Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This newspaper review, which was published in Mexico City, discusses the aesthetic and technical principles underlying the work that Carlos Cruz-Diez produced in urban spaces. The reviewer notes the dynamic nature of the artist’s approach to [...]

This article presents the retrospective on Mercedes Pardo’s art production at Museo de Arte Moderno de México (1978) by witnessing her international reach. Jose Balza focuses on the links that Pardo has with both Caracas and its [...]

In this brochure produced for the exhibition of works by prizewinners at the 1960 Prêmio Leirner de Arte Contemporânea, Gerardo Ferraz discusses how Anatol Wladyslaw’s work transitioned from the “mathematics and geometry&rdquo [...]

This article, published in the Caracas newspaper El Nacional, announces the upcoming opening of the exhibition 1x9, serigrafia del color by the Venezuelan abstract painter Mercedes Pardo, held at the Museo de Bellas Artes in the capital city. The [...]

This is Ferreira Gullar’s eulogy for his friend, the sculptor Franz Weissmann, whom he calls “one of the [Brazilian] inventors of the imagined universe.” The author remembers having met Weissmann in 1952 at Mário Pedrosa& [...]

In his introductory essay, Frederico Morais identifies the basic criteria underpinning the three retrospective exhibitions that were presented as part of the Ciclo de exposições sobre arte no Rio de Janeiro (1984). He briefly discusses [...]

This article, published in the magazine of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), highlights the artist Judith Lauand, the subject of the “anthological exhibition” Judith Lauand: Experiências. It begins with a [...]

In this essay Ronaldo Brito discusses Brazilian Constructivism as an integral part of an “organized cultural strategy” that was in effect from the 1940s to the 1960s and was closely aligned with “the country’s social and [...]

Ferreira Gullar uses his newspaper column to reply to an article that appeared in the Correio da Manhã in which Waldemar Cordeiro challenged his review of an exhibition of works by Concrete artists from São Paulo at the MAM-RJ (Museu de [...]

This text includes a few excerpts from the six lectures that Jorge Romero Brest gave in São Paulo in 1948. At that time, Romero Brest held an academic position at the Universidad de Montevideo and was the director of the magazine Ver y estimar [...]

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 [...]

In its bulletin, GRUPO 8, created in Montevideo in 1959, exposed the need to organically and institutionally tie national industries to those Uruguayan artists affiliated with modernity. The objective was to promote labor sources for Uruguayan modern [...]

This document is a statement issued by the Montevideo-based GRUPO 8. Although diverse, all of the group members produced “abstract art”; in the late fifties, it was a sort of avant-garde functional to local industry insofar as the group connected [...]

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

The magazine Mensaje, dedicated to the dissemination of Brazilian culture in Uruguay, devoted its twenty-fourth issue, published December 1948, to an analysis of work by Candido Portinari, just at the conclusion of the Brazilian artist’s one-year [...]

The magazine Mensaje, devoted to the dissemination of Brazilian culture in Uruguay, dedicated its twenty-fourth issue, published December 1948, to an analysis of work by Candido Portinari, just at the conclusion of the Brazilian artist’s one-year [...]

The magazine Mensaje, dedicated to the dissemination of Brazilian culture in Uruguay, devoted its twenty-fourth publication in December of 1948, to the analysis of the work of Candido Portinari, at a time when the Brazilian artist was at the end of [...]

In this brief essay, which was published in the brochure for the 1960 Prêmio Leirner de Arte Contemporânea, Wolfgang Pfeiffer discusses the spontaneity and imagination he sees in the work of Niobe Xandó. A self-taught painter, Xand [...]

In this brief essay, which was published in the brochure for the 1960 Prêmio Leirner de Arte Contemporânea, Wolfgang Pfeiffer writes about a drawing of a fish on the sand by Moacyr Rocha that appears at the beginning of the essay. The [...]

In this brief essay, which appeared in the brochure produced for the 1960 Prêmio Leirner de Arte Contemporânea (Leirner Prize for Contemporary Art), Oswald de Andrade Filho—the son of the famous writer—describes Murillo [...]

Luiza Interlenghi, in her role as curator, interviews the artist Ubi Bava, asking him about his involvement in what came to be known as the Salão Preto e Branco (Black-and-White Salon) in Rio de Janeiro in 1954. He explains that, with so few [...]

In this statement, Iberê Camargo recalls how the third Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, also known as the Salão Preto e Branco (Black-and-White Salon), was planned as a protest against the Brazilian Finance Minister Osvaldo Aranha& [...]

In his testimony the critic Ferreira Gullar describes his involvement in the third Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, also called the Salón Blanco y Negro (Black-and-White Salon), in 1954. At that point in time he was not a professional [...]

In this introductory essay, “La huelga del color” (The Color Strike), Glória Ferreira includes an article that had appeared in the newspaper Correio da Manhã on May 16, 1954. The article described the third Salão [...]

In his introductory essay, Paulo Herkenhoff describes the 1954 Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna —also known as the Black-and-White Salon—as a political statement that was expressed in an official exhibition space. In protest against [...]

