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Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism, which developed from a symposium presented by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011, showcases original essays by distinguished Latin American architects, historians, and curators whose research examines architecture and urban designpractices in the region during a significant period of the twentieth century. Drawing from the exuberant architectural projects of the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as from critically engaged artistic practices of the present day, the essays in this collection reveal how the heroic visions and utopian ideals popular in architectural discourse during the modernist era bore complicated legacies for Latin America—the consequences of which are evident in the vastly uneven economic conditions and socially disparate societies found throughout the region today.The innovative contributions in this volume address how the modernist movement came into being in Latin America and compellingly explore how it continues to resonate in today's cultural discourse. Beyond the Supersquare takes themes traditionally examined within the strict field of urbanism and architecture and explores them against a broader range of disciplines, including the global economy, political science, gender, visual arts, philosophy, and urban planning.Containing a breadth of scholarship, this book offers a compelling and distinctive view of contemporary life in Latin America. Among the topics explored are the circulation of national cultural identities through architectural media, the intersection of contemporary art and urban social politics, and the recovery of canonically overlooked figures in art and architectural histories, such as Lina Bo Bardi and Joao Filgueiras Lima (“Lele”) from Brazil, Juan Legarreta of Mexico, and Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico.

Join the Queen of Latina Style to make joyous, vibrant, sparkly Latin-inspired crafts that are stunning to look at yet surprisingly easy to make.The Crafty Chica is back! In The Crafty Chica Creates!, a revised and expanded edition of The Crafty Chica Collection, Kathy Cano Murillo enthusiastically welcomes you into her world of making and affirmational thinking with colorful, Latin-style craft projects inspired by her Mexican heritage.With 45 projects—26 completely new joining 19 previous favorites—get fun techniques for painting, sewing, mixed media, clay, and paper crafts using affordable and recycled materials. While some are more in-depth than others, the projects are ideal for all skill levels. The Crafty Chica welcomes you to infuse the projects with elements of your own cultural heritage to make them personal and unique.Each project is presented with a materials list, clear step-by-step instructions, a large photo of the finished project, and the personal and cultural history behind it.Organized by category—Clothing, Artful Affirmations, Home Accessories, Jewelry and Accessories, Garden Decorations, and Fiesta—the projects include:Milagros (miracle charms) layered resin phone gripDia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) papier-mache dog sculptureStamped clay folk-art boxes and ring dishA stunning poncho made from Mexican scarvesA picture frame upcycled with an embroidered blouse As you embrace the Latino culture or let your cultural heritage shine with creative crafts, you'll discover:Innovative ways to work with a wide range of materials, including air-dry clay, resin, and fabricHow to fully embrace vivid color palettesWays of repurposing everyday supplies into gorgeous art pieces that make great giftsGreat techniques for sculpting, sewing, painting, and embellishing that will boost skills and confidence Whether you are looking for dazzling things to make for group crafting, to decorate your casa or workplace, to release stress and lift your mood, or for gift giving, The Crafty Chica Creates! is your friendly, inspiring guide.

The debate about the return of cultural assets to former colonial territories is highly topical and at the same time much older than most assume. Authors from countries in the Global South and North shed light on the long history of restitution claims from colonised countries. Their research reveals disputes about restitutions sometimes lasting for decades, traces veiled references to colonial violence by the former colonial powers in archives, and discusses what the'homecoming'of human remains can mean for societies.

A comparative, empire-wide study of the ceramics associated with the imperial Inca state, theorizing the role of these highly recognizable vessel forms in legitimizing Inca rule and establishing imperial identities. The beautiful polychrome ceramics of the imperial Inca state have long been noted for their seemingly repetitive nature but little considered beyond this basic observation. The widespread distribution and general uniformity of the Inca pottery, however, hints at its larger importance to the imperial project. Moving beyond the pervasive'seen one, seen'em all'mentality, Objects of Empire brings to light the variability and rich semiotic content of imperial Inca vessels. Taking a comparative, empire-wide approach, Tamara Bray identifies the parameters and significance of this variability, and defines the core elements of the imperial state style. She then investigates where, when, and why differences and deviations from the perceived norm occur. This study illuminates the strategies of territorial expansion and political control that lay at the heart of the Inca juggernaut, as well as the role of objects in the calculus of would-be rulers and subjects. Based on a unique and extensive database of imperial Inca pottery developed through detailed study of archaeologically recovered and museum-based collections, Objects of Empire reveals how power and legitimacy were produced and reproduced under the Inca through the material culture of everyday life.

