Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The article “¡Que viva ‘La novia’ que viva!” was published in the Culture – Entertainment section of the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo on September 16, 1997 on the occasion of the performance of La novia ( [...]

The article “¡Que viva Manrique!” [Hooray for Manrique!], written by the editorial team at the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador and published on April 16, 1996, referred to Pedro Manrique Figueroa. Precursor del Collage en Colombia [Pedro [...]

The researcher Irma Arestizábal comments on the placement of Argentinean avant-garde art, (always at the margin) in relationship to the hegemonic art centers. She writes based on a selection of works of Argentinean artists that appear in [...]

In the design ¿Y por qué no?, the artist Antonieta Sosa describes the action planned in detail. As she states it, this work consists of placing wine glasses on different parts of her body so that they will drop and break. Added to the sound of [...]

This text, written by the anthropologist Juan Ignacio Castillo at the time of the 3rd Bienal Salvador Valero de Arte Popular (Trujillo, 1991), is a commentary on popular religious imagery and its use in different social contexts and strata. The [...]

This essay on the subject of 111 the work by Nuno Ramos is divided into three parts. The art critic Alberto Tassinari begins by describing the sociopolitical, cultural, and ideological conditions in Brazil on October 2, 1992, when military police put [...]

On the occasion of the exhibition La casa de todos nosotros: Antonio Martorell y sus amigos [A House for Us All: Antonio Martorell and Friends] held at El Museo del Barrio in 1992, Puerto Rican curator Susana Torruella Leval analyzes Antonio [...]

In this essay, Roberto Guevara gives an overview of Gego’s career, [based on a selection of works that are] on display at the São Paulo Biennial. Guevara describes how Gego’s work has evolved from her early sculptures in the 1950s to her latest [...]

Abdel Hernández, the Cuban critic and writer, discusses the VII Bienal Nacional de Dibujo de Caracas (Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero, 1994) which, in his opinion, was an event that promoted “fragmentation and disciplinarity” in art, and [...]

Leandro Soto Ortiz interprets the sculptural works of fellow artist Raoul Deal that were featured in the exhibition La Esperanza del Loro Verde. Soto Ortiz positions Deal’s work within a Postmodernist current, contextualizing it at the core of [...]

Interview with artist Nelson Felix conducted by art critic Rodrigo Naves and three artists: Lygia Pape, José Resende and Nuno Ramos (São Paulo, May 24, 1997). Felix comments on his education as an architect; his love of music; his first drawings, [...]

Oswald de Andrade explains that the term Pau-Brasil [Brazil Tree, which yielded the wood that was exploited for export and gave the country its name] that he used in his 1924 manifesto was intended as a “slogan,” an invention with which [...]

In this interview, the journalist Rubén Wisotzki asks Eugenio Espinoza about Orla, the exhibition presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber in Caracas, in 1993. The Venezuelan artist believes that the exhibition was a moment for [...]

In this text Nemesio Antúnez provides a brief description of Taller 99. He discusses the origin of the workshop and his association with Atelier 17 (founded in 1917) in Paris, where he completed his training as a printmaker, underscoring the [...]

In this text, Ruth Auerbach explains the curatorial guidelines behind the 3rd Bienal Nacional de Arte de Guayana (Ciudad Bolívar, 1993). She believes the salons were established in order to propose that they be a space open to experimentation. In [...]

Invitation to Alfredo Londaibere’s exhibition (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, June, 1991 [...]

In this essay, Angela Coldsmith examines the varied printmaking techniques of Anaida Hernández, and her work on behalf of women’s issues in her practices as an artist, activist, and educator. In particular, they note that Hernández organized an [...]

In this chapter of her book on Evandro Carlos Jardim, Yvoty Macambira mentions the printing workshop created in 1987—the Atelier Experimental de Gravura Francesc Domingo Segura—whose name pays tribute to Jardim’s mentor. The workshop operated [...]

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 [...]

According to Ivo Mesquita, it is due to political-economic changes and social crises in Brazil—the results of a colonial project—that the country is influenced by the non-optimistic perspectives that have taken hold in the rest of the world with [...]

This exhibition catalog, Chicago Latino, was part of an intercultural dialogue initiated by two “socially-minded arts groups,” the 369 Gallery of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Near Northwest Arts Council of Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition [...]

The authors of this essay describe Coco Fusco as one of the most highly visible and vocal members of the Latino artistic community in the United States. The author, Mary Ellen Croteau, provides an overview of Fusco’s family background and academic [...]

The curator Axel Stein introduces the exhibition of works by Luis Lizardo at the Centro de Arte Euroamericano (Caracas, 1991). In his essay Stein talks about the artist’s early days, when he was just getting started, interspersing his own formal [...]

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. [...]

