Peruanismo literario” is a false idea [...]

Silvano Santiago begins this essay with the famous statement by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, “We are not Europeans nor North Americans, our original culture has been eliminated: nothing is foreign to us as everything here is foreign. Our own [...]

In this text, Octavio Paz contemplates the characteristics of “Hispanic” art in the United States. In a section entitled “Names and Constitutions,” he begins by describing what he argues is an archetype of all societies: the [...]

Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the segment “Arte Contemporânea Brasileira” in the 24th International Biennial of São Paulo (1998), states that the name of the exhibition he is curating raises the following question: “What art is (not) [...]

The author of this article, Aracy Amaral, discusses the comment she made concerning exhibitions of “Latin American art” in the United States, explaining that this is an absurd description because there is no artistic school involved, much less a [...]

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 critic Sheila Leirner seeks to differentiate between marginal art, marginalized art, and art that is understood as marginalized by the artist who created it. In her opinion, there is a tendency to regard marginal art and artists [...]

Mario Castillo, the distinguished Chicano/Mexican multimedia creator, writes in this artist statement that his work has always dealt with birth, life, death, and the afterlife, and that he has always tried to relate it to his Mexican heritage. He [...]

This catalogue documents a project created by the Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and twelve students in the Adult Education Program at the Emerson House Community Center in Chicago. Introductory text explains that this project was [...]

In response to J. R. Guillent Pérez, art critic Marta Traba defines the term “apocalypse”—used by her in an article that unleashed a great controversy in Caracas—as the chaos and dissolution of existing social structures, as well as the [...]

In this document, scholar and curator Chon Noriega uses the model of identity articulated by José Martí in order to construct a more accurate understanding of U.S. Latino cultural expression and, more specifically, Latino installation art. He [...]

In this essay, curator and art historian Mari Carmen Ramírez argues that demographic trends and the emergence of multiculturalism have generated renewed debate about the conditions for representation and identity among marginalized groups. While [...]

In this autobiographical timeline covering from 1947 to 1977, Nuyorican artist Jorge Soto Sánchez describes his childhood in the South Bronx where he took great delight in drawing from an early age. Conversely, he also found disillusionment in the [...]

José Luis Falconi discusses Nuyorican photographer Adal Maldonado’s series, Out of Focus Nuyoricans, as a metaphorical depiction of the mutable nature of Puerto Rican identity and nationhood. By choosing to portray his Puerto Rican subjects as [...]

In this essay, Amelia Jones explores the Post-modern notion of the “multiply identified body/self” that emerged in the art of the 1990s, by focusing on the self-portraits of the Los Angeles Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar. Unlike the body- [...]

In this article, Gloria Anzaldúa explores what it means to be a Chicano/a border artist. Reflecting on mixed feelings about a trip to a museum exhibition of the Aztec world, she meditates on the tension between the Chicano/a desire to reconnect with [...]

Aracy Amaral comments in this essay on the term “Latin American” as an aesthetic category, which would suggest being identified as something different and also the need to search for universal values. This would be one of the paths: the denial of [...]

According to the Brazilian critic Mario Barata, cultural identity derives from qualities that go beyond natural phenomena; it is also the result of planning and the promotion of works of art produced by a particular country. Permanent status is thus [...]

In this brief, bilingual artist statement Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons expresses her belief that art is “The transformation of ordinary things into a vision, a new dimension that wasn’t their original purpose.” Therefore, she explains that [...]

“Brown Paper Report” is the manifesto of the Tejano [Texan-Chicano] San Antonio-based art collective Con Safo, written by artist Mel Casas in 1971. This short text presents the concepts of Chicano and “Brown Vision,” as well as the etymology [...]

In this essay, various aspects of the II Encontro Latino-americano de Artes Plásticas [Second Latin American Meeting of the Visual Arts] held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, are summarized, emphasizing the performing artistic practices and the need to [...]

Here, Miguel von Dangel reviews the ideas of Latin American identity and its utopias, stating that its identity was subconsciously affected by cultural conflicts from elsewhere. The writer also points out deficiencies in Latin American criticism, [...]

In this essay, Shifra Goldman defines Chicano art as the expression of the historical conditions of what she calls the “double-mestizaje” [double-intermingling] of Chicano experience. Beginning with a consideration of the unresolved question of [...]

This is an essay by independent scholar Max Benavídez in which he considers the impact of what he calls the “internal exile and displacement,” and decades of social marginalization on the self-identification of many Chicanos. He explores the [...]

This booklet for the exhibition Confluencias: Leandro Soto and Raoul Deal contains three texts: an interview with the artists by Linda Corbin-Pardee, an essay by Gregory Jay, and a short text by Awam Amkpa entitled “The Story of Oggun.” Jay [...]

Ismael Xavier refers to Glauber Rocha’s essay “Uma Estética da Fome” [An Aesthetic of Hunger] in which he sees a connection to Frantz Fanon’s theory concerning an intellectual response to the consequences of colonialism. In so doing, Xavier [...]