Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this newspaper article, Antonio Velluto describes the incident at the Caracas Cathedral when the parish priest, Augusto Laborem, took a stick to the sculpture Retrato espiritual de un tiempo, by Miguel von Dangel, and destroyed it because he [...]

In this essay, art historian Kristine Stiles provides the most comprehensive essay written to date on the work of Rafael Montañez Ortiz, who is recognized as an innovator in the destruction art movement of the 1960s. Stiles’s essay chronicles [...]

This essay by Professor Raúl Antelo addresses the issue of place in a theory concerning the marginalizing of Latin American culture, more specifically within South America. This culture has always been viewed through a prism of exclusion and [...]

In this manifesto, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, who was born in the United States and is of Puerto Rican descent, discusses the concept of destruction as a new mode of creating art. He validates employing “destruction art” as an appropriate [...]

As vice-president of the Frente Nacional de Artes Plásticas (FNAP) [National Front for the Visual Arts], David Alfaro Siqueiros makes the latest resolution of the group known. To wit: “to immediately initiate a national campaign directed at the [...]

The correspondent for The Daily Worker in Chicago creates a context for his readers concerning the formation of a Communist and a revolutionary art in Mexico, which describes on the walls of public buildings the useless life of the upper classes and [...]

The author condemns the double standard with which two property rights cases were adjudicated. Siqueiros compares the destruction of the offices of La revista de Yucatán [Yucatan Magazine] by an angry crowd to the attack by a group of dentistry [...]

Cayetano Cordóva Iturburu gives a positive critique of the Destructive art exhibition due to its intelligent organization of the artworks, as well as for the expanded interpretation of art as either life blasted experience or a new poetics [...]

Robert Cox writes that, in the exhibition Arte Destructivo at Galería Lirolay, the artists have created a smart form of displaying destruction, as the antithesis of creation. He refers to both the sale of the works and the participation of the [...]

Enrique Azcoaga offers a negative critique of the exhibition of destructive art, which he describes as artistically mounted garbage heap, a crude stage, literal and pompier. He outlines the differences between this trend with both Dadaism and [...]

Kenneth Kemble tackles the authorship of an idea of destructive art, which is more an experimentation than an -ism. In his view, destructive art evokes the diversity of man’s essential needs: destruction as emotion, the pleasure and the [...]