Studies on Latin American Art and Latinx Art – Serie

Toward the middle of the 1950s, abstract art became a dominant trend in the Latin American cultural scene. Many artists incorporated elements of abstraction into their rigorous artistic vocabularies, while at the same time, the representation of geometric lines and structures filtered into everyday life, appearing in textiles, posters, murals, and landscapes. The translation of a field-changing Spanish-language book, Abstract Crossings analyzes the relationship between, on the one hand, the emergence of abstract proposals in avant-garde groups and, on the other, the institutionalization and newfound hegemony of abstract poetics as part of Latin America’s imaginary of modernization. A profusion of mid-century artistic institutional exchanges between Argentina and Brazil makes a study of the trajectories of abstraction in these two countries particularly valuable. Examining the work of artists such as Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Tomás Maldonado, author María Amalia García rewrites the artistic history of the period and proposes a novel reading of the cultural dialogue between Argentina and Brazil.This is the first book in the new Studies on Latin American Art series, supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Dematerialization examines the intertwined experimental practices and critical discourses of art and industrial design in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Provocative in nature, this book investigates the way that artists, critics, and designers considered the relationship between the crisis of the modernist concept of artistic medium and the radical social transformation brought about by the accelerated capitalist development of the preceding decades. Beginning with Oscar Masotta’s sui generis definition of the term, Karen Benezra proposes dematerialization as a concept that allows us to see how disputes over the materiality of the art and design object functioned in order to address questions concerning the role of appearance, myth, and ideology in the dynamic logic structuring social relations in contemporary discussions of aesthetics, artistic collectivism, and industrial design. Dematerialization brings new insights to the fields of contemporary art history, critical theory, and Latin American cultural studies.

Exploring art made in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, Hemispheric Integration argues that Latin America’s position within a global economic order was crucial to how art from that region was produced, collected, and understood. Niko Vicario analyzes art’s relation to shifting trade patterns, geopolitical realignments, and industrialization to suggest that it was in this specific era that the category of Latin American art developed its current definition. Focusing on artworks by iconic Latin American modernists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joaquín Torres-García, Cândido Portinari, and Mario Carreño, Vicario emphasizes the materiality and mobility of art and their connection to commerce, namely the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods from Europe and the United States. An exceptional examination of transnational culture, this book provides a new model for the study of Latin American art.

How a constellation of Latin American artists explored the body, power, and emancipation—and expanded the meanings of feminist art.  In The Political Body, art historian Andrea Giunta explores gender and power in the work of Latin American artists from the 1960s to the present. Questioning the social place of women and proposing alternative understandings of biological bodies, these artists eroded repressive systems and created symbolic strategies of resistance to dictatorships, racism, and marginalization.  Giunta presents close readings of works—paintings, films, photography, multimedia art, installations, and performances—by a myriad of artists spanning from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay to Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Examining themes of visibility, subjectivity, empathy, and liberation, The Political Body tells the story of an ongoing revolution, providing an active intervention in the history of feminist art in and beyond Latin America.

A new reality for the art object has emerged in the world of contemporary art: it is now experienced less as an autonomous, inanimate form and more as an active material agent. In this book, Kaira M. Cabañas describes how such a shift in conceptions of art’s materiality came to occur, exploring key artistic practices in Venezuela, Brazil, and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Immanent Vitalities expands the discourse of new materialisms by charting how artists, ranging from Gego to Laura Lima, distance themselves from dualisms such as mind-matter, culture-nature, human-nonhuman, and even Western–non-Western in order to impact our understanding of what is animate. Tracing migrations of people, objects, and ideas between South America and Europe, Cabañas historicizes changing perceptions about art’s agency while prompting readers to remain attentive to the ethical dimensions of materiality and of social difference and lived experience.

Art produced outside hegemonic centers is often seen as a form of derivation or relegated to a provisional status. Forming Abstraction turns this narrative on its head. In the first book-length study of postwar Brazilian art and culture, Adele Nelson highlights the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil. By focusing on the formation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951; the early activities of artists Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Ivan Serpa; and the ideas of critics like Mário Pedrosa, Nelson illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of both local and international forms. The book ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in a newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.

The 1950s and early 1960s in Brazil gave birth to a period of incredible optimism and economic development. In The Affinity of Neoconcretism, Mariola V. Alvarez argues that the Neoconcretists—a group of artists and poets working together in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to 1961—formed an important part of this national transformation. She maps the interactions of the Neoconcretists and discusses how the artists and poets collaborated to challenge existing divides between high and low art and between fields such as fine art and dance. This book reveals how art and intellectual work in Brazil occurred within a local political and social context and also emerged from the transnational movement of artists, artworks, published materials, and ideas.

Venezuela’s turbulent twentieth century saw boom and bust as the former Spanish colony transformed into a major postwar cultural player. In this sweeping study of visual and material production, Sean Nesselrode Moncada explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. An innovative, transdisciplinary reevaluation of Venezuelan modernism, Refined Material reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another.

Broken Tropics examines contemporary installations, performance, photography, and street art from three primary sites of compounding vulnerability: Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Guillermina De Ferrari poses two central questions: How does contingency affect our humanness? And what does art say about it? With the understanding that being human is a praxis, as Sylvia Wynter notes, and that art is a practical philosophy, De Ferrari introduces the notion of an “art of contingency.” This situated praxis engages with the accidental and the unexpected in the creative process, highlighting two contradictory facts: that uncertainty is a predictable feature in Caribbean life; and that, nonetheless, misfortune does not have to be fate. Putting long-standing concerns about social, political, and economic injustice on a continuum with the concerns of disaster studies and ecocriticism, Broken Tropics shows how external pressures intervene in the construction and disruption of the collective, how people reshape and reinvent the social world in response, and how the arts envision new forms of living in a broken world.