In the twentieth-century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xui Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde.

Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America

Ramírez, Mari Carmen

Olea, Héctor

Arts & Photography

Yale University Press

Latin American artist Gego (19121994) produced a range of line-based abstract work, including drawings, prints, and wire sculptures. Focusing on a rare series of monotypes from the early 1950s, drawings and prints, and drawings without paper” and tejeduras” (woven paper pieces) of the late 1970s and 1980s, this fascinating book traces Gego’s exploration of line and space. Gego used lines as conceptual and visual tools to create in-between spaces within her works. Whether drawing lines on paper or projecting them into space, the artist sought to make visible the invisible.” She believed that line could express what is not physically present in natureincluding thought, intuition, and emotions. By manipulating the density of the lines or by interrupting them, she brought light, shadow, and feeling into her linear works.

Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible

De Zegher, Catherine

Manrique, Josefina

History & Criticism

Other Distribution

This beautifully illustrated book salutes the recent acquisition by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, of the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, one of the most important and complete collections in the world devoted to modern Latin American art in the 1950s and 1960s. Including works by Cícero Dias, Samson Flexor, Lygia Clark, and members of the Grupo Ruptura of São Paulo and the Grupo Frente of Rio de Janeiro, Leirner's renowned collection celebrates its artists as important visual architects of Brazilian Modernism.

Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil: The Adolpho Leirner Collection

Leirner, Adolpho

Museum Fine Arts Houston

This first volume of the Critical Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art series published by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents 168 crucial texts written by influential artists, critics, curators, journalists, and intellectuals whose writings shed light on questions relating to what it means to be "Latin American" and/or "Latino." Reinforced within a critical framework, the documents address converging issues, including: the construct of "Latin-ness" itself; the persistent longing for a continental identity; notions of Pan–Latin Americanism; the emergence of collections and exhibitions devoted specifically to "Latin American” or "Latino" art; and multicultural critiques of Latin American and Latino essentialism. The selected documents, many of which have never before been published in English, span from the late fifteenth century to the present day. They encompass key protagonists of this comprehensive history as well as unfamiliar figures, revealing previously unknown facets of the questions and issues at play. The book series complements the thousands of seminal documents now available through the ICAA Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive, http://icaadocs.mfah.org. Together they establish a much-needed intellectual foundation for the exhibition, collection, and interpretation of art produced in Latin America and among Latino populations in the United States.

Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?: Volume 1 (Volume 1) (Critical Documents)

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In 2001, Eduardo Costantini, the founder of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), began collecting artworks from across Latin America. Today, the renowned Costantini Collection consists of more than two hundred works, encompassing drawings, paintings, sculptures, and objects by seventy-eight artists from various countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
In the spirit of cultural exchange, MALBA and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, are joining together to exhibit fifty of these works, spanning from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. Among the celebrated artists represented in this beautiful book are Frida Kahlo, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and Diego Rivera. Also of note are works by Tarsila do Amaral, Rafael Barradas, Antonio Berni, and Alfredo Guttero. An interview by Mari Carmen Ramírez with Costantini sheds light on his philosophy of collecting, and texts by Marcelo Pacheco offer insights into the broad range of modern and contemporary art created in Latin America.

Modern and Contemporary Masterworks from MALBA - Fundación Costantini

Pacheco, Marcelo

Argentinian figurative artist Antonio Berni (1905–1981) is known for his aesthetic originality and for art steeped in social commentary. In the 1950s, he inaugurated a series of works that documented the lives of two fictional characters, Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel. Through the stories of Juanito, a denizen of Argentina’s shantytowns, and Ramona, who rises from the working class to the upper echelons of society, Berni addressed topics from industrialization to neocolonialism to economic backwardness and their effects on the population of underdeveloped countries. Written by leading scholars of Latin American art, this handsome volume presents the first comprehensive survey of the internationally acclaimed Juanito and Ramona series. Richly illustrated with more than 250 color images, the volume brings together nearly two decades of Berni’s monumental, mixed-media reliefs and assemblages, experimental works on paper, and sculptural constructions made of found, everyday objects.

