Morazán, or how to delve into a place as a strategy for regeneration after the Peace Accords (1992)

Luisa Guaza describes how some contemporary artists and artist collectives in El Salvador have been inspired by the Comunidad Segundo Montes, a communitarian settlement formed in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees from that country's civil war. Today, artists mine the history of the war and the Comunidad Segundo Montes to recuperate accounts that have been suppressed, to promote free speech, and to embody El Salvador's collective wounds as a means to social regeneration.

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Sweden and Latin America: possible dialogues around geometric abstraction

Sofía Frigerio delineates points of correspondence between modern artists who made works of geometric abstraction in Sweden and Latin America, as seen in the exhibition Concrete Matters [Feb 24, 2018-May 13, 2018] at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.

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Documenting the Visual

Building a Latin American Collection at the MoMA Library

Milan Hughston was MoMA's Chief of Library from 1999 until his retirement in 2016. His responsibilities included identifying and acquiring material for the library that would augment the museum's holdings without duplicating material available elsewhere. In the following text, Hughston will talk about some of the rare and specialized archives of Latin American art he was able to identify and add to MoMA's collection.

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Peripatetic in Caracas, or How to [Re]concile Ourselves with the City

LuisRa Bergolla and the civic association Collectivox design urban group walks in Caracas so that people can rediscover and reclaim the city and its pleasures. Being part of an "urban herd" ameliorates the fear many have of exploring a city ranked as the most violent in the world, and for the 7th Seminario, Bergolla created a thematic walk for participants to consider the political will expressed in the architectural legacies of three past presidents of Venezuela.

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In Search of a New Ethic: Art and Feminisms

Diverse positions in contemporary feminisms point with continued urgency to the importance of publicizing the silencing and subjugation of women. Albeley Rodríguez-Bencomo notes that contemporary art is intertwined with the dissensions and affinities of feminist debate, and speaks about recent exhibitions that have been influential in promoting the range of feminist and artistic response.

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Art and Politics in Cuba in the New Millennium

A Brief Review

Félix Suazo discusses examples of Cuban art from the the 1970s to the present that exemplify the changing dialogue between art and politics, which has been "simultaneously oriented toward the interior of the field of art and toward the public realm ... via the critical revision and disassembling of the symbols and strategies of power."

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An Archival Trail: Concrete Art in Argentina

How magazines, flyers, and pamphlets tell the story of Concrete art in Argentina

The Getty’s special collections archives include a wealth of ephemera, such as magazines, flyers, and pamphlets, related to the mid-twentieth century Concrete art movement in Latin America. Zanna Gilbert describes how these primary documents shed light on the inventive and interdisciplinary work of Concrete artists represented by a group of their works from the CPPC on loan to the Getty for a three-year investigation into their physical processes and philosophic foundations.

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Caribbean Popular, Caribbean Contemporary: Current Artistic Practices of Havana, Cuba

In his third and final article reporting on his summer 2017 visit to the Caribbean, Julián Sánchez turns his eye to Cuban artists Glenda León and Yulier Rodríguez. While León’s practice is studio-based, and Rodríguez—known as Yulier P.—intervenes in public spaces to create his art, both artists have found a way to employ seemingly apolitical naîve aesthetics to address both politics and the human condition in their native Havana.

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Caribbean Popular, Caribbean Contemporary: Current Artistic Practices of Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Julián Sánchez writes about the continuing influence of historical and contemporary vernacular art in Haiti on the imagery, materials, and techniques employed by current artists in Port-au-Prince.

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White on White (cube): Public Museums and Private Spaces

Lucas Ospina analyzes Nicolás Consuegra's exhibition "El espacio del lugar. El lugar del espacio" to discuss the value that some artists in Latin America attribute to the "white cube". In this case, Consuegra reproduces a space within another space, expanding the limits of the pictorial plane and making the white cube the work itself.

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Female Eyes on South America: Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858)

Katherine Manthorne makes a case for the Austrian nineteenth-century world traveler Ida Pfeiffer as a proto-feminist. Pfeiffer wrote accounts of her journeys, undertaken beginning when she was 45 years old and had separated from her husband after raising the couple’s sons. Published in her native German, the journals were popular enough to be translated into several languages.

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Caribbean Popular, Caribbean Contemporary: Current Artistic Practices of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

In the first of a three-part series looking at the interchange of contemporary Caribbean art with vernacular traditions, Julián Sánchez González presents the work of Dominican artists Quisqueya Henríquez, Natalia Ortega, and Engel Leonardo as touchstones for a discussion about "Dominicanidad", the influence of a collective ethos, and a return to original sources of art in the Dominican Republic.

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