Abstraction in Reverse

Abstraction in Reverse
Author: Alexander Alberro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022639400X

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator an unprecedented role in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe. Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomás Maldonado, Jesús Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous art, these artists produced artworks that required the presence of the spectator to be complete. Alberro also shows the various ways these artists strategically demoted regionalism in favor of a new modernist voice that transcended the traditions of the nation-state and contributed to a nascent globalization of the art world.

Art of Latin America

Art of Latin America
Author: Marta Traba
Publisher: Inter-American Development Bank
Total Pages: 197
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0940602733

Marta Traba, one of Latin America's most controversial art critics, examines the works of over 1,000 artists from the first 80 years of the 20th century. This book is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in studying the evolution of Latin American art.

Visual Voyages

Visual Voyages
Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300224028

An unprecedented visual exploration of the intertwined histories of art and science, of the old world and the new From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. Nature provided incentives for exploration, commodities for trade, specimens for scientific investigation, and manifestations of divine forces. It also yielded a rich trove of representations, created both by natives to the region and visitors, which are the subject of this lushly illustrated book. Author Daniela Bleichmar shows that these images were not only works of art but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions. Early depictions of Latin American nature introduced European audiences to native medicines and religious practices. By the 17th century, revelatory accounts of tobacco, chocolate, and cochineal reshaped science, trade, and empire around the globe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, collections and scientific expeditions produced both patriotic and imperial visions of Latin America. Through an interdisciplinary examination of more than 150 maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes, and landscape paintings spanning four hundred years, Visual Voyages establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientific and artistic exploration, affirming that region's transformation and the transformation of Europe as vitally connected histories.

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830-1930

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830-1930
Author: Idurre Alonso
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1606066943

This volume examines the unprecedented growth of several cities in Latin America from 1830 to 1930, observing how sociopolitical changes and upheavals created the conditions for the birth of the metropolis. In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid industrialization. At the same time, the lower classes were eradicated from old city districts and deported to the outskirts. The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 surveys this expansion, focusing on six capital cities—Havana, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Lima—as it examines sociopolitical histories, town planning, art and architecture, photography, and film in relation to the metropolis. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of books, prints, and photographs from this period, largely unpublished until now, this volume reveals the cities’ changes through urban panoramas, plans depicting new neighborhoods, and photographs of novel transportation systems, public amenities, civic spaces, and more. It illustrates the transformation of colonial cities into the monumental modern metropolises that, by the end of the 1920s, provided fertile ground for the emergence of today’s Latin American megalopolis.

The Americas Revealed

The Americas Revealed
Author: Edward J. Sullivan
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Art, Latin American
ISBN: 9780271079523

Explores the formation of public and private collections of Spanish Colonial and modern Latin American art throughout the United States, and the impact of the ever-changing political landscape of Latin American countries.

Latin America in Construction

Latin America in Construction
Author: Barry Bergdoll
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780870709630

In 1955 The Museum of Modern Art staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark survey of modern architecture in Latin America. Published in conjunction with a new exhibition that revisits the region on the 60th anniversary of that important show, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 offers a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from Mexico and Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s. The publication features a wealth of original materials that have never before been brought together to illustrate a period of self-questioning, exploration and complex political shifts that saw the emergence of the notion of Latin America as a landscape of development. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings, vintage photographs, sketches and newly commissioned photographs, the catalogue presents the work of architects who met the challenges of modernization with innovative formal, urbanistic and programmatic solutions. Today, when Latin America is again providing exciting and challenging architecture and urban responses, Latin America in Construction brings this vital post-war period to light.

Legal Experiments for Development in Latin America

Legal Experiments for Development in Latin America
Author: Helena Alviar García
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000387011

This book provides a nuanced picture of how diverse legal debates on the pursuit of economic development and modernization have played out in Latin America since independence. The opposing concepts of modernization theory and Dependency Theory can be seen to be playing out within the field of legal transformation, as some legal analysts define law as a closed, formal, rational system, and others see law as inseparable from economic, social and political change. Legal experiments have followed these trends, in some cases using legal instruments to guarantee classical, civil and political rights, and in others demanding radical transformation of existing legal structures. This book traces these debates across the key topics of: economic development and foreign investment; property; resource and power distribution in terms of gender and social policy. Drawing on a wide range of literature, the book adds complexity and color to our understanding of these themes in Latin America. This insightful exploration of comparative law within Latin America provides the tools needed to understand legal transformation in the region, and as such will be of interest to researchers within law, political sociology, development and Latin American studies.

Our America

Our America
Author: Smithsonian American Art Museum
Publisher: Giles
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2014
Genre: Art
ISBN:

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

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 178735976X

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

Drawing the Line

Drawing the Line
Author: Oriana Baddeley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1989
Genre: Art
ISBN:

An exploration of the areas occupied by Latin American art and culture between the ongoing traditions of its indigenous inhabitants, its colonial heritage and its contemporary relationship to the cultural politics of North America and Europe. It looks at the way cultural identity has been constructed by artists from the 1940s to the present day and challenges the way art criticism has hitherto dealt with Latin American art.