Antonio Berni: Juanito and Ramona

This fascinating exploration of Venezuelan Informalism charts the movement’s history from its beginnings in the mid-1950s to its last manifestations in the 1970s. Essays by an esteemed group of scholars discuss the variety, richness, and complexity of Informalism and examine the ways in which Venezuelan artists embraced many of the abstract, gestural tendencies contemporaneously developed in Abstract Expressionism, Tachism, and Art Informel. Providing a thorough and comprehensive overview of this artistically fertile, yet underappreciated, movement, this volume highlights the diverse approaches and the wide range of media employed by Informalism’s key practitioners, including Elsa Gramcko, Alberto Brandt, Francisco Hung, Daniel González, and the collective El Techo de la Ballena. Also featured are stunning works by internationally acclaimed figures who experimented with Informalism, such as Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto.

Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955–1975

Rivero, Tahia

Gaztambide, María

Rangel, Gabriela

BRAND NEW book. It is still wrapped in the plastic. Never opened.

Dimensions of Constructive Arts in Brazil: The Adolpho Leirner Collection

Home ― signaling a dwelling, residence or place of origin ― embodies one of the most basic concepts for understanding an individual or group within a larger physical and social environment. Yet home has been a little noted, although prevalent, feature in art since the 1950s, a period in which artists challenged the traditional "object" of the visual arts through the use of material and media culture, new forms, and performative actions and processes. This volume explores works by diverse U.S. Latino and Latin American artists whose engagement with the concept of "home" provides the basis for an alternative narrative of post-war art. Their work brings together an impressive array of formal languages, conceptual strategies, and art historical references with the varied social concerns characterizing both the postwar period in the Americas and an emerging global economy impacting day-to-day life. The artists featured in this volume engage home as both concept and artifact. This can be seen in the use of building fragments or excisions (Gordon Matta-Clark, Gabriel de la Mora, and Leyla Cárdenas), household furniture (Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Beatriz González, Doris Salcedo, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Guillermo Kuitca), and personal possessions (Carmen Argote, María Teresa Hincapié, Camilo Ontiveros), and also in the use of coca leaves as a material base of the American Dream and its economic exchange with Colombia (Miguel Angel Rojas). Within more representational work, home is the re-creation of fraught domiciles (Abraham Cruzvillegas, Pepón Osorio, Daniel J. Martinez), a collage of spaces, styles, and materials (Antonio Berni, Andrés Asturias, Jorge Pedro Nuñez, Miguel Angel Ríos, Juan Sanchez), and a juxtaposition of bodies and place (Laura Aguilar, Myrna Báez, Johanna Calle, Perla de León, Ramiro Gomez, Jessica Kairé, Vincent Valdez). In more conceptual work, home is all these things reduced to form―a floor plan (Luis Camnitzer, León Ferrari, María Elena González, Guillermo Kuitca), a catalog of objects (Antonio Martorell, Hincapié), or a housing development plan (Livia Corona Benjamin, Martinez). In the end, home is a journey without arrival (Allora y Calzadilla, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Christina Fernandez, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Julio César Morales, Teresa Serrano). Home―So Different, So Appealing reveals the departures and confluences that continue to shape US Latino and Latin American art and expands our appreciation of these artists and their work.

Home ― So Different, So Appealing

Noriega, Chon A.

Rivas, Pilar Tompkins

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press

This Spanish/English bilingual catalog and the traveling exhibition it accompanies examine the work of nine Argentinean artists whose iconoclastic production can be seen as finding a common ground in the critical recourse of parody. The exhibit and the catalog represent the first attempt to bring together this heterogeneous group of artists while simultaneously investigating the formal and conceptual affinities that link their artistic production. Featured artists are Antonio Berni, Jorge de la Vega, Víctor Grippo, Pablo Suárez, Alberto Heredia, Juan Carlos Distéfano, León Ferrari, Rubén Santantonín, and Luis Fernando Benedit. The catalog is one of the first comprehensive sources for these artists' work both individually and as a group. Comprehensive essays by curator Mari Carmen Ramírez and Argentinean art historians Andrea Giunta and Marcelo E. Pacheco address the general context of Argentinean art since the 1960s, as well as the specific issues posed by the works in the exhibition. Because of the lack of English sources on this topic, special emphasis is placed on the documentation of the exhibition topic and the artists' individual careers. Included are short critical essays on each of the artists represented in the exhibition, as well as documentary photographs, a selection of important writings by the artists, and a comprehensive bibliography for their work and the time period represented.

Cantos paralelos: la parodia plástica en el arte argentino contemporáneo

Pacheco ,Marcelo E.

GIUNTA,ANDREA

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