Conceptualism played a different role in Latin American art during the 1960s and 1970s than in Europe and the United States, where conceptualist artists predominantly sought to challenge the primacy of the art object and art institutions, as well as the commercialization of art. Latin American artists turned to conceptualism as a vehicle for radically questioning the very nature of art itself, as well as art's role in responding to societal needs and crises in conjunction with politics, poetry, and pedagogy. Because of this distinctive agenda, Latin American conceptualism must be viewed...

This important and welcome volume is the first English-language anthology of writings on Latin American modern art of the twentieth century. The book includes some fifty seminal essays and documents--including statements, interviews, and manifestoes by artists--that encompass the broad diversity of this emerging field. Many of these materials are difficult to access and some are translated here for the first time. Together the selections explore the breadth and depth of Latin American modern art as well as its distinctive evolution apart from American and European art history.
Included...

The pictorial genre known as casta painting is one of the most compelling forms of artistic expression from colonial Mexico. Created as sets of consecutive images, the works portray racial mixing among the main groups that inhabited the colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ilona Katzew places casta paintings in their social and historical context, showing for the first time the ways in which the meanings of the paintings changed along with shifting colonial politics.
The book examines how casta painting developed art historically, why race...

Artist, educator, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer has been writing about contemporary art ever since he left his native Uruguay in 1964 for a fellowship in New York City. As a transplant from the "periphery" to the "center," Camnitzer has had to confront fundamental questions about making art in the Americas, asking himself and others: What is "Latin American art"? How does it relate (if it does) to art created in the centers of New York and Europe? What is the role of the artist in exile? Writing about issues of such personal, cultural, and indeed political import has long been an...

Between 1900 and 1942, New York City was the site of extraordinary creative exchange where artists could share ideas in a global context. The swiftly changing urban landscape before and between the World Wars inspired the erosion of artistic boundaries and fostered a new climate of modernist experimentation. Nexus New York focuses on key artists from the Caribbean and Latin America who entered into dynamic cultural and social dialogues with the American-based avant-garde and participated in the development of a new modern discourse. Featuring both celebrated and little-known...

In 1996 Mexico's Museo Nacional de Arte acquired a remarkable dossier of text and images that included an eighteenth-century document requesting permission to carry out a specific iconographic program in Tlaxcala. This discovery planted a seed that grew into Jaime Cuadriello's landmark work Las glorias de la Republica de Tlaxcala, now available in English for the first time.

In 1789 don Ignacio Mazihcatzin, the Indian pastor of Yehualtepec, commissioned noted regional artist Jose Manuel Yllanes to do a set of oil paintings for his parish church. As a formal record of...