Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this interview with Miguel von Dangel by French-Venezuelan painter Luis Pannier (b. 1953), von Dangel reflects on art as a religious activity and on the role of the natural environment of the Americas in his work. In von Dangel’s view, the [...]

In this article, the British critic Rod Mengham reviews Doris Salcedo’s installation Neither (2004) in terms of the Colombian artist’s career, identifying significant changes in her work since 2002. Up until that point, Salcedo had produced [...]

This is the photographic documentation for the written texts about three ethnic groups in northern Brazil: the Kampa (in Acre state), the Marubo (Amazonas state), and the Yanomami (Amazonas and Roraima states). The author is the Franco-Italian [...]

This is the catalogue of ritual objects related to the Yoruba deity Xangô (written Changó in Cuba) in the collection of the Museu do Estado de Pernambuco in Recife. The 307 works are placed in the following categories: sculptures of [...]

Juan Calzadilla wrote this critical text as a preface to the catalogue for Miguel von Dangel’s exhibition Sacrifixiones (1969). The essay starts with comments on the artist’s beginnings in taxidermy. Calzadilla explains how, during his time at [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon.                                However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss provides a descriptive analysis of the origin, meaning, and function of masks for some South American indigenous groups. His argument revolves around the Amazon River region and other locations in South America; it [...]

This document by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is concerned with the practice of altar-making as a spiritual and cultural endeavor that blends influences from European, African, and indigenous American sources. Typically characterized as a kind of “folk [...]

In this document, Amalia Mesa-Bains writes about the women’s practice of altar-making, suggesting that while there has been a decline in the performance of and engagement with popular ritual in contemporary life, the creation of altars as both [...]

In this document, Professor Amelia Malagamba discusses the practice of altar making, a traditional form of cultural production from Mexico that has been further developed by Chicano artists living in the United States. Her focus is on articulating a [...]

In this text, Mariano Picón-Salas weighs the benefits of the dominance of ritual in Mexican society versus that of economics in the United States. He begins by arguing that the protestant emphasis on the individual has shaped a modern society North [...]

In this essay, art historian Sybil Venegas traces the history of the Day of the Dead rituals from their roots in ancient Mexico to the twentieth-century revival and reinvention in Aztlan, the southwestern part of the United States. The evolution of [...]

Rafael Montañez Ortiz describes the assemblages of Marcos Dimas as an extension of the artist’s childhood experience of digging up bits of Taíno artifacts in the fields of Puerto Rico. Ortiz proposes that Dimas’s works are the result of his [...]

In this document Miguel Covarrubias analyzes masks from both an aesthetic and ritualistic point of view. He asserts that the ritualistic masks are the intensification of an idea born of the imagination. In this way, given that culture is more pure, [...]