Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This unsigned article reviews the works of the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), the art action group that took the name used as the title of the article in question: Para no morir de hambre en el arte (To Avoid Dying of Hunger [or Starving to [...]

In this article, Barboza Leite identifies the artists who contributed to the founding of the SCAP (Sociedade Cearense de Artes Plásticas) from 1941 to 1949, when the association was launched. He provides a detailed description of the endemic [...]

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 [...]

In this text, the members of El Techo de la Ballena, a group that emerged in the sixties, in Caracas, delineated the differences between categories such as “tacky,” “unfortunate,” and “ridiculous” in the exhibition, Homenaje a la cursiler [...]

The group—calling itself the Colectiva de Artistas Puertorriqueños—articulates the concern that the policies of El Museo del Barrio marginalize the production of Puerto Rican artists in New York in favor of promoting well-established artists [...]

This programmatic statement by the Grupo Arte Nuevo was included in the catalogue for their second exhibition, which ran from October to November 1966 at the MALI (Museo de Arte de Lima). Faced with “a world molded by the dramatic evolution of [...]

This essay describes the establishing of the photography club Foto Clube do Pará, naming its founding partners, the activities presented, and the postal addresses of its members. Around the mid-1950s, in the state capital of Belém, they opened a [...]

In this essay, Hugo Martinez chronicles the formation of United Graffiti Artists, a collective of New York City graffiti artists. Analyzing the graffiti scene from a sociological perspective, Martinez reports that the majority of graffiti artists in [...]

This is the introductory essay for À Flor da Pele [Skin Deep], the exhibition that the art critic Marcus Lontra Costa organized at the gallery in the Centro Empresarial Rio in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1983. It is an energetic defense of “ [...]

Critic Marcus Lontra Costa takes stock of the eighties on the basis of the exhibition Como vai você, Geração 80? held at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro in 1984. Lontra Costa and his colleagues are particularly [...]

This document is a conversation between the painter Jorge Guinle and the critic Ronaldo Brito; the artists Carlos Vergara and Tunga are also part of the conversation. Focusing on the area he addresses in his ideas, Guinle discusses general aspects of [...]

This brief document by writer José Armas summarizes the ideas of a group of Chicano writers and artists from the states of Washington, California, Texas, and New Mexico who met in Lubbock, Texas, with the intention of forming an artistic and [...]

Curator Isabel Nazario compares the emergence of independent Puerto Rican printmaking collectives in New York during the 1970s to the government sponsored graphic art workshops that were instituted in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. She notes that Puerto [...]

This annotated chronology written by Puerto Rican-born artist Diogenes Ballester, documents the history of Taller Boricua [Puerto Rican Workshop]—the oldest extant Puerto Rican artist collective in New York—from its founding in 1969 to 1989. For [...]

In this article critic Wilson Coutinho emphasizes Luiz Áquila’s pictorial contributions to art in the 1980s. Known as “the father of the ‘80s generation,” he was one of the few to continue painting during the prior experimental decade. Á [...]

The article written by the journalist Fabián Forero Barón and published in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo (December 2007) reviews the visual artwork of the collective Excusado Printsystem, and its impact in Bogotá since 2003. It places major [...]

This is a news report on the formation of the Cooperativa dos Artistas Plásticos de São Paulo in 1979, which in fact was a pioneering initiative in Brazil. Instead of meeting to discuss issues on aesthetics, the collective sought to establish an [...]

This address by Mário Pedrosa was entitled “Käthe Kollwitz e seu modo vermelho de perceber a vida” [Käthe Kollwitz and her red perception of life]; it was delivered at the CAM (Clube dos Artistas Modernos) in June 1933 during the show [...]

In this article the art critic Stella Teixeira de Barros outlines the history of the various visual arts associations that were founded in the city of São Paulo between the Brazilian modernist period and the 1980s. Teixeira de Barros uses the term [...]

This article is about the emergence of a group in São Paulo in 1993 that called itself the “Atelier Piratininga.” The members of the group were Ernesto Bonato, Armando Sobral, and Giorgia Volpe. In their early days they were mainly focused on [...]

In this “Author’s Note,” Syeus Mottel, a theater and film director, and a photographer, describes his experience after he was recruited to make a book adaptation of a unique project already in development by Buckminster Fuller and Michael Ben [...]

The manifesto that launched Rex Gallery & Sons in the city of São Paulo addresses in passing issues facing the visual arts in Brazil such as the paucity of galleries that support the production of artists, the lack of specialized art criticism, [...]

This account of the disbandment of the Grupo Rex asserts that the primordial aim of the São Paulo-based group was to say things that had never been said before, to criticize attitudes beset with bad faith, and to encourage the work of young [...]

This is an interview conducted by the artist Luiz Paulo Baravelli with the painter Leda Catunda, who comments on two painting trends in São Paulo in the 1980s: subject and figure. She talks about her approach to art of the prior decade and cites the [...]

The chapter published in the book Ciudad espejo [Mirror City] by the Arts Faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia [National University of Colombia] (2009), written by Natalia Gutiérrez, describes the methodology used by the Colectivo [...]