The art critic and researcher Eliseo Sierra reviews a decade of the life and art of the Venezuelan painter Susana Amundaraín, from her beginnings in the 1980s through 1992. After reviewing the art world at the time she began to produce art, the [...]

In this article Marjorie Devon, the director of the Tamarind Institute in the United States, lists the Institute’s various exchange programs with Brazilian artists who work in the field of lithography. Cláudio Mubarac, Iran do Espírito Santo, and [...]

Analyzing the work of Venezuelan artist Diana López, critic Jesús Fuenmayor highlights the most salient features of her work from the beginning of the 1990s (when she began her artistic career) up to the moment that the exhibition he is reviewing [...]

The Colombian artist Víctor Laignelet discusses the ability in painting to expand its range of action—what he calls its antropofagia [anthropophagy]—as it absorbs “new visual expressions” such as “installations,” exposing the roots of [...]

The curator and cultural representative Jorge Jaramillo Jaramillo—who at the time was the director of the Galería Santa Fe at the Planetarium in Bogota—discusses several matters regarding the first edition of the Premio Luis Caballero [Luis [...]

The text describes the Galería del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas as a “a mental place that presents the art that tunes in exactly with the current times,” mentioning that, “in spite of having a joke of a budget, the Rojas space became a [...]

Cuban novelist Zoe Valdés pays homage to the work of Dominican artist Darío Suro. Transformed into a perceptive art critic while still displaying her lyrical gift as a fiction writer, Valdés gives literary form to Suro’s art, which she sees as a [...]

In this text, curator William Niño Araque reflects on Fabiola Sequera’s sculpture on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Galería Astrid Paredes in Caracas in 1991. The curatorial essay proposes three approaches to a body of work that [...]

With this text, Mariela Avellaneda de Luna officially presents Gego at the twenty-third São Paulo Biennial. Avellaneda points out the importance of the line in Gego’s large structures, such as the versions of Reticulárea, emphasizing the way the [...]

The document includes an image that is part of Marcelo Pombo's installation in the collective exhibition La Conquista (Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta, March 1992). Organized for the Fifth Centennial of the Discovery of America, it includes a [...]

In this essay published in the 1992 exhibition catalog of Remerica! Amerika, Puerto Rican artist Enoc Perez discusses the effects of United States colonialism in the development of art in Puerto Rico. He observes that Puerto Rican artists have [...]

Jorge Gumier-Maier and Magdalena Jitrik point out that the objective the Galería del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas aimed for since its inception was “to create space for a large group of young artists whose works were not part of the accepted and [...]

Here, Roberto Guevara presents the objectives of the First Camille Pissarro Biennial (Centro Cultural Consolidado, Caracas, 1992). The event was organized to strengthen the ties between Venezuela and France as well as stimulate the development of [...]

In this essay, Michael Crockford discusses how the artistic practices of Yolanda Lopez combine feminism, activism, and community building. He observes that Lopez challenges indeed lowly depictions of Mexican-Americans in the United States by [...]

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 [...]

This letter was written by UCLA professor Chon Noriega to Elisabeth Sussman, a former curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Written in 1993, the letter addresses several concerns about the museum’s upcoming Biennial Exhibition with [...]

Luis E. Díaz Hernández, executive director of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña [Puerto Rican Cultural Institute] (ICP), sent a letter to the artist Lorenzo Homar with a questionnaire consisting of five questions. The objective of the [...]

In this text, Gary Hesse considers the direction Martina Lopez’s work took after she was introduced in 1986 to computer imaging that became the main means with which she created her photographs. With this new tool, Hesse explains, Lopez has [...]

The author of this essay, Adrianne Dwyer, discusses the autobiographical references found in Magdalena Campos-Pons’s work that relate to her Afro-Cuban background, specifically the spiritual tradition of Santeria. Campos-Pons explains that her [...]

In this essay presenting an exhibition of work by Anna Barros, Agnaldo Farias asserts that this artist’s production returns vital and primary elements to the universe of myth. He comments on the expansiveness and specificity of works that place the [...]

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, [...]

By way of an open letter, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas (b. 1960) introduces the exhibition Pinturas, work by Luis Lizardo, organized by the Centro de Arte Euroamericano (Caracas, 1996). The letter is a meditation (of a poetic nature) on the ideas and [...]

In his article, Armando Castellanos interprets Raoul Deal’s work featured in the exhibition Las Esperanzas del Loro Verde [The Hopes of the Green Parrot]. Castellanos argues that Deal’s work confronts the duality, ambiguity, and tension between [...]

Guided by certain poetic and fictional considerations, the art critic and curator Adriano Pedrosa discusses Daniel Senise’s paintings. Using short phrases that address various parts of the catalogue in a frank dialogue with the images, the author [...]