This was the first time a national publication—the Lima newspaper El Comercio—had published the guidelines for the Festivales de Lima, an event of great importance in Latin America that took place in October and November 1966. The event consisted [...]

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 [...]

The author, Natalia Majluf, states that these works, created using the techniques of the “minutemen” photographers that work in provincial city plazas, could initially be thought as ethnographic or touristic photography. Nevertheless, when [...]

In this text, Rodrigo Quijano argues that Lima 01—a series of photographs of inverted images of interiors of old abandoned buildings in downtown Lima—addresses questions of forgetting and urban decay. The series makes reference to the design of [...]

In this response to Fernando de Szyszlo, well-known critic Sebastián Salazar Bondy points out how dynamic the Peruvian art scene is; against all odds, “there are people working tirelessly, with no pointless nostalgia as they undertake the creation [...]

According to the author of this text, the works by César Moro on exhibit are aggressively disconcerting; indeed, there is “nothing to say about ‘things’ so removed from mainstream painting.” The author points out that, at this time, the [...]

This article about the Museo del Hospital Psiquiátrico Víctor Larco Herrera [Museum of the Victor Larco Herrera Psychiatric Hospital] (in Peru’s capital city) was written by Ernesto More, under the pseudonym “Jerome,” as part of a series on [...]

Poet César Moro describes the confusion and expectations of the public at the Surrealist art show, while also questioning the judgments pronounced on the show by “those charmers from the base police known as critics of purpose and profit,” whose [...]

This text announces the upcoming opening of the show of Surrealism organized by César Moro at the Academia Alcedo in Lima. The writer, who confesses he has not seen the show, comments that it is the first Surrealist exhibition to take place in the [...]

In this text, eminent Latin American avant-garde poet César Vallejo asserts that “among the symptoms of the final decline of the capitalist intelligentsia is the vice of coterie.” He argues that the crises of economic imperialism are reflected [...]

According to José Carlos Mariátegui, Breton (in his second manifesto) “prosecuted” all the writers and artists who, having initially embraced surrealism, then renounced it. Though he mentions the attacks on Pierre Naville, he claims that the [...]

In her text, Maria Lúcia Bueno follows the course of twentieth century visual arts, from modernity to globalization. She in turn probes the art world, relating art spaces and dissemination of art to their social context. Based on her analysis of the [...]

In her text, Maria Lúcia Bueno follows the course of twentieth century visual arts, from modernity to globalization. She in turn probes the art world, relating art spaces and dissemination of art to their social context. Based on her analysis of the [...]

In this text, José Carlos Mariátegui argues that no avant-garde artistic or literary movement has been “as significant historically or important as content as Surrealism.” He asserts that, while Futurism attempted to go beyond formal [...]

In this brief review, Bill Caro discusses his own career, ranging from his 1972 exhibition (focused on Lima shantytowns) to his interest in light that became one of the key facets of his work in the 1980s. Caro states that “photographing is as [...]

This document is the catalogue to Cementerio de automóviles, an exhibition of work by hyperrealist painter Bill Caro held at Galería Enrique Camino Brent in Lima in late 1976. In a synopsis, architect Héctor Velarde states that beauty is “ [...]

In this letter to painter Bill Caro, Emilio Harth-Terré asserts that the views of the neighborhoods of Lima Caro painted constitute “artistic expression” that goes beyond any attempt at social protest. The painter formulates, in Harth-Terré’s [...]

In his introduction, Juan E. Ríos—the author of this overview of Peruvian painting from the first half of the twentieth century—describes Peruvian art as “the creation of a visual equivalent of reality, rather than a mere copy of it” denying [...]

In this essay, Peruvian art critic and diplomat Raúl María Pereira provides an overview of Peruvian painting from the first half of the twentieth century. While the author praises the first generation of academic painters, he believes that their [...]

In this text, Raúl María Pereira reflects on the history of painting in Peru, affirming that the Incan “genius in form and color” lived on despite the Spanish conquest, not as a parallel or marginal entity, but as a force that acted on “the [...]

According to the Cuban journalist, there is “a rich tradition of indigenous art” behind the paintings by Fernando de Szyszlo that were exhibited in Havana: a form of popular art whose roots can be traced back to pre-Hispanic culture in the Andean [...]

For Marta Traba, the Fernando de Szyszlo exhibition in Bogotá (Colombia) evidences that “the mistake does not lie in wanting to be American, but in how one is American.” In her opinion, the series of works by the Peruvian painter inspired by the [...]

In this text, poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen considers the series of paintings produced by Fernando de Szyszlo on the basis of the Quechua poem Apu Inca Atawallpaman written during the colonial era. Westphalen asserts that the relationship between [...]

In his remarks on the series of paintings Apu Inca Atawallpaman inspired by the colonial-era Quechua poem of the same name, Sebastián Salazar Bondy rejects criticism that “sets out to speak FROM painting” and, thus, marginalizes theme. He argues [...]

Juan Acha discusses the exhibition of Fernando de Szyszlo’s series of paintings inspired by the indigenous poem “Apu Inca Atawallpaman,” an event that was organized by the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo (IAC) in Lima. Acha finds the [...]