arising from the varied and dynamic art of Latin America and the rich spiritual traditions of Christianity in Latin American identity. Religious themes, narratives, iconographies, and sensibilities in Latin American visual culture in a variety of media and from a range of historical periods and regions of Latin America reveal the interconnectivity of faith, race, ethnicity, and history, as well as the various methodological challenges that these works of art – and their artists – pose in the history of art.
Such interconnections include reactions against and movements beyond religion, in addition to connections within and between faiths. Here are a small selection of such intersections prompted primarily by the surveys included in
Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century:
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Enrique Alfèrez was born into a world of art, although his father might not have viewed it that way. His father, Longinos Alfèrez, studied Art in Europe and returned to Mexico where he established himself as a carver of religious statues for churches and hacienda chapels. Longinos considered himself a craftsman above an artist …
It was in 1929 that Alfèrez arrived in New Orleans for the first time on his way to Mexico. The local art life in the French Quarter was so attractive to him that he never made it to Mexico that time. His first commission was to carve statues of Mary and three saints on the facade of the Church of the Holy Name of Mary in Algiers. He befriended Franz Blom, the director of the Tulane University’s Middle America Research Institute and joined him on a trip to Mexico where they made a full-scale plaster cast of the facade of the Nunnery buildings of the Mayan ruins at Uxmal in Yucatan which was displayed at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. He returned to New Orleans as a permanent member of the City’s art community and during the next decade received numerous public art commissions, taught at the Arts and Crafts Club in the French Quarter and directed the Works Progress Administration’s sculpture program.”
In Ecuador,
Enrique Alvarez “has gone on to receive widespread national recognition for his artistic merit. In 1998, he was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and in 2000, was awarded first prize in the Second Latin American Exhibition of Religious Art in New York.
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Jaime Andrade, an artist from Quito, Ecuador created the sculpture in mahogany.” "In 1958
[Thomas] Merton commissioned Andrade to do a statue of the Virgin Mary and child Jesus in dark wood for the novitiate library. "A statue," as he explains, "that would tell the truth about God being 'born' Incarnate in the Indians of the Andes. Christ poor and despised among the disinherited of the earth."
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Flávio de Carvalho is regarded as one of the precursors of the 60’s ‘Happenings’ in the United States. In 1931, his studies of anthropology and psychoanalysis lead him to carry out the "Experiment n°2": wearing a hat he walks a Christi Corpus procession against the grain. This act is regarded as an insult and Flávio de Carvalho was almost lynched by a hysterical crowd of worshippers, finally owed his safety to the police force. His intention was to test the limits of tolerance and aggressiveness of a religious crowd.
In 1933, he founded the Modern Artists' Club (CAM). He stimulated the cultural life of of São Paulo and took part in the creation of a discussion space on different areas, bringing together artists, composers, writers and psychiatrists. Within this framework, he founded the Theatre of the Experience and directed the "Ball of the dead God", an experimental theatrical and dancing show for which he created everything : text, adornment, costumes and play of light. The actors, almost all black people, were wearing aluminum masks and executing dynamic and surrealist movements. Considered as subversive this play, very influenced by the Dadaist movement, was prohibited and the police force closes the theatre in spite of the mobilization of more than 300 intellectuals.”
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Christian Chicana feminist artists used their work to challenge the patriarchal society that they live in and even the patriarchal society of Biblical times. Through their work they promote a strong, prominent feminine figure, one who does not need a man to survive. They offer a role model to women of all ages and hopefully promote a new-found interest in young people’s religion by renewing faith in a traditional religious figure.
Not only that, but the Virgin of Guadalupe is depicted as a brown women, so these artists are challenging cultural and race barriers as well.”
Everyone can draw, paint and create, she said. When we create from our core, we are like God. Even if the end result is a purple paper chicken, the creative process itself can transform your being. Antonia saw this transformation happen in people who never imagined they could create art.”
Julio Galán “is aware of the world around him and he adapts it for himself. Although his creations revolve around his personality and image, he never stops including references to the culture where he developed, particularly religious culture.
With these references that could be considered alien to the space he inhabited —the space of his dolls, disguises and make-up— he appears, and paints himself or adds symbols of his personality to appropriate some images …
The artist recreates the image of the Last Supper including himself in it, painting in a Christ child with his own face peeking out from the childish features, painting the adult Jesus Christ but dressing him in clothing like Galán’s. The artist’s face transformed in other images reveals his proximity to Catholicism and at the same time the distance he puts between that and his own doctrine.
Some of his works are inspired in ex-votos, or tin devotional folk paintings, done to thank the Virgin Mary or some saint for a miracle that saved the life of the painter or cured some disease as had been fervently prayed for, and that generally describe in a drawing or painting the scene of the miracle.”
