Latin Americans have long been relegated to the cultural background, obscured by the dominant European culture. This biographical dictionary profiles 75 artists from the United States and 13 nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean, including painters, sculptors, photographers, muralists, printmakers, installation artists, and performance artists. Some of their works recall pre-Columbian times; others confront the cultural imperialism of the U.S. over Latin America; and many explore how the dominant elements of culture can affect identities of class, gender, and sexuality. Profiled artists range from the renowned to the little-known: Frida Kahlo; Tina Modotti; Diego Rivera; Myrna Baez; Raquel Forner; Patrocino Barela; and many more. Color photographs are provided for many of the works. Each entry includes information about the artist's childhood, schooling, creative growth, and artistic styles and themes. Exemplary artworks and influences are described, along with a look at popular and critical responses. Supplemental features include artist cross references, a glossary of essential terms from the art world, and a number of vivid photos portraying the artists in their creative environments.

Since its publication in Spanish in 1998, The Grid and the Park not only revitalized studies on the history of Buenos Aires, but also laid the foundation for a specific type of cultural work on the city —an urban perspective for cultural history, as its author would describe it— that has had a sustained impact in Latin America. Public space, embodied in the grid of city blocks and the park system, here appears as a particularly productive category because it encompasses dimensions of the material city, politics, and culture, which are usually studied separately. From Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s figurations of Palermo Park in the mid-nineteenth century to Jorge Luis Borges’s discovery of the suburb in the 1920s; from the modernization of the traditional center carried out by Mayor Torcuato de Alvear in the 1880s to the questioning of that centrality by the emergence of the suburban barrio, the book weaves the changing ideas on public space with urban culture to produce a new history of the metropolitan expansion of Buenos Aires, one of the most extensive and dynamic urban centers of the early twentieth century.