The first study of Christian murals created by indigenous artists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Yucatán. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Maya artists painted murals in churches and conventos of Yucatán using traditional techniques to depict iconography brought from Europe by Franciscan friars. The fragmentary visual remains and their placement within religious structures embed Maya conceptions of sacredness beyond the didactic imagery. Mobilizing both cutting-edge technology and tried-and-true analytical methods, art historians Amara Solari and Linda K. Williams reexamine the Maya Christian murals, centering the agency of the people who created them. The first volume to comprehensively document the paintings, Maya Christian Murals of Early Modern Yucatán collects new research on the material composition of the works, made possible by cutting-edge imaging methods. Solari and Williams investigate pigments and other material resources, as well as the artists and historical contexts of the murals. The authors uncover numerous local innovations in form and content, including images celebrating New World saints, celestial timekeeping, and ritual processions. Solari and Williams argue that these murals were not simply vehicles of coercion, but of cultural “grafting,” that allowed Maya artists to shape a distinctive and polyvocal legacy in their communities.

In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.

The photographers discussed in this book probe the most contentious aspects of social organization in Mexico, questioning what it means to belong, to be Mexican, to experience modernity, and to create art as a culturally, politically, or racially marginalized person.By choosing human subjects, spaces, and aesthetics excluded from the Lettered City, each of the photographers discussed in this volume produces a corpus of art that contests dominant narratives of social and cultural modernization in Mexico. Taken together, their work represents diverging and diverse notions of what is meant by Mexican modernity.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, women's studies, and Mexican studies.

The result of decades of study, Alan Grinnell's Painting the Cosmos presents the spectacular and underappreciated art of Panama and its revealing iconography. Emphasizing brightly painted polychrome designs with complex iconography on myriad ceramic forms, the art of Central Panama (ca. 200 BCE–1500 CE) is highly distinctive compared to other pre-Columbian cultures. The book illustrates more than eight hundreds vessels in full color, many of which will be unfamiliar even to pre-Columbian specialists, and proposes interpretations of the iconography informed by the archaeology, history, and ethnohistory of the region. In these animistic cultures, much of the iconography reflected interactions of humans with the natural world. The author identifies persistent design themes that reflect the myths and beliefs of these ancient peoples.Enriched by current scholarship, this beautifully produced volume fills a major gap in the knowledge of and appreciation for the art and cultures of the ancient Americas. It serves as both an introduction to this unique and relatively unknown culture and a resource for scholars in pre-Columbian history, art, and culture.

Diversifying the current art historical scholarship, this edited volume presents the untold story of modern art by exposing global voices and perspectives excluded from the privileged and uncontested narrative of “isms.” This volume tells a worldwide story of art with expanded historical narratives of modernism. The chapters reflect on a wide range of issues, topics, and themes that have been marginalized or outright excluded from the canon of modern art. The goal of this book is to be a starting point for understanding modern art as a broad and inclusive field of study. The topics examine diverse formal expressions, innovative conceptual approaches, and various media used by artists around the world and forcefully acknowledge the connections between art, historical circumstances, political environments, and social issues such as gender, race, and social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, imperial and colonial history, modernism, and globalization.

On Tropical Grounds develops a new approach to the avant-garde and Surrealism in Caribbean and Atlantic studies. The book examines how islands and their tropical associations figure in the cultural and political imaginaries of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and identifies genealogies of local responses to continental fantasies of exotic insularity. Examining written and visual works that reflect on the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean and the Canary Islands, as well as critical debates around discourses of insularity in island and metropolitan spaces, this book considers notions of ethnic purity, originality, imitation, appropriation, cosmopolitanism, and self-exoticism to challenge the idea that avant-garde practices were pre-eminently urban and metropolitan cultural forms. The book argues that attention to the relational dimension implicit in exchanges around ideas of anticolonial struggle, radical social transformation, and anti-fascist resistance should inform analyses of cultural production in Caribbean and Atlantic insular spaces. On Tropical Grounds develops a persuasive critical model for the investigation of politically and aesthetically situated archipelagic relations that transgresses disciplinary boundaries and reconfigures our conception of the avant-garde as a global movement that was overdetermined by racial, gender, and colonial conflicts. This book will be of value to anyone interested in Caribbean and Atlantic studies, avant-garde and visual culture studies, and literary and cultural studies.

The sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript known as the Codex Borbonicus contains a remarkable record of the eighteen Mexica (or “Aztec”) festival periods of twenty days, known as veintenas, celebrated during the 365-day solar year. Because its indigenous artists framed the Borbonicus veintenas with historical year dates, this volume situates the annually recurring rituals within the march of linear, reckoned time, in the singular year “2 Reed” (1507), during the reign of Moteuczoma II. DiCesare attends to the historical dimensions of several unusual scenes, proposing that the veintenas probably varied significantly from year to year in response to historical concerns. She considers particularly whether the Borbonicus veintenas document the confluence of solar year ceremonies with a second set of ritual feast days, governed by the 260-day cycle known as the tonalpohualli, or “count of days.” In this way, DiCesare analyzes how linear and cyclical conceptions of time intersected in Mexica ritual performance.

