9 books about art in Latin America

Was there a lack of references to think about art in Latin America? There is no more…

I made a selection from the classic by Dawn Ades, which unfortunately is only available in used bookstores or bookstores, to recently released books like this one about Torres Garcia.

I made sure that most of this list you could find to buy, if you are interested, of course.

Latin America includes Brazil, so some books about us were also included.
There are still a lot of topics left out, which book would you add to this list?

The work presents a broad panorama of Latin American art, from the period marked by the independence movements, around 1820, to the present day. It investigates fascinating aspects of 19th and 20th century art, as well as providing a general overview of contemporary art from the Latin American continent.

The starting point is the studio, a place that provokes widespread fascination, but the book Espaços de Trabalho de Artistas Latino-Americanos goes far beyond these four walls and reveals unique work spaces, be it the mobile studio, the city itself, as well as places used for research and reflection by some of the most renowned artists on our continent. With images taken by photographer Fran Parente and interviews by journalist and art critic Beta Germano, the book invites the reader to enter these intimate environments of artistic creation and learn a little more about the personality that inhabits each of them.

With extreme acuteness, critic Ronaldo Brito reviews the various global constructive trends in 20th century art. This recovery introduces, into the book, a definitive study on the singularities of the Brazilian neoconcretist movement in the 1960s. Illustrated with reproductions of works by the group's main artists, such as Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. An essential work in studies of Brazilian art, originally published in 1985.

Located at the intersection of two lines of modernity – constructivism and Duchamp's art – Hélio Oiticica's work included concrete painting, neoconcrete spatial structures, objects, environmental manifestations, audiovisual experiments and behavioral propositions. Celso Favaretto reconstructs the trajectory of this eminently experimental artist, explaining the coherent development of his proposals and artistic practice and the meaning of his critical intervention in the domains of the Brazilian avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s, raising questions that remain current.

How can we understand the encounter between indigenous crafts and avant-garde art catalogs on the television table? In search of an answer to this emblematic question, Néstor García Canclini analyzes culture in Latin American countries, taking into account the complexity of relationships that shape it today: cultural traditions coexist with modernity that has not yet “finished arriving” for here. In this book, his reflections on the phenomenon of cultural hybridization in Latin American countries are presented, seeking to understand the intense dialogue between erudite, popular and mass culture, and their insertion on the world stage. To undertake the analysis, Canclini uses an interdisciplinary approach and an intercultural treatment of the topic, carrying out his task with remarkable ease.

The nameless city of Torres-García presents an essay in text and image about a graphic work of notable originality, published in 1941. In this fifth volume of the Private Graphic Collection, Gustavo Piqueira unravels “La ciudad sin nombre”, a book by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949). In the calligraphy of the work analyzed, there is a profound symbiosis between letters and drawings, transforming them into symbols of a single code. The result is an exemplary geometric construction of the book's pages, in a system in which “reading” is not linked to the text nor “seeing” to the images.

This book presents to the general public the art produced in Brazilian lands from before its discovery until the end of the 1960s. Each chapter, written by a specialist, reports on a certain period in the history of art in Brazil. Believing that in the artistic field it is possible to recognize the identity of a nation, About Brazilian Art seeks to bring readers closer to the formation of artistic expression in Brazil until its maturity and invites reflection on the importance of the country's cultural heritage and its dissemination.

Using an approach to Mexican muralism, specifically the work of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, Subirats explores American and European interpretations of art, which are obviously hegemonic and place Mexican muralism in a diminished, disadvantaged position, by attempting understand and study it according to criteria foreign to our culture, which nullifies its historical particularity, in the absence of an autonomous, specific and proper theoretical horizon, in addition to the nonexistence of a critical consciousness. Likewise, and in counterbalance to the above, he exposes the mythological, metaphysical, sociological and political foundation of every true work of art, all of this of course, in elegant lyrical prose and from an original critical stance.

Can the world of art, with its universal aesthetic reasons, declare itself outside the rules of the patriarchal regime? Is this field free of glass ceilings, mansplaining and gender stereotypes? None of this seems to be corroborated when looking at the numbers of the official system: women have fewer awards, less presence in exhibitions and occupy, with few exceptions, subordinate places in art histories. Faced with this scenario, an intense transformation movement is underway. Hand in hand with feminist and gender activism, starting in the 1970s, art offered tools for a liberating imaginary and placed the female body as a privileged place of expression for a subjectivity in dissent.

Feminism and Latin American Art presents a theoretical and quantitative overview of the female scene in the visual arts and focuses on the intervention of artists who contributed to building an emancipatory imagination in Latin America. Andrea Giunta explores in these pages the emergence of new themes – motherhood, harassment, prostitution, divergent bodies – and new forms of representation, which question not only the differences between feminist art and feminine art, but also the relationships of power inscribed in the modes of seeing and showing.

This book tells the story of a revolution in progress and is proposed as an active intervention based on knowledge. If even today the universe of art replicates, under the forms of exclusion and invisibility, the different forms of violence against women, restoring the political meaning of artistic feminism does not mean replacing a set of names in a system of power, but rather contributing to the opening of a different understanding of the world.