Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Alicia Haber was the curator of the 1991 exhibition Charrúas y montes criollos, presenting the contemporary work of Uruguayan artist Rimer Cardillo, who had been residing in New York since 1984. According to the curatorial text, the exhibition [...]

Rodrigo Quijano argues that Tiempo detenido—the installation by ceramicist Carlos Runcie Tanaka—does more than illustrate a traumatic event. Since its beginnings, Quijano asserts, the work has been linked to the artist’s search for identity. To [...]

This “lesson” given by Joaquín Torres García (JTG) is a manifesto of sorts. It is the first in which the artist formulates the idea of “inverting the map” of South America and asserts the existence of a local cultural identity that should [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

This essay proposes that a “Latin American identity” was an idea based on two facts: the influence of the decadent post-war European culture and secondly, the geopolitical circumstances of Latin American governments confronted with North American [...]

Revista Nacional was a quarterly journal published by the Academia Nacional de Letras del Uruguay [National Academy of Letters]. This article refers to one of the most important figures in the intellectual history of the River Plate [region], Pedro [...]

In this essay, numerous questions are raised relating to national and continental identity in Latin America, after eleven years (1973–84) under military dictatorship. There is a manifest recognition of both the reality of underdevelopment, as well [...]

In this article the Venezuelan researcher Alfredo Chacón discusses the Venezuelan concept of popular art. He asks: When do we talk about popular art? He goes on to explore different social factors that define what Venezuelans consider “popular [...]

In this statement, Arturo Uslar Pietri posits that the history of Latin America has been a process of raising awareness of the region’s evolution, which serves as the basis for the development of a new world born of the modern age. In an encounter [...]

This essay by the curator Julieta González is a preface to a book published by the Museo Alejandro Otero (2000) that collected articles related to the debate about “identity” in Latin America in 1965. The debate arose as a response to an article [...]

In this essay, María Luz Cárdenas reviews the latest work produced by Milton Becerra, the Venezuelan sculptor and artist who works with new media, focusing specifically on his installation Naturaleza y espíritu. Cárdenas compares Becerra’s work [...]

The basis of curator Roberto Guevara’s critical discussion of the exhibition Figuración / Fabulación is an analysis of, among other things, the origin of the term “Latin America” and the search for a regional identity. Guevara states that his [...]

With this text, Mateo Manaure announced his decision to leave the city and build a studio near his hometown of Uracoa in the state of Monagas. He says that he wants to spend more time painting and to make work with a more indigenous spirit pursuant [...]

In this interview, journalist María Cristina Sanhueza takes up the opinion of J. R. Guillent Pérez regarding the assertions of Oswaldo Vigas, which question the contribution of Los Disidentes [The Dissidents] (Paris, 1950) to Venezuelan art. After [...]

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, [...]

Venezuelan critic Roberto Montero Castro here examines some of the opinions arising from the declarations made by Oswaldo Vigas. The author laments the “tono parroquial” [parochial tone] of the replies to the Venezuelan painter, because they do [...]

In this essay, the Venezuelan artist Oswaldo Vigas defends his beliefs on the subject of the Latin American identity, stating that the only way Latin American communities can survive the unfolding of historical events is by departing from their own [...]

The creator of the work “Ida Píngala II,” Alfred Wenemoser, wrote a text organized into two parts describing the work, which was shown at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1981. In the first part, the artist summarizes in six steps the content of his [...]

Juan Calzadilla starts this critical text with a general commentary on the concept of “painting” when it is limited to the artist’s self-expression based on discovering a personal language, with the resulting isolation from the environment. He [...]

Art historian Hanna Feldman takes issue with critics who approach Gego’s art from a nationalist (Venezuelan) perspective, which she believes limits its scope and social importance. Feldman asserts that contemporary experiences of migration, exile, [...]

This essay posits the 1980s as a period of intense self-reflection among Latin American artists living in the United States. Susana Torruella Leval considers the complex relationships of these artists to the tumultuous North American art milieu, [...]

In this document, curator and art historian Susana Torruella Leval considers works by several artists whose practices reflect an interest in articulating a particular historical consciousness that is tied to their cultural identity as Latin Americans [...]

This article, first published in the summer/fall 1992 issue of High Performance by Mexican-born, U.S.-based artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, parodies the social, political, and cultural structures of the United States. A commentary on an [...]

“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 “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” the Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz grapples with the issues related to the search for the national identity in post-revolutionary Mexico and, more broadly, the existential relationship [...]

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 [...]

Here, Sheila Leirner discusses the exhibition Interior Reliefs, by the U.S. artist Mary Dritschel, held at the Luisa Strina gallery in São Paulo. To this critic, the works exhibited have almost the same impact as the artist’s first exhibition in [...]

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 [...]

Renato Ortiz examines the concept of “identity” in the contemporary global world from a sociological perspective. Pursuant to Postmodernity—which he calls “radicalized modernity”—there is a multiplicity of [...]

This text is an analysis of the process through which black/white mixing ceased to be limited by the boundaries of nineteenth-century racial categories. This emerged in news commentary and studies of Brazilian culture. Based on those categories, this [...]

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 [...]

Annateresa Fabris questions the status of the image in contemporary art in the context of the exhibition Gravura Paulista. Fabris begins the text by referring to film, which she considers the vision of those who cannot forge a relationship with the [...]

In Aracy Amaral’s view, the debate around the Etsedron group could give rise to reflection on a Latin American aesthetic insofar as it entails an expressionistic and primitivistic interpretation of reality from an environmental perspective. Amaral [...]

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 synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

In this text, curator Moacir dos Anjos analyzes the global conditions transforming contemporary artistic production. Mondialisation, he argues, entails rupture in the traditional associations between place, culture, and identity, ushering in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The question that constitutes the title of this article is posed as a challenge not only to intellectuals, but to society as a whole. In its attempt to answer that question, Revista Flash decided to interview individuals in the art world, despite the [...]

This text is a criticism written by Natalia Gutiérrez of the work, Corte en el ojo [Cut in the Eye](2000), by Miguel Ángel Rojas. She develops it based on ideas of “place” and “no place,” as well as the paradox between them established by [...]

This text introduces the print portfolio, Cuba-Colombia, raíces comunes [Cuba/Colombia, Common Roots], the second work of the Corporación Prográfica [Prográfica Association] (Cali, Colombia)—after El graficario de la lucha popular en Colombia [ [...]