An examination of sculpture and authorship in eighteenth-century Quito that documents Caspicara as a participant in the innovative artistic production of the city's workshops and its widespread commerce of polychrome sculptures. Who is Caspicara? Nothing is known of Caspicara's life, and not a single sculpture has been documented as his work. Yet traditional histories laud him as a prolific Indigenous sculptor in eighteenth-century Quito who created exquisite polychrome figures and became a national artistic icon. Drawing on extensive archival, historical, and object research, Susan Verdi Webster peels away layers of historiographical fabrication to reveal what we do and do not know about Caspicara and his work. Rather than being a solitary master, Caspicara collaborated with other, largely Indigenous artists in Quito's protoindustrial workshops, manufacturing sculptures now credited to him alone. The high quality of Quito sculptures produced by anonymous artists turned the city into a hub of wide-ranging commerce in religious icons. The art world and post-independence Ecuadorians have lionized the one named sculptor, Caspicara, according to the Western model of the artist-genius, amplifying the market for works bearing his name and creating a national hero on par with European masters. Lost in this process were the artists themselves. Webster returns to their world, detailing their methods and labor and, for the first time, documenting a sculpture made by Caspicara.

From his provincial origins in the small northern Mexico town of Múzquiz, Coahuila, to his meteoric rise in Manhattan's East Village art scene, to having achieved international standing at the time of his early death at forty-seven, Julio Galán was radically transgressive. The artist extended contemporary Mexican painting beyond the cultural criticism of Neo-Mexicanism (neomexicanismo), redefining Mexican identity as gender-expansive in his art. Galán combined gender-fluid imagery, his performative persona, queer self-representation, and cross-cultural visual and textual references to create large-scale, layered, dialogical visual puzzles. An artist ahead of his time, Galán's content and imagery is relevant to contemporary LGBTQ+ social movements.Replete with full-color reproductions of Galán's artwork and photographic material, Teresa Eckmann's book serves as the first English-language monograph on the artist's life and work. Anyone interested in art in Mexico and Latin America will find this book an indispensable addition to their library, and it will be a core book on the study of this artist for decades to come.

This study focuses on street art and large-scale murals in metropolitan Miami/Dade County, while also foregrounding the diasporic and aesthetic interventions made by migrant and second-generation artists whose families hail from the Caribbean and Latin America. Jana Evans Braziel argues that Caribbean and Latinx street artists define and visually mark the city of Miami as a diasporic, transnational urban space. These artists also help define Miami as a cosmopolitan city, yet one that is also a distinctly Caribbean and Latinx urban space, and simultaneously resist but also (at times reluctantly) participate in the forces of gentrification and urban re/development, particularly through the myriad and complex ways in which street art contributes to city branding and art tourism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban studies, American studies, and Latin American/Caribbean studies.

Taking into account politics, history and aesthetics, this edited volume explores the main expressions of primitivism in Iberian and Transatlantic modernisms.Ten case studies are thoroughly analyzed concerning both the circulations and exchanges connecting the Iberian and Latin American artistic and literary milieus with each other and with the Parisian circles. Chapters also examine the patterns and paradoxes associated with the manifestations of primitivism, including their local implications and cosmopolitan drive. This book opens up and deepens the discussion of the ties that Spain and Portugal maintained with their imperial pasts, which extended into European twentieth-century colonialism, as well as the nationalist and folk aesthetics promoted by the cultural industry of Iberian dictatorships. The book significantly rethinks long-established ideas about modern art and the production of primitivist imagery.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Iberian studies, Latin American studies, colonialism, and modernism.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

How artists challenged a military dictatorship through mass print technologies in 1970s and 1980s São Paulo. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, during Brazil's military dictatorship, artists shifted their practices to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. Mari Rodríguez Binnie's The São Paulo Neo-Avant-Garde examines these artworks and their engagement with politics and mainstream art institutions and practices. As Binnie skillfully shows, artists appropriated processes like photocopy, offset lithography, and thermal and heliographic printing, making newly available technologies of mass production foundational to their work of resistance against both the dictatorship and the established art world. Often working collaboratively, these artists established alternative networks of exchange locally and internationally to circulate their work. As democracy was reestablished in Brazil, and in the decades that followed, their works largely fell out of sight. Here, in the first English-language book to focus entirely on conceptual practices in São Paulo in the 1970s and 1980s, Binnie unearths a scene critical to the development of contemporary Brazilian Art.

The hidden life of the greatest surviving work of Inca artThe most celebrated Andean artwork in the world is a five-hundred-year-old Inca tunic made famous through theories about the meanings of its intricate designs, including attempts to read them as a long-lost writing system. But very little is really known about it. The Royal Inca Tunic reconstructs the history of this enigmatic object, presenting significant new findings about its manufacture and symbolism in Inca visual culture.Andrew James Hamilton draws on meticulous physical examinations of the garment conducted over a decade, wide-ranging studies of colonial Peruvian manuscripts, and groundbreaking research into the tunic's provenance. He methodically builds a case for the textile having been woven by two women who belonged to the very highest echelon of Inca artists for the last emperor of the Inca Empire on the eve of the Spanish invasion in 1532. Hamilton reveals for the first time that this imperial vestment remains unfinished and has suffered massive dye fading that transforms its appearance today, and he proposes a bold new conception of what this radiant masterpiece originally looked like.Featuring stunning photography of the tunic and Hamilton's own beautiful illustrations, The Royal Inca Tunic demonstrates why this object holds an important place in the canon of art history as a deft creation by Indigenous women artists, a reminder of the horrors of colonialism, and an emblem of contemporary Andean identity.

