Publisher Description

Traces the development of Latin American art from 20,000 BCE to modern times, from the southern tip of Argentina to the Rio Grande.

Explores how one group of Latin American artists express their relationship to American art, history and culture.

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.

This bilingual book describes the numerous elements that have shaped the twentieth and twenty-first century art of Latin America. Beginning with the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean Islands, and following historical developments through today, the values and symbols of these early civilizations have remained a constant in much of Latin American art. The work gives a brief history of Latin American art, defines the modernist movements and trends that surfaced in Paris in the early twentieth century and traces the way Latin American artists adapted the forms to express their own national culture. The main section is a list of significant artworks, each accompanied by biographical details from the artist's life, an explanation of the work's subject matter and a discussion of the inspiration and meaning behind it. The work boasts a wide selection of illustrations, including three color inserts, and concludes with a bibliography.

Since the late nineteenth century, art museums have played crucial social, political, and economic roles throughout Latin America because of the ways that they structure representation. By means of their architecture, collections, exhibitions, and curatorial practices, Latin American art museums have crafted representations of communities, including nation states, and promoted particular group ideologies. This collection of essays, arranged in thematic sections, will examine the varying and complex functions of art museums in Latin America: as nation-building institutions and instruments of state cultural politics; as foci for the promotion of Latin American modernities and modernisms; as sites of mediation between local and international, private and public interests; as organizations that negotiate cultural construction within the Latin American diaspora and shape constructs of Latin America and its nations; and as venues for the contestation of elitist and Eurocentric notions of culture and the realization of cultural diversity rooted in multiethnic environments.

In this uniquely wide-ranging book, David Craven investigates the extraordinary impact of three Latin American revolutions on the visual arts and on cultural policy. The three great upheavals - in Mexico (1910-40), in Cuba (1959-89), and in Nicaragua (1979-90) - were defining moments in twentieth-century life in the Americas. Craven discusses the structural logic of each movement's artistic project - by whom, how, and for whom artworks were produced -- and assesses their legacies. In each case, he demonstrates how the consequences of the revolution reverberated in the arts and cultures far beyond national borders. The book not only examines specific artworks originating from each revolution's attempt to deal with the challenge of 'socializing the arts,' but also the engagement of the working classes in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua with a tradition of the fine arts made newly accessible through social transformation. Craven considers how each revolution dealt with the pressing problem of creating a 'dialogical art' -- one that reconfigures the existing artistic resource rather than one that just reproduces a populist art to keep things as they were. In addition, the author charts the impact on the revolutionary processes of theories of art and education, articulated by such thinkers as John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The book provides a fascinating new view of the Latin American revolutionaries -- from artists to political leaders -- who defined art as a fundamental force for the transformation of society and who bequeathed new ways of thinking about the relations among art, ideology, and class, within a revolutionary process.