“Brown Paper Report” is the manifesto of the Tejano [Texan-Chicano] San Antonio-based art collective Con Safo, written by artist Mel Casas in 1971. This short text presents the concepts of Chicano and “Brown Vision,” as well as the etymology [...]

In this article, Roberto Galvão provides a chronological timeline of the facts and institutions that contributed to the cultural state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil. He discusses the challenges that regional artists have faced in their attempts [...]

This is the art critic Marcus Lontra Costa’s essay about the painter Cláudio Fonseca. In his preamble, Lontra takes a close look at this contemporary artist and concludes that he lives in the moment, in a place where the only possible artistic [...]

This article reports on the activities of the Clube de Gravura de Porto Alegre (CGPA) founded in 1950 by artist Carlos Scliar, who served as its president. The club was considered a model organization. It gained “notoriety throughout Brazil and [...]

In this introductory article, the curator and journalist Teniza Spinelli outlines the genealogy of print clubs in Brazil, beginning with the Grupo de Bagé (1948), and moving on to the Clube de Gravura de Porto Alegre (1950), which was the model for [...]

The brochure begins with a part dictionary, part humorous definition of the words “Con Safo,” which is followed by an anonymous short essay that functions as a manifesto for the Con Safo artist collective. In it, the group outlines the [...]

Art critic Lucy Lippard gives an overview of issues that have galvanized Latino artists in the United States to take action; the most notable causes being migrant workers rights in the 1960s and ‘70s, protests against United States interventions in [...]

On July 30, 1999, artist, critic, and curator Álvaro Barrios interviewed Ramiro Gómez about his participation in El Sindicato group. In the interview, Gómez discusses the exhibitions in which El Sindicato participated from the time of its creation [...]

The art critic Roberto Pontual wrote this text for the exhibition 3x4 - Grandes Formatos organized in 1983 by the Centro Empresarial Rio. The essay’s confessional tone is nuanced by the author’s description of the driving spirit behind the works [...]

In this study, Ladjane Bandeira argues that the movement for artistic independence in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil was an attempt to counter the influence of the European experience as “filtered” through São Paulo and other [...]

In a text about the work of Daniel Senise, critic Fernando Cocchiarale presents a reading of the retro tendency known as the “retorno à pintura” that took place in the eighties. Cocchiarale underscores the unique nature of the artist’s work. [...]

Published in the catalogue to the 18th São Paulo Biennial (1985), this text by critic Wilson Coutinho presents the work of artist Daniel Senise. Coutinho underscores the dramatic nature of Senise’s pictorial representations of simple objects and [...]

Artist Antonio Henrique Amaral comments on remarks that Czech philosopher and writer Vilém Flusser made about works from Amaral’s Campos de Batalha [Battlefields] series. Amaral objects to the commentary made by Dan Stancy that Flusser quotes in [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

This catalogue for the 1980 exhibition, Comadres: A Collective Environmental Exhibit by Ten Women Artists, wasdesigned as a folder containing loose sheets of handwritten minutes taken throughout the different meetings in preparation of the [...]

Photographer Charles Biasiny-Rivera recounts the history of En Foco [Focused], the first Puerto Rican photographers collective in New York City. Founded in 1973, En Foco’s community-based programs in the Bronx included operating a street gallery, a [...]

This article by the art critic Eduardo Márceles Daconte was published in the Sunday Magazine of the Bogotá daily newspaper El Espectador. The writer provides a brief account of the activities of the group El Sindicato, which emerged in Barranquilla [...]

This text by art critic Alberto Tassinari addresses the group Casa 7’s participation in the 1985 edition of the São Paulo Biennial. One of the characteristics of the group’s new strain of research is, according to Tassinari, the “arrangement [...]

Carlos Scliar, a printmaker from the state of Rio Grande del Sur, gave this interview on the occasion of the Exposição de Gravuras Brasileiras, an exhibition held in the state of Santa Catarina, which borders on Rio Grande del Sur. The focus of the [...]

In this article, members of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) respond to several misrepresentations of the group and factual errors about its genesis carried out by former member Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Citing quotes from [...]

In the following passages, Luis Felipe Noé reflects on the function and methods of art in the contemporary atomized society. He asserts that transformations of art imply a constant revolution. Today’s artists must examine and expose the [...]

In Aracy Amaral’s view, the debate around the Etsedron group could give rise to reflection on a Latin American aesthetic insofar as it entails an expressionistic and primitivistic interpretation of reality from an environmental perspective. Amaral [...]

In this 1972 essay, R. Buckminster Fuller presciently describes a new era of communication systems in which all humanity can learn enough about productivity as well as the generalized principles of nature that render abject poverty, and the have-nots [...]

In his book Explode[AB1]  Geração! the art critic Roberto Pontual discusses his thoughts on the emergence of the generation that produced an “explosion” of painting in Brazil in the 1980s. Pontual writes in a very personal style, in keeping [...]

This text by Salim Miguel is a review of the Exposição de Gravuras Brasileiras held at the Salón of the Lux-Hotel in Florianópolis in the state of Santa Catarina from October 24 to 31, 1954. The show featured seventy-four works produced at Clubes [...]