Tracing corporeality and materiality across Cuban texts and images of the twentieth century This volume looks at Cuban literature and art that challenge traditional assumptions about the body. Examining how writers and artists have depicted racial, gender, and species differences throughout the past century, Christina García identifies historical continuities in the way they have emphasized the shared materiality of bodies. García shows how these works interact with ecologies of the human and nonhuman across diverse media, time periods, and ideologies. García examines corporeality in a variety of works, including the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and experimental writings of Severo Sarduy; transspecies drawings, paintings, and sculptures by Roberto Fabelo; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's popular queer film Fresa y chocolate; and contemporary narrative fictions by Ena Lucía Portela, Antonio José Ponte, and Ahmel Echevarría. Using the lenses of new materialism, critical race studies, critical animal studies, queer studies, and poststructuralism, García engages with Cuban cultural production at the intersection of diverse social issues. In this book, García explores how certain artistic practices focus on portraying ecological relationships instead of recognizable subjects or shared identity. Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art demonstrates that through their attention to the connections that different kinds of bodies share, Cuban creators have long undermined rules of classification and unification, reimagining community as shared vulnerability and difference. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This book offers a fresh reading of Latin American modernism through the lenses of gender and space. By analysing the contributions of eight contemporaneous women – four writers and four plastic artists – it reveals how they constructed and conceived of their identities as cultural practitioners through distinctly spatial tactics. Organised around four spatial themes (domestic architecture, the natural world, travel and the public sphere), this multidisciplinary, comparative monograph sheds new light on the works of well-known figures such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, while recuperating artists that remain virtually unknown, such as Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado. Through discussion of their work within a transnational context, this study positions these Latin American women practitioners within a broader narrative of modernism from which they have often remained absent.

We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of “New World” artifacts and materials through the lenses of “curiosity” and “exoticism,” Russo asks a different question: What impact have these works had on the way we currently think about—and theorize—the arts?Centering her study on a vast corpus of early modern textual and visual sources, Russo contends that the subtlety and inventiveness of the myriad of American, Asian, and African creations that were pillaged, exchanged, and often eventually destroyed in the context of Iberian colonization—including sculpture, painting, metalwork, mosaic, carving, architecture, and masonry—actually challenged and revolutionized sixteenth-century European definitions of what art is and what it means to be human. In this way, artifacts coming from outside Europe between 1400 and 1600 played a definitive role in what are considered distinctively European transformations: the redefinition of the frontier between the “mechanical” and the “liberal” arts and a new conception of the figure of the artist.Original and convincing, A New Antiquity is a pathbreaking study that disrupts existing conceptions of Renaissance art and early modern humanity. It will be required reading for art historians specializing in the Renaissance, scholars of Iberian and Latin American cultures and global studies, and anyone interested in anthropology and aesthetics.

An exploration of how the ancient Maya engaged with their history by using, altering, and burying stone sculptures. For the ancient Maya, monumental stone sculptures were infused with agency. As they were used, reused, altered, and buried, such sculptures retained ceremonial meaning. In Memory in Fragments, Megan E. O'Neil explores how ancient Maya people engaged with history through these sculptures, as well as how they interacted with the stones themselves over the course of the sculptures'long “lives.” Considering Maya religious practices, historiography, and conceptions of materials and things, O'Neil explores how Maya viewers perceived sculptures that were fragmented, scarred, burned, damaged by enemies, or set in unusual locations. In each case, she demonstrates how different human interactions, amid dynamic religious, political, and historical contexts, led to new episodes in the sculptures'lives. A rare example of cross-temporal and geographical work in this field, Memory in Fragments both compares sculptures within ancient Maya culture across Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize over hundreds of years and reveals how memory may accrue around and be evoked in material remains.

Winner—Visual Communication Division Outstanding Book Award​, National Communication Association (NCA) How a city government in central Mexico evolved from waging war on graffiti in the early 2000s to sanctioning its creation a decade later, and how youth navigated these changing conditions for producing art. The local government, residents, and media outlets in León, Mexico, treated graffiti as a disease until the state began sponsoring artistic graffiti through a program of its own. In Voices in Aerosol, the first book-length study of state-sponsored graffiti, Caitlin Frances Bruce considers the changing perceptions and recognition of graffiti artists, their right to the city, and the use of public space over the span of eighteen years (2000–2018). Focusing on the midsized city of León, Bruce offers readers a look at the way negotiations with the neoliberal state unfolded at different levels and across decades. Issues brought to light in this case study, such as graffiti as a threat and graffiti as a sign of gentrification, resonate powerfully with those germane to other urban landscapes throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Combining archival work, interviews, considerations of urban planning, local politics in Mexico, and insights gained by observing graffiti events and other informal artistic encounters, Bruce offers a new lens through which to understand the interplay between sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of cultural expression. Ultimately, Voices in Aerosol builds a strong case for graffiti as a contested tool for'voicing'public demands.