Paul Giudicelli is a Dominican painter who “graduated from law school and taught in college. He served a public office stint as governor of his home state. In 1945, he was appointed coordinator of Humanities at Mexico's National Autonomous University and college ambassador to South America in 1946. Between 1964 and 1970, he acted as Secretary of Public Education. He launched the
Dominican modern novel into a brand-new narrative method (inner monologue) and the alteration of temporary stages, as seen in his work At the Edge of Water (1947). The novel spins a yarn about the life of a hinterland rural town in the state of Jalisco, his home state. His characters, prisoners of their own religious beliefs and a sense of guilt, are shaken by the developments of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. He conveys his story using a taut and sumptuous prose and was also a member of the National College and Language Academy.”
Alfredo Guttero “displayed creative talent at an early age; starting with music but later turning to art. Following his family's wishes, he began a legal career, but left it to become a painter, under the encouragement of Ernesto de la Cárcova and Martín Malharro. In 1904, he received a grant from the Argentinian government to study in Europe and lived in Paris until 1916, where he studied with Maurice Denis and participated in the Salon. Following that, he lived in Segovia and Madrid, with brief stays in Germany, Austria and Italy and visits to virtually every other part of Western Europe, ending with a major exhibition in Genoa.
After more than two decades away from home, he returned in 1927, where he remained intensely active during the five years remaining until his death. He became the Director of the "Plastic Arts" division of the local Wagner Society and created the "Hall of Modern Painters", where he introduced the works of Miguel Carlos Victorica and Demetrio Urruchúa, among others. Together with Raquel Forner, Alfredo Bigatti and Pedro Domínguez Neira (1894-1970), he created the "Cursos Libres de Arte Plástico". In 1931, he exhibited at the "First Baltimore Pan-American Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings". Much of his time and energy was spent promoting Modern Art in opposition to the reactionary forces prevalent at that period.”
“Painting in colonial Brazil was scarce, and low quality, worth it for the iconography. Landscape was discouraged for fear that it could facilitate greed in enemy powers. With the economic progress of Bahia and Minas Gerais in the 18th century, a few painters appeared from the region, mostly in religious art, such as José Teófilo de Jesus and Mestre Ataíde.
His post-colonial vision shows the marks of slavery in modern Brazil, the contradictions and the added value. Violence is in the scenes of the Passion, because the flogged Christ of
[Alberto da Veiga] Guignard is the slave on the pillory post. In a view of Ouro Preto, Guignard creates a fictional portrait of Aleijadinho, showing his work and imagining his personality to proclaim the Afrodescendent pillar of Brazilian culture. Guignard, like Lasar Segall, projected the work ethos of the black person in Brazil.”
The work of
Frida Kahlo “uses the tradition of votive art
– part of her heritage was Catholic – and can be an open prayer for courage:
"Tree of Hope, Keep Firm", she writes across a painting of a parched
and treeless landscape. To write the past is to hold a memory. To write the
present is to stand witness. To write the future is to cast a spell, and this
was my prayer, to spell motherhood with three letters: a-r-t.”
The singer and composer Roberto Carlos was involved in the circulation of symbolic assets through the installation of Adoração (Worship) by the visual artist
Nelson Leirner. The intersection between this universal musical icon, with strong mediatic and popular appeal and a piece of contemporary art, assigned to produce political effects, has given us the opportunity of understanding how and why the musician was chosen to signify, in the incipient symbolic assets market of the sixties, the contradictions of pop art, transplanted to the political reality of the Grupo Rex, in which Leirner was inserted. For this, the visual artist chooses, to resignify the young talented musician, a code belonging to popular Christian iconography, inserting him in a game of reference that surpassed the popular binomial current culture and erudite culture.
“Another feminist artist that creates unique and unconventional portraits of the Virgin of Guadalupe is
Yolanda Lopez. Lopez is known for creating three distinct images of Mary, the most well-known called Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe or Virgin Running (Q&A). This image is quite different from both the conventional Virgin, as well as Alma Lopez’s portrayal of the Virgin. In this first painting, Yolanda Lopez portrays herself as a strong, active young woman ready for anything. The Virgin has some traditional aspects such as the blue cloak with gold stars and the halo around her body, but overall, this is not the traditional, submissive, down gazing Virgin of Guadalupe. She is shown running with white tennis shoes, crushing both the Satan-like snake in her hand, and the angel beneath her, the angel used to hold her up in traditional images. Lopez is demonstrating that women do not need anyone to hold them up; they are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.”
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Matute “studied in the National School of Fine Arts, then transferring to Mexico where he studied at the San Carlos Academy till 1951.He was participated with the architectural group of Juan OGorman in the mural decoration of the library of the City University at UNAM. He then integrated with a group that worked with the muralist, Diego Rivera in the collaboration of the mural in the Teatro de los Insurgentes. In his return to Honduras, he was given the Pablo Zelaya Sierra award in 1954. He was director of the National School of Fine Arts. In 1955, he moved to Spain, England and Italy where he combined his artistic labor with the diplomatic.
