"It deals witb a distinguished career which led the Colombian artist from her early stage of "windows" and "doors" to a series of "atmospheres"--In which she seems to leap through the frames of her earlier paintings to find herself before the light that is on the other side and was merely hinted at before. The white canvases of her "atmospheres" - luminous, sparkling and full of matter - in turn fulfill their cycle, opening the way for a further stage which is marked by the recuperatian of the object and a new and fresh approach to nature.

The name of the painter Enrique Grau is inseparable from the history of art in Colombia. Since his astonishing debut as a prodigy in the early 1940s, Grau has explored virtually every avenue of art: drawing, engraving, collage, silkscreen, woodcuts, painting, sculpture, theatrical costumes and sets, cinema, murals, frescos, and objects. In the course of his long career, Grau has achieved and consolidated a style that is personal and classical at the same time; he is unique in the panorama of Latin American art. This book pays homage to an artist as vital at the age of 83 as he was when the public first brought him acclaim over 60 years ago.

In The Politics of Taste Ana María Reyes examines the works of Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic, Marta Traba, who championed González's art during Colombia's National Front coalition government (1958–74). During this critical period in Latin American art, artistic practice, art criticism, and institutional objectives came into strenuous yet productive tension. While González’s triumphant debut excited critics who wanted to cast Colombian art as modern, sophisticated, and universal, her turn to urban lowbrow culture proved deeply unsettling. Traba praised González's cursi (tacky) recycling aesthetic as daringly subversive and her strategic localism as resistant to U.S. cultural imperialism. Reyes reads González's and Traba's complex visual and textual production and their intertwined careers against Cold War modernization programs that were deeply embedded in the elite's fear of the masses and designed to avert Cuban-inspired revolution. In so doing, Reyes provides fresh insights into Colombia's social anxieties and frustrations while highlighting how interrogations of taste became vital expressions of the growing discontent with the Colombian state.

The work of Colombian sculptor Edgar Negret is lovingly portrayed in this homage to the man and six decades of his art. The incorporation of aluminum, industrial paint, and visible assembling techniques in his 1950s works in Mallorca and New York is discussed along with details of his journey across America, return to Colombia, and artistic approximation of Latin American literature. As the panorama of his life and art unfolds, the increasing incorporation of pre-Colombian mythology in his sculpture is analyzed, concluding with a portrayal of the beautiful birds, butterflies, flowers, and toys he created at the final years of his life.

"This book presents artifacts - or artefactos - from everyday life, objects that have accompanied Colombian people through the centuries, both in their earthly and spiritual activities. In both English and Spanish, the word artifact means, literally, "made with skill or art." Although all worthy of museums and galleries, these are not just exhibition pieces, nor are their makers all members of a separate artisan class. There is no Colombian home, however humble, that does not have a handmade broom, stool, basket, textile, or rustic furniture; nor is there a single Amazon Indian who cannot quickly piece together a basket from leaves found in the jungle."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future. In order to probe how cultural production embodies the tensions between the abstract universality of human rights and the materiality of violations on individual human bodies and on determined groups, the volume asks the following questions: How does the transmission of historical traumas of Colombia’s past, through human rights narratives in various forms, inform the debates around the subjects of rights, truth and memory, remembrance and forgetting, and the construction of citizenship through solidarity and collective struggles for justice? What are the different roles taken by cultural products in the interstices among rights, laws, and social justice within different contexts of state violence and states of exception? What are alternative perspectives, sources, and (micro)histories from Colombia of the creation, evolution, and practice of human rights? How does the human rights discourse interface with notions of environmental justice, especially in the face of global climate change, regional (neo)extractivism, the implementation of megaprojects, and ongoing post-accord thefts and (re)appropriations of land? Through a wide range of disciplinary lenses, the different chapters explore counter-hegemonic concepts of human rights, decolonial options struggling against oppression and market logic, and alternative discourses of human dignity and emancipation within the pluriverse.