This first-of-its-kind book brings together writing by artists and scholars to survey the lively field of Puerto Rican experimental dance across four decades. Originally published as Habitar lo Imposible, the translation in English features essays, artist statements, and interviews plus more than 100 photos of productions, programs, posters, and scores. Throughout, Inhabiting the Impossible provides fresh, invaluable perspectives on experimentation in dance as a sustained practice that has from the start deeply engaged issues of race, gender, sexuality, and politics. The book is also enhanced by a bibliographic section with detailed resources for further study.

An illustrated biography of the pioneering British artist and writer, tracing her life and work through the many places around the world where she livedThe British-born artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the vanguards in the history of women artists and the history of Surrealism. The interests of this visionary—feminism, ecology, the arcane and the mystical, the interconnectedness of everything—are now shared by many. Challenging the conventions of her time, Carrington abandoned family, society, and England to embrace new experiences and forge a unique artistic style in Europe and the Americas. In this evocative illustrated biography, writer and journalist Joanna Moorhead traces her cousin's footsteps, exploring the artist's life, loves, friendships, and work.Leading readers on a personal journey across Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Mexico, Surreal Spaces describes the places and experiences that would become etched in Carrington's memory and be echoed, sometimes decades later, in her art and writing—whether her grandmother's kitchen with its giant stove; a remote Cornish hideaway where she holidayed with Max Ernst, Lee Miller, and Man Ray; the Left Bank of Paris; an asylum in Santander, Spain; New York, where she lived among other European exiles; or Mexico City, her final sanctuary. “Houses are really bodies,” Carrington wrote in her novella The Hearing Trumpet. “We connect ourselves with walls, roofs and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams.”Featuring photographs, drawings, and paintings of the spaces that so richly influenced Carrington's work, Surreal Spaces is an intimate and vivid portrait of a fascinating artist.

A richly illustrated survey of Alfredo Jaar's Studies on Happiness (1979–1981) and its deep political stakes in the historical context of Chile's neoliberal transition.Between 1979 and 1981, Alfredo Jaar asked Chileans a deceptively simple question:'Are you happy?'Through private interviews, sidewalk polls and video-recorded forums, among other interventions, Jaar's three-year and seven-phase project, Studies on Happiness, addressed a furtive and fearful population living under Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. It also spoke to a country in transition, as a newly adopted constitution remade Chile through privatisation and other neoliberal reforms. In its varied interventions and direct mode of address, Studies on Happiness functioned as a feedback device meant to catalyse a critical awareness with its blunt questioning.Edward A. Vazquez contextualises Studies on Happiness within Jaar's early production and situates his practice within a Chilean art world haunted by the residues of political violence. This study foregrounds the project's historical embeddedness and the deep political stakes of its apparent sociality, recognising the crucial role that context has always played in Jaar's practice. By turning to the Santiago of Studies on Happiness, Vazquez explores the work's political and art historical environment and provides a wedge to realign current interpretations of Chilean art and hemispheric conceptualism with the openness central to Jaar's project.

In Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which contemporary artists in Latin America are reinventing historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new aesthetic and political perspectives on the past and the present. Page brings together an entirely new corpus of artistic projects from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru that engage critically and creatively with forms as diverse as the medieval bestiary, baroque cabinets of curiosities, atlases created by European travellers to the New World, the floras and herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, and the dioramas designed for natural history museums. She explores how artists develop decolonial and post-anthropocentric perspectives on the collections and expeditions that were central to the evolution of European natural history. Their works forge a critique of the rationalizing approach to nature taken by modern Western science, reconnecting it with forms of popular, indigenous and spiritual knowledge and experience that it has systematically excluded since the Enlightenment. Drawing on photography, video, illustration, sculpture, and installation, this vividly illustrated and lucidly written book (also available in premium quality in hardback edition) explores how these artworks might also deconstruct the apocalyptic visions of environmental change that often dominate Western thought, developing a renewed understanding of alternative ways in which humans might co-inhabit the natural world.

In Praying to Portraits, art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual's relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world.

Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time, offering no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provides alibis to perpetrators while denying victims their humanity. For those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is infinite.State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. A gallery of dedicated artworks by Mexican abstract painter Chantal Meza inspires each chapter, bringing the aesthetic into critical conversation and leading to a multidisciplinary collection that charts a new path for recovering humanity in the face of its annihilation. Featuring contributions from theorists of violence who are concerned with the issue of forcibly removing humans from the surface of the earth, while also appreciative of the complex layers of appearance and disappearance in the contemporary world, the book attends to the many ways disappearance occurs and the ethical questions this raises.State of Disappearance traverses the difficult terrain of human denial to rethink some of the most devastating chapters in human history and their enduring relevance to our lives.