He worked with a variety of themes including religion, the historical, portraits that mystified their characteristics. His works are done in an expressionist style. During his first stages as an artist, Miguel Angel was an objective colorist. Then through his Spanish experience, he manifested himself.
Osvaldo Mesa brings viewers to Africa via Cuba in his large installations, crowded with paintings and sculptures. “Richly painted backdrops define a space in which a multitude of objects rest--painted and twine-wrapped bottles, sticks and rocks that resemble the tools of healing and divination found in the sacred spaces of traditional African mystics.
Such fetishes made the journey to Cuba with people who were brought there as slaves and combined their spirituality with aspects of Christianity to create the Santeria religion. Mesa's work is a sophisticated reworking and rediscovery of this process. Aesthetic rather than religious, it retains some of the cosmic power of its source.”
“An artist, activist, educator, and scholar,
[Amalia] Mesa-Bains, who is 74, creates large installation works comprising dozens, at times hundreds, of objects: photographs of friends and family, strings of beads, scientific instruments, perfume bottles, her personal medical equipment, holy cards, her wedding veil, Mexican flags, her father’s glasses and mother’s necklace, statuettes, fabric and clothing, sugar skulls, crucifixes, calendars, stamps, candles, shards of glass, dirt, scattered woodchips, plants. At the beginning of her career, she took inspiration from home altars and Day of the Dead ofrendas, adapting them for her own artistic aims. Her installations are sacred spaces imbued with memory: of the dead, of history and all its atrocities, of innocence lost, of the mystical and mythological.”
“He created a large impact on the Brazilian avant-garde movements, especially after he participated in the 1922 Semana da Arte Moderna in São Paulo which ignited new trends in the Brazilian Modernism movement. From 1922-1930
Vicente do Rego Monteiro was associated with Léonce Rosenberg's Galérie de l'effort Moderne, showing in a variety of solo exhibitions.
He illustrated two books depicting modern art centered on the regional culture of Brazilian natives and their traditions; one in 1923: Legendes, croyances et talismans des Indiens de l'Amazone and one in 1925: Quelques Visages de Paris. In Vittel, Rego Monteiro focused on religious themes, influenced by Fernand Léger.
During early 1920’s he started developing his “relief” style where is paintings looked like sculptures. They are two-dimensional and look like they are carved into the surface. A multitude of his relief paintings were of religious themes such as “A Crucifixão” (The Crucifixion), which is one of his most famous works. "A Crucifixão" and "A Descida Da Cruz" along with several of his other religious paintings feature figures that are forlorn, mourning, and crying, the color of the paintings also being very muted; which is very different from his brightly colored ceramics of indigenous. Because of their style, most of his religious-themed works are similar to Ivan Mestrović's "melancholic deco".”
Rodolfo Morales’ “work has been described as dream-like, fertile and heavily based in folklore. It often depicts indigenous people, especially women set amongst rural buildings, churches, town squares and arcaded shops. His style is influenced by María Izquierdo (1902-1955) and French painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985).
By 1985, Morales had earned enough money to stop teaching and to return to Oaxaca where he was able to dedicate himself to both his art and to restoration. Using income from his art he founded the Rodolfo Morales Cultural Foundation devoted to restoration of buildings in his hometown of Ocotlán. In all, he funded the restoration of fifteen churches including the 16th century Convent of Santo Domingo and a 17th-century church in the town of Santa Ana Zegache, as well creating cultural spaces throughout Oaxaca's central valleys. His most important restoration project was the former convent of Ocotlan which was converted into a municipal complex.”
José Clemente Orozco "painted the theme, Cristo destruye su cruz, three times in his life, twice as murals — one of which still survives at Dartmouth College — and once on a 4’ x 3’ canvas." The image has been understood both as saying “It is finished!” to the violence that destroys and oppresses and as a denial of "the sacrificial destiny meant for him."
“Through his art,
Roche Rabell showed the world our culture, the African roots, our religion as well as the relation between politics and culture in the American continent.
The painter explored aspects of the Puerto Rican identity and its environment with the same intensity that he did with himself. That is why he would also depict the most intimate aspects and vulnerabilities of human beings in multiple self-portraits. The human figure had a central position in his production.”
Diego Rivera "did not represent religious images unless they were useful as social observations ... The most that he came close to portray religious messages was at the murals in Chapingo, where his images functioned as a catechism exhorting a new generation of Mexican farm workers and agricultural planners to uphold a modern nationally, constructive, self-respecting way of life, based on the credo "exploitation of the land, not of man."" Nevertheless, it has been noted that his Detroit Industry Murals "are rife with Christian themes and utopian symbolism."
