Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The text “Entrance” serves as the introduction to the book, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, by Mexico-based Argentinean academic and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini. Written in 1995, the work rapidly became [...]

This text investigates several meanings of the concept “place” in art: space/representation, interval of meaning, installation space, institutional space, and sociocultural space, emotional, symbolic or utopian (where the artwork is executed and [...]

The journalist Angela Prysthon clearly differentiates modern from postmodern cosmopolitanism. In the modern form, the center/periphery dialectic prevails, and there are tensions between traditional reality and internationalist aspirations; the [...]

In this groundbreaking essay, Julio Plaza provides the reader with an overview of what was at the time, the very recent “video text” technology featured in a special section of the seventeenth São Paulo Biennial, a section that Plaza curated. He [...]

In this text, curator Moacir dos Anjos analyzes the global conditions transforming contemporary artistic production. Mondialisation, he argues, entails rupture in the traditional associations between place, culture, and identity, ushering in [...]

Antonio Risério discusses the origins of the artistic avant-garde in Bahia in the 1950s and 1960s. He notes the syncretic nature of this particular form of art that embraces everything from high culture to popular culture to mass communication. He [...]

The art critic Ferreira Gullar discusses the work of the printmaker Gilvan Samico, highlighting the uniqueness of his prints. Samico’s figurative work reveals both a regional and an international vocabulary, and confirms the traditional nature of [...]

To what extent did artists involved in the transavantgarde deviate from that modern tradition that tirelessly sought to create something new? This is the basic question that Jorge Guinle asks in this article. He sees that the new “school” [...]

Aracy Amaral explains that since the early twentieth century, fine artists from Latin America in search of their cultural roots have taken an interest in the themes and formal usage of popular expression. The examples she cites include Tarsila do [...]

According to Tadeu Chiarelli, contemporary international art has moved away from personal expression and embraced an industrial aesthetic. This is the result of a serial, modular logic that rejects any attempt to stress the physical and chemical [...]

Antonio Gonçalves Filho comments on the exhibition of photographs by Anna Mariani, included in the XVIII São Paulo Biennial. Although it portrays simple images of houses common in the northeastern region of Brazil, the shots awaken a curiosity [...]

The Brazilian professor and art critic Aracy Amaral introduces Arte Híbrida, the exhibition organized by the MACU in Sao Paulo where she was the director. She highlights the creativity of the participating artists and their search for a Brazilian [...]

In this review of Emmanuel Nassar’s work, Tadeu Chiarelli discusses the paintings the artist produced in the mid-1980s, in which he detects an attraction to the widespread erudite Constructivist tradition coupled with a certain discomfort, [...]

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 text, Sérgio Romagnolo expresses the need for a “unique vision” in order to understand Brazilian art. He believes that Brazilian artists should not be seen from a European perspective and maintains that it is still possible to develop [...]

In this document Tomás Ybarra-Frausto discusses the philosophical and sociological underpinnings of Chicano art. He links its development to the political goals of the Chicano movement, describing the work of Chicano artists as a model for freedom [...]

The author, Susan Keller, ponders the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains within the context of the Mexican-American social empowerment movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as the Chicano Movement. A figurehead of her generation, Mesa-Bains looked to [...]

The author, Susan Keller, ponders the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains within the context of the Mexican-American social empowerment movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as the Chicano Movement. A figurehead of her generation, Mesa-Bains looked to [...]

In the introductory essay to The Hybrid State Films, a survey of independent films and videos, Cuban-American art scholar and curator of the show, Coco Fusco, states that she is critical of the foundational approach of multiculturalism that [...]

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 [...]

The Puerto Rican educator Luis Quero Chiesa titles this section, “Malezal.” He believes that the North American invasion of Puerto Rico was “the most profound cultural tragedy of the New World.” In his opinion, everything that was [...]

In this essay, artist and cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains situates spirituality as part of an everyday struggle against domination by Latinos, a set of popular practices that offer critical, alternative histories and an important site of resistance [...]

In his essay, Victor Zamudio-Taylor addresses the historic loss of cultural memory imposed on mestizos (mixed race people) by the dominant culture throughout the Americas since the time of the conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese. The loss of [...]

This article by Elenore Welles profiles Chicano artist Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, and describes his art as whimsical and a reflection of his experiences. Lujan’s work, Welles writes, strikes a balance between bridging cultural gaps and preserving [...]

In this essay, Amalia Mesa-Bains discusses the interplay between a folk ethos and contemporary aesthetic in Chicano art. She begins by tracing the history of Chicano art to the Chicano movement that spurred a generation of artists who had a fine arts [...]

This essay by artist Rubén Trejo focuses on the roots of humor in Chicano art and, specifically, in his sculptures. Trejo proposes that the major sources of humor for Chicano artists include pre-Columbian art, Mexican folk art and literature, and [...]

In this essay, Annateresa Fabris addresses the issue of identity and its connections to the visual arts in Latin America. She refers to the concept of a “sense of place” in the development of the symbolic system that posits the idea of a “ [...]

Using the theoretical framework of “broken memory,” defined by Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones as memory "deliberately denied by political power or broken by official repression or cultural exclusion," Juana N. Goergen analyzes signs and imagery of [...]

In this text, the artist Mirentxu Ganzaraín discusses the inadequacy of terminology in use in the United States to describe and categorize the art by artists whose ethnic backgrounds are other than normative ones. As a North American of Chilean and [...]