In 1959, the very year the Cuban Revolution amplified Cold War tensions in the Americas, museumgoers in the United States witnessed a sudden surge in major exhibitions of Latin American art. Surveying the 1960s boom of such exhibits, this book documents how art produced in regions considered susceptible to communist influence was staged on U.S. soil for U.S. audiences.Held in high-profile venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibitions of the 1960s Latin American art boom did not define a single stylistic trend or the art of a single nation but rather attempted to frame Latin America as a unified whole for U.S. audiences. Delia Solomons calls attention to disruptive artworks that rebelled against the curatorial frames purporting to hold them and reveals these exhibitions to be complex contact zones in which competing voices collided. Ultimately, through multiple means—including choosing to exclude artworks with readily decipherable political messages and evading references to contemporary inter-American frictions—the U.S. curators who organized these shows crafted projections of Pan-American partnership and harmony, with the United States as leader, interpreter, and good neighbor, during an era of brutal U.S. interference across the Americas.Theoretically sophisticated and highly original, this survey of Cold War–era Latin American art exhibits sheds light on the midcentury history of major U.S. art museums and makes an important contribution to the fields of museum studies, art history, and Latin American modernist art.

This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora.In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others'specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith.The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

The Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, held at the Royal Academy of Arts of London and seven other major venues throughout the United Kingdom in 1944 and 1945, was the first collective display of Brazil's art shown in the United Kingdom and the largest ever sent abroad until then. It resulted from an initiative championed by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and envisioned by 70 Modernist painters who donated 168 artworks as a contribution to the Allied War effort. Notwithstanding its historical relevance and unmatched scale, this event had never been academically investigated. Through exploring why and how successfully the Brazilian government devoted superlative efforts to this enterprise in the midst of World War II, this book is intended to fill this gap and gain an understanding of a largely neglected public aspect of a deeply studied period of Brazilian foreign policy. The research unearthed abundant firsthand documents to reconstruct the episode, adopting the hermeneutic method and a theoretical framework from the Public Diplomacy and Cultural Diplomacy fields in order to interpret the circumstances that made possible this improbable and challenging endeavor. It contends that the Exhibition was a remarkably innovative action of Public Diplomacy avant la lettre, which aimed at engaging with British society and enhancing the image of Brazil and its culture. Its motivations must be understood within the broader foreign policy, focused on obtaining prestige and repositioning Brazil in the postwar international order, which encompassed the deployment of 25,000 troops to fight in Europe. The research further claims that the initiative was intended and managed to achieve a substantial impact on views about Brazil, by means of conveying a well-planned message.

Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil brings together the work of ten artists who reflect upon the long-standing histories of oppressive power structures in the territory now known as Brazil. Blurring the line between art and activism and spanning installation, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video, these artists contribute to local and global conversations about the state of democracy, racial injustice, and the violence inflicted by the nation-state. This first English-language, book-length study of contemporary Brazilian art in relationship to activism assembles artist-authored texts, interviews, essays, and a conceptual mapping of Brazilian history to illuminate the function of art as a platform for critical engagement with the historical, political, and cultural configurations of a particular place. By refusing to remain neutral, these artists create spaces of vibrant and vital community and self-construction to explore how healing and justice may be possible, especially in the Black, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous communities to which many of them belong.

Rethinking the role of the artist and recovering the work of unacknowledged creators in colonial society This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries. Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting. Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists'engagement in society and their impact within it.Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Listen to the artists of the Brazilian Northeast. Their work, they say, comes of continuity and creativity. Continuity runs along lines of learning toward social coherence. Creativity brings challenges and deep personal satisfaction. What they say and do in Brazil aligns with ethnographic evidence from New Mexico and North Carolina; from Ireland, Portugal, and Italy; from Nigeria, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh; from China and Japan. This book is about that, about folk art as a sign of human unity.

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology's capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections – between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel – alter representations of self, Other, and world.

An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada. During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada's economy yet this Pacific frontier in today's Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period. In this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume, Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a'periphery'was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.

In contemporary Latin America, an emerging crosscurrent of pioneering female writers and artists with an interest in transgressing traditional boundaries of genre, media, gender and nation are using their work to voice dissent against pressing social issues including neo-liberal consumerism, environmental degradation, mass migration and gender violence.Bringing together analyses by scholars from the US, Europe and Latin America with reflections by Ana Clavel, Eugenia Prado Bassi, Eli Neira, Regina José Galindo, Carla Faesler, Mónica Nepote, Pilar Acevedo, Gabriela Golder, Mariela Yeregui, Jacalyn Lopez Garcia and Lucia Grossberger Morales on their own practice, this volume proposes new critical approaches to new forms of expression which encapsulate rich transnational cultural flows and grass-roots political activism. Via an analysis of multimedia interventions and practice, the volume shows how the work of these women draws attention to the constructed nature of all boundaries and borders, be they between nations or people, in an increasingly globalised and digitalised world.