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Soledad Salamé, American, born in Santiago, Chile in 1954, currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
From 1973 to 1983 Salamé lived in Venezuela. At this time she was exposed to the rainforest, a pivotal experience in her artistic development which continues to be a source of inspiration. As an interdisciplinary artist Salamé creates work that originates from extensive research of specific topics. In pursuit of intensive research, Salamé has since travelled widely in the Americas, Europe and Antarctica.”
“The concern of this
artist, born in Chile and educated in Chile and Venezuela, is the environment and the political and spiritual aspects of its preservation or destruction. “
"[
David Alfaro] Siqueiros painted some fifteen portraits of Christ ... on August 2, 1963, he inscribed the following quote from the most devout of Italian painters, Fra Angelico, in the back of his painting Cristo del Pueblo: "May only he who believes in Christ paint Christ." And in another occasion, during his imprisonment, he declared: "Was Jesus Christ not, like me, a victim of social dissolution, a persecuted man?" On August 9, 1963, from his cell at a crime prevention facility, Siqueiros inscribed the following words regarding the Via Crucis on the back of his painting, Mutilated Christ: "First, his enemies crucified him 2000 years ago. Then, they mutilated him from the Middle Ages on, and today, their new and true friends restore him under the political pressure of communism post-Ecumenical Council. This small work is dedicated to the latter."
“The exhibition Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas, which was shown at Galeria Brito Cimino in São Paulo in November 2008, on the other hand, is an example of the more poetic, less direct critique of [
Regina] Silveira’s works, which also characterises Tropel (reversed). Here the artist installed a fully decked table with a white tablecloth and the finest porcelain ready for a luxurious, celebratory dinner. But both the tablecloth and porcelain were covered with large, black insects, projected onto the surface of the serving dishes, carafes, glasses and plates. The entire dinner service was on a tablecloth cross-stitched in the style of the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceara, where the women in many towns still master this traditional, local craft.
The insects range from abnormally large cockroaches, mosquitoes and flies to grasshoppers and scorpions. The variety of insects can be seen to represent a mix of references to the Biblical plagues that devastated Egypt (grasshoppers and mosquitoes) and the “bestarium” of the Middle Ages, to the presence of insects in absurd modernist literature by authors like Franz Kafka and the Argentinean authors Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar - not to mention everyday, contemporary ‘bugs’. It was the same Mundus Admirabilis with which Silveira ‘occupied’ Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil’s free-standing cubic glass building in Brasilia in 2007, transforming it into a gigantic insect cage with the domineering presence of giant insects representing a disturbing, universal image of global plagues of all ages. With this shift from Biblical mythology to the daily dinner table, and references to the absurd tradition in European as well as Latin American literature, Mundus Admirabilis symbolizes the plague as the universal phenomenon of classical mythology, but also the very present plagues of modern society, like corruption, war, AIDS or environmental catastrophes.
The Saints’s Paradox (1994) where an impossible situation is established: A small wooden figure of a saint has been given a large distorted shadow not belonging to himself but to the statue on the monument to the brutal General Duque de Caxias in São Paulo.”
Much of
Nahum B. Zenil's “works use mixed media on paper or oil on canvas. He preferred to paint on canvas until the materials compromised his health. He quickly returned to collaging on paper. He often uses his image to relieve pressures he felt as a child growing up homosexual in a small town and to comment on contemporary Mexican society. His works illustrate a duality between himself as an "other" and his relationship with the Catholic Church. Within Zenil's mixed media pieces he uses mainly himself as the subject. He pictures himself in his images with many religious figures such as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Within his images are many re-worked traditional Mexican forms like the retablo and ex-voto styles. Zenil was inspired by the works of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Jose Guadalupe Posada.
These influences can be seen in his works, Frida in My Heart and With All Respect, in which the artist actually used the image of Frida Kahlo in his paintings. According to the website glbtq archive, they state that "In a number of ways, Zenil has looked to the art of Frida Kahlo, with its strong dose of self-examination and criticism, as a beacon of inspiration. The portrait of Kahlo is sometimes incorporated into Zenil's works and he creates a lively dialogue between his own portrait and that of Kahlo, whose art has often been seen as representing the triumph of will over adversity." Zenil saw Frida art as a form of salvation, which he used to escape from his everyday life. Zenil's art allowed him to purge himself of the pressures he felt growing up gay, in a small town as a child. The pressures continued to follow him into his life in Mexico city, and as a teacher until he quit, to pursue his art full-time. Many of his works look at a variety of themes and relationships among race, religion, Mexican history, cultural designation, colonialism, male subjectivity and homosexuality."
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