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Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521-1821
Kelly Donahue-Wallace surveys the art and architecture created in the Spanish Viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and La Plata from the time of the conquest to the independence era. Emphasizing the viceregal capitals and their social, economic, religious, and political contexts, the author offers a chronological review of the major objects and monuments of the colonial era. In order to present fundamental differences between the early and later colonial periods, works are offered chronologically and separated by medium--painting, urban planning, religious architecture, and secular art--so the aspects of production, purpose, and response associated with each work are given full attention. Primary documents, including wills, diaries, and guild records are placed throughout the text to provide a deeper appreciation of the contexts in which the objects were made.
Constructing an Avant-Garde : Art in Brazil, 1949-1979
How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups -- including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism -- but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman. Martins argues that artists of Brazil's postwar avant-garde updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. He describes defining episodes in Brazil's postwar avant-garde, discussing crucial critical texts, including Gullar's "Theory of the Non-Object," a phenomenological account of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and Mondrian; portraiture, self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and missed encounters with conceptualism; and monochrome, manifestos, and engagement. The Brazilian avant-garde's hijacking of modernism, Martins shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their international minimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Reconfiguring not only art history but their own history, Brazilian avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challenges from a unique -- and oblique -- standpoint.
Devouring Frida : The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo
Beginning in the late 1970's Frida Kahlo achieved cult heroine status less for her richly surrealist self-portraits than by the popularization of the events of her tumultuous life. Her images were splashed across billboards magazine ads, and postcards; fashion designers copied the so-called "Frida" look in hairstyles and dress; and "Fridamania" even extended to T-shirts, jewelry, and nail polish. Margaret A. Lindauer argues that this mass market assimilation of Kahlo's identity has consistently detracted from appreciation of her work, leading instead to narrow interpretations based on "an entrenched narrative of suffering." While she agrees that Kahlo's political and feminist activism, her stormy marriage to fellow artist Diego Reviera, and the tragic reality of a progressively debilitated body did represent a biography colored by emotional and physical upheaval, she questions an "author-equals-the-work" critical tradition that assumes a :one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting." In kahlo's case, Lindauer says, such assumptions created a devouring mythology, an iconization that separates us from rather than leads us to the real significance of the oeuvre. Accompanied by 26 illustrations and deep analysis of Kahlo's central themes, this provocative, semiotic study recontextualizes an important figure in art history at the same time it addresses key questions about the language of interpretation, the nature of veneration, and the truths within self-representation. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera is celebrated by Gerry Souter as a virtuoso Mexican muralist, where he could express at once his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions. His easel paintings and drawings also constitute a large body of both his early and late work and are represented in the book. Gerry Souter, the author of the remarkable Frida Kahlo, overcomes his huge admiration for Diego Rivera to give the artist a human dimension, found in his political choices, his love affairs and his belief that this truth was Mexico, the language of his thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place.
Folk Treasures of Mexico
In his foreword, former New York governor and vice president of the United States Nelson A. Rockefeller remembers his first trip to Mexico in 1933 and his subsequent, life-long fascination with the Mexican people and their popular art.
Rockefeller¿s collection of more than 3,000 pieces of Mexican folk art is widely considered to be the most exceptional in the U.S., and Folk Treasures of Mexico celebrates these icons with more than 150 photos of the pieces, many of which are quite rare.
In the main text, Marion Oettinger, Jr., curator of Latin American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, describes the objects according to function: utilitarian, ceremonial, decorative, or for play. Among the many noteworthy objects are a wooden-carved centurion helmet mask from the eighteenth century depicting a Roman guard, which is one of the few remaining masks of this type in existence, and a nineteenth century ceramic pitcher from Oaxaca that combines many stylistic techniques. Other objects include a variety of children¿s toys, clothing, and items for eating and drinking.
Originally published in 1990, the book contains a preface by Rockefeller¿s daughter, Ann Rockefeller Roberts, who was instrumental in finding permanent homes for her father¿s stunning collection, which can now be found in the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco.
Including a glossary, bibliography, and chronology, Folk Treasures of Mexico is a must-read for anyone interested in Latin American art, culture, and history.
Readings in Latin American Modern Art
This important and welcome volume is the first English-language anthology of writings on Latin American modern art of the twentieth century. The book includes some fifty seminal essays and documents--including statements, interviews, and manifestoes by artists--that encompass the broad diversity of this emerging field. Many of these materials are difficult to access and some are translated here for the first time. Together the selections explore the breadth and depth of Latin American modern art as well as its distinctive evolution apart from American and European art history. Included in this collection are fascinating ideas and insights on the impact of the avant-garde in the 1920s, the Mexican mural movement, Surrealism and other fantasy-based styles, modern architecture, geometric and optical art, concrete and neo-concrete art, and political conceptualism. For students and scholars of Latin American art, the volume offers an invaluable collection of primary and secondary sources.
Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America
This anthology centers on the visual representation of woman in early modern Latin America, that is, the social and cultural construction and definition of female identity as evidenced by the art document. Artists in this period were collectively aware of a vocabulary of gender that could be tailored to deliver varying messages about the position of women in vice regal culture and society. This volume is organized not in the predictable linear framework, by periods and centuries, but rather by the realization that throughout much of this period, Spanish authorities and others envisaged the Spanish colonies of the Americas in gendered terms. Proffered as the female body, the "New" (virginal by implication) World was at differing times adored, pursued, courted, seduced, defiled, exploited, reviled, and denounced by those (males) who encountered "her." This mentality is born out in the various forms of female representation that are discussed in this fully illustrated book. Contributors include: C. Cody Barteet, Maria Elena Bernal-Garcia, Magali M. Carrera, Carol E. Damian, Carolyn Dean, Catherine R. DiCesare, Lori Boornazian Diel, Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Ray Hernandez-Duran, Andrea Lepage, Kellen Kee McIntyre, Penny Morrill, Elizabeth Q. Perry, Richard E. Phillips, Michael J. Schreffler, and Christopher C. Wilson. ERRATUM TO CHAPTER 7 Ray Hernandez-Duran, "El Encuentro de Cortes y Moctezuma: The Betrothal of Two Worlds in Eighteenth-Century New Spain" (pp. 181-206). On page 194, second paragraph, third sentence, should read: "Marina's absence in the encounter painting, where she normally mediates contact between the men, emphasizes the phallogocentric aspect of the historic meeting." The original phrasing, using the pivotal term, 'phallogocentric' (a reference to a gendered form of exchange or communication) was changed to 'phallus-centered, ' which not only alters a central idea in the argument, but actually has nothing to do with the image in question.