The patchwork is an apt metaphor for the region not only because of its colourfulness and the making of something whole out of fragments but as an attempt to make coherence out of disorder. The seeking of coherence was the exact process of putting together this book and foregrounds the process of Caribbean societies forging identity and identities out of plural and at times conflicting and contested groups that came to call the region home. Within the metaphor of the patchwork however is the question, where are the vernacular needlework artists within the visual art tradition of the Caribbean? The introduction sets out to both clarify and rectify this situation, and several common themes flow through the following essays and interviews. Themes include that that the land and colonization remain baseline issues for several Caribbean artists who stage and restage the history of conquest and empire in varying ways. That artists in the region amalgamate as part of their practice and seem to prefer an open-endedness to art making as opposed to expressing fidelity to a particular medium. That artists and scholars alike are dismantling long-held perceptions of what Caribbean art is thought to be, and are challenging boundaries in Caribbean art. These are among the issues addressed in the book as it looks at ecological concerns and questions of sustainability, how the practices of the artists and their art defy the easy categorization of the region, and the placement of women in the visual art ecology of the Caribbean. The latter is one of the most contested areas of the book. Readers should come away with the sense that questions of race, colour, and class loom large within questions of gender in the Jamaican art scene and that the book, dedicated to Sane Mae Dunkley, aims to insert vernacular needleworkers into the visual art scene in both Jamaica and the larger Caribbean. Audience will include researchers and scholars of Caribbean and African diasporic art, college students, those interested in post-colonial studies, Caribbean artists, art professionals interested in a wider, globalized view of contemporary art; students curious to know about the many phases of art production throughout the Caribbean. General readers interested in the culture of the region.

The Casa del Deán in Puebla, Mexico, is one of few surviving sixteenth-century residences in the Americas. Built in 1580 by Tomás de la Plaza, the Dean of the Cathedral, the house was decorated with at least three magnificent murals, two of which survive. Their rediscovery in the 1950s and restoration in 2010 revealed works of art that rival European masterpieces of the early Renaissance, while incorporating indigenous elements that identify them with Amerindian visual traditions. Extensively illustrated with new color photographs of the murals, The Casa del Deán presents a thorough iconographic analysis of the paintings and an enlightening discussion of the relationship between Tomás de la Plaza and the indigenous artists whom he commissioned. Penny Morrill skillfully traces how native painters, trained by the Franciscans, used images from Classical mythology found in Flemish and Italian prints and illustrated books from France—as well as animal images and glyphic traditions with pre-Columbian origins—to create murals that are reflective of Don Tomás's erudition and his role in evangelizing among the Amerindians. She demonstrates how the importance given to rhetoric by both the Spaniards and the Nahuas became a bridge of communication between these two distinct and highly evolved cultures. This pioneering study of the Casa del Deán mural cycle adds an important new chapter to the study of colonial Latin American art, as it increases our understanding of the process by which imagery in the New World took on Christian meaning.

Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s. Mexico has long been lauded and studied for its post-revolutionary public art, but recent artistic practices have raised questions about how public art is created and for whom it is intended. In The New Public Art, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, together with a number of scholars, artists, and activists, looks at the rise of community-focused art projects, from collective cinema to off-stage dance and theatre, and the creation of anti-monuments that have redefined what public art is and how people have engaged with it across the country since the 1980s. The New Public Art investigates the reemergence of collective practices in response to privatization, individualism, and alienating violence. Focusing on the intersection of art, politics, and notions of public participation and belonging, contributors argue that a new, non-state-led understanding of'the public'came into being in Mexico between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. During this period, community-based public art bore witness to the human costs of abuses of state and economic power while proposing alternative forms of artistic creation, activism, and cultural organization.

A thousand years ago, the Comitán Valley, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was the western edge of the Maya world. Far from the famous power centers of the Classic period, the valley has been neglected even by specialists. Here, Caitlin C. Earley offers the first comprehensive study of sculpture excavated from the area, showcasing the sophistication and cultural vigor of a region that has largely been ignored. Supported by the rulers of the valley's cities, local artists created inventive works that served to construct civic identities. In their depictions of warrior kings, ballgames, rituals, and ancestors, the artists of Comitán made choices that reflected political and religious goals and distinguished the artistic production of the Comitán Valley from that of other Maya locales. After the Maya abandoned their powerful lowland centers, those in Comitán were maintained, a distinction from which Earley draws new insights concerning the Maya collapse. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs of sculptures unearthed from key archaeological sites, The Comitán Valley is an illuminating work of art historical recovery and interpretation.

