Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

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 letter, written in 1926 to the multifaceted Oswald de Andrade, the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars makes certain suggestions regarding the forthcoming Paris exhibition of work by Tarsila do Amaral, the leading woman artist in the Brazilian [...]

In this communiqué-style essay written in Rio de Janeiro, Oswald de Andrade calls for the axiological rehabilitation of primitive man—understood as the communities or people that lived on this continent before the Eurocentrically-named & [...]

Art historian Shifra M. Goldman writes with great acuity and depth about the traveling exhibition, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987, and subsequently went to the Queens [...]

Writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote this tribute to Oswald de Andrade, “the poet of anthropophagy,” shortly after his death in 1954. According to the author, Oswald’s cultural philosophy based on the notion of “anthropophagy” puts forth [...]

Through comparative analysis, Silviano Santiago examines the “place” of literary discourse in Latin America. He describes a process of “acculturation” that began in the colonial era and has left the trace of “defamiliarization.” [...]

This essay, by the Brazilian curator and art historian Aracy Amaral, appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Modernidade: arte brasileira do século XX (Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1988). Amaral discusses the origins of the [...]

This essay by Frederico [de] Morais accepts as a given that the stigma of Latin American marginalization is due to its absence from the field of universal art or to its exclusion from metropolitan history and criticism of art. At the same time, some [...]

In this article, the artist and engineer Flávio de Carvalho outlines his thoughts on a “city of the future” inhabited by “naked men,” members of a society that has “stripped” itself of western taboos, and is finally, “free from [...]