In Dissident Practices, Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present, covering the period from the military dictatorship to the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, the social changes of the 2000s, the rise of the Right in the late-2010s, and the recent development of an overtly feminist art practice. Though they were lauded as key figures in Brazilian art, these artists still faced adversity and constraints because of their gender. Although many of them in the 1960s and 1970s disavowed the term feminism, Calirman gives a nuanced account of how they responded to authoritarianism, engaged with trauma in the aftermath of the military dictatorship, interrogated social gender norms, and fought against women's objectification. By battling social inequalities, structures of power, and state violence, these artists create political agency in a society in which women remain targets of brutality and discrimination.

Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan. After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City. Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico's modern capital.

In Unseen Art, Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art, as well as Mesoamerican understandings of sight as an especially godlike and elite power, in order to trace a gradual evolution in the uses of secrecy and concealment, from a communal practice that fostered social memory to a tool of imperial power. Addressing some of the most charismatic of all Mesoamerican sculptures, such as Olmec buried offerings, Maya lintels, and carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures, Brittenham shows that the creation of unseen art has important implications both for understanding status in ancient Mesoamerica and for analyzing art in the present. Spanning nearly three thousand years of the Indigenous art of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, Unseen Art connects the dots between vision, power, and inequality, providing a critical perspective on our own way of looking.

Foregrounding street art in the capital cities of Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, this book argues that Antillean street artists diagnose the “impossible state” of the arrested present (colonized, occupied, or under dictatorship) while simultaneously imagining liberated futures and fully sovereign states.Jana Evans Braziel launches a comparative study of art, politics, history, urban street cultures, engaged citizenships, and social transformations in three Antillean capital cities—Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and San Juan, Puerto Rico—of the Greater Caribbean. The book includes a photo documentary archive of street art, murals, and installations by key muralists in these cities: Yulier Rodriguez Pérez,'Jerry'Rosembert Moïse, and Colectivo Moriviví (Chachi González Colón, Raysa Rodríguez García, and Salomé Cortés). Braziel offers art historical and geopolitical analyses of the urban street art in their cities of production, underscoring street art as political, economic, and environmental engagements (and not as exclusively aesthetic ones) with urban space and street life.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Caribbean studies, Latin American studies, and urban studies.

Mapping a New Museum seeks to rethink the museum's role in today's politically conscious world. Presenting a selection of innovative projects that have taken place in Latin America over the last year, the book begins to map out possibilities for the future of the global museum. The projects featured within the pages of this book were all supported by The Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research (SDCELAR) at the British Museum (BM), with the aim of making the BM's Latin American collections meaningful to communities in the region and others worldwide. These projects illustrate how communities manage cultural heritage and, taken together, they suggest that there is also no all-encompassing counter-narrative that can be used to'decolonise'museums. Reflecting on, and experimenting with, the ways that research happens within museum collections, the interdisciplinary collaborations described within these pages have used collections to tell stories that destabilise societal assumptions, whilst also proactively seeking out that which has historically been overlooked. The result is, the book argues, a research environment that challenges intellectual orthodoxy and values critical and alternative forms of knowledge.Mapping a New Museum contains English and Spanish versions of every chapter, which enables the book to put critical stress on the self-referentiality of Anglophone literature in the field of museum anthropology. The book will be essential reading for students, scholars and museum practitioners working around the world.

This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism.

2023 LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) The first comprehensive study of cartonera, a vibrant publishing phenomenon born in Latin America. A publishing phenomenon and artistic project, cartonera was born in the wake of Argentina's 2001 economic crisis. Infused with a rebellious spirit, it has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of publishers across Latin America and Europe making colorful, low-cost books out of cardboard salvaged from the street. Taking Form, Making Worlds is the first comprehensive study of cartonera. Drawing on interdisciplinary research conducted across Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, the authors show how this hands-on practice has fostered a politically engaged network of writers, artists, and readers. More than a social movement, cartonera uses texts, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions to foster community and engagement through open-ended forms that are at once artistic and social. For various groups including waste-pickers, Indigenous communities, rural children, and imprisoned women, cartonera provides a platform for unique stories and sparks collaborations that bring the walls of the “lettered city” tumbling down. In contexts of stigma and exclusion, cartonera collectives give form to a decolonial aesthetics of resistance, making possible a space of creative experimentation through which plural worlds can be brought to life.

2022 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, Bard Graduate Center A landmark study of ancient Peruvian Moche mural art. Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of “archaeo art history” to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology. Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience.

Grounded in perspectives of affect theory, Other Americans examines the writings of Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Alarcón; films by Alfonso Cuarón, Claudia Llosa, Matt Piedmont, and Joel and Ethan Coen; as well as the Netflix serials Narcos and El marginal. These widely consumed works about Latin America—equally balanced between narratives produced in the United States and in the region itself—are laden with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that exceeds the experience of reception. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America become common coinage for US audiences, shaping their ideological relationship with the region and performing an affective interpellation. By analyzing the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that would portray Latin America as an implicit other, Bush examines a process of affective comprehension that foments an us/them, or north/south binary in the reception of Latin America's globalized art.