This publication offers a definitive look at the artistic practice of Remedios Varo (1908-1963) following her emigration from Spain to Mexico City in 1941. Her work from 1955 to 1963 made a lasting contribution to modern art and the legacy of Surrealism. In Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, fresh historical and material findings establish the integral relationship between Varo's layered interests--in alchemy, architecture, magic, mysticism, philosophy, and science--and her beguiling technical approach to art making. Essays detail specific works' complex stories and spectacular surfaces. An illustrated taxonomy of Varo's artistic techniques, including automatic mark making as well as careful manipulation of materials and media, offers new insights into the artist's craft. An illustrated inventory of a major portion of Varo's library--published here for the first time--reveals the artist's engagement with a wide range of subjects. Stunning new photography of many of her artworks are presented within a dynamic geometric design inspired by the artist's work. Situating Varo as a woman working in midcentury Mexico City and living among a tight-knit community of local and émigré artists, poets, and thinkers, the catalogue illuminates the complex worldview that shaped her search for individual and collective transcendence.

Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago, in partnership with the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

Exhibition Schedule:

Art Institute of Chicago
(July 29, 2023-November 27, 2023)

Through powerful interviews with more than 60 artists and designers of Caribbean heritage, accompanied by gorgeous photographs, Crafted Kinship takes readers on a unique journey through the world of Black Caribbean creativity. Each maker crafts a kinship with the land, the people, the culture of their country of origin. Their art explores and reflects deeply on themes like African origins, ancestors, Black womanhood/Black manhood, identity, joy, memory, and the complicated and painful history of migration and diaspora. An art that is more often than not multidisciplinary, created by makers who eschew traditional labels by reshaping the boundaries around art and design.

Curated by Malene Barnett, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and textile surface designer of Jamaican and Vincentian descent, Crafted Kinship is the first book in which Caribbean makers share the intimate stories of their art-making process and how their countries of origin influence and inform how and what they create. Included are makers working across all mediums. Meet Anina Major, a Bahamian visual artist whose work attempts to reclaim the significance of straw basketry through her ceramics; Basil Watson, a Jamaican figurative artist and sculptor famous for his stunning bronze figures that are exhibited outdoors all over the world; Renee Cox, a Jamaican photographer whose work celebrates Black womanhood; La Vaughn Belle, a multidisciplinary artist from St. Croix who draws from archival sources to interrogate colonial legacies; Sonya Clark, a textile artist and educator of Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Bajan heritage who works with hair and other meaningful materials to explore issues of power, race, and gender; and Nyugen E. Smith, an interdisciplinary artist of Trinidadian and Haitian ancestry whose fluid stream of consciousness is expressed through objects, performance, music, and moving image.

As seen in The New York Times, Vogue Mexico, Latina Magazine, and The Art Newspaper

The essential survey showcasing the work of more than 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Latin America

Latin American artists have gained increasing international prominence as the art world awakens to the area's extraordinary art scenes and histories. In an accessible A-Z format, this volume introduces key artworks by 308 artists who together demonstrate the variety and vitality of artwork being made. Focusing on those born, or who have lived, in the 20 Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions of Latin America, and featuring historic and living artists - both those celebrated internationally and names less-known outside their native countries - this book has been created in close collaboration with an expert panel of 68 advisors and writers.

Artists featured include: Allora and Calzadilla, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Francis Alÿs, Olga de Amaral, Fernando Botero, Leonora Carrington, Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Leonor Fini, Gego, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carmen Herrera, Graciela Iturbide, Alfredo Jaar, Frida Kahlo, Guillermo Kuitca, Wifredo Lam, Teresa Margolles, Marisol, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Zilia Sánchez, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Cecilia Vicuña, Adrián Villar Rojas and Faith Wilding.

The advisory panel includes: Deri Andrade, David Ayala-Alfonso, Fernanda Brenner, Estrellita B. Brodsky, Tatiana Cuevas, Anna Di Stasi, Andrés Gustavo Duprat, Raphael Fonseca, Zanna Gilbert, Laura Hakel, Yina Jiménez Suriel, Maya Juracán, Pablo Léon de la Barra, Miguel A. López, Bernardo Mosqueira, Gerardo Mosquera, Rodrigo Moura, Laura Orozco, Taisa Palhares, Maylin Pérez, Catherine Petitgas, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Florencia Portocarrero, Ileana Ramírez Romero, Amy Rosenblum-Martín, Emiliano Valdés and Michael Wellen.

The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. This first volume spans four centuries, from the first Spanish occupation of Latin America and the Caribbean in the fifteenth century; through the establishment of slave colonies on the mainland and islands by the British, French, and Danish; to the revolutionary emergence of independence, first in Haiti in 1804, and then across Latin America. Essays by leading scholars and superb illustrations bring to light a remarkable range of imagery that provides vivid insights into the complex racial history of the period.

The two volumes complement the vision of Dominique and Jean de Menil, art patrons who, during the 1960s, founded an archive to collect images depicting the myriad ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art continues the de Menil family's original mission and brings to the fore a renewed focus on a rich and understudied area.

The story of Mexican art is set in its rich historical context by the book's treatment of political and social change. The author draws on recent scholarship to examine crucial issues of race, class, and gender, including the work of indigenous artists during the colonial period, and of women artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. This second volume explores the period from the final abolition of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the nineteenth century through the independence of the Caribbean islands to the present day. The images and essays here reveal the damaging legacy of colonialism and slavery and the vigorous efforts of Afrodescendant artists to assert their identity in the face of prejudice and denial.

These volumes complement the vision of Dominique and Jean de Menil, art patrons who, during the 1960s, founded an archive to collect images depicting the myriad ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art continues the de Menil family's original mission and brings to the fore a renewed focus on a rich and understudied area.

An exploration of how the ancient Maya engaged with their history by using, altering, and burying stone sculptures.

For the ancient Maya, monumental stone sculptures were infused with agency. As they were used, reused, altered, and buried, such sculptures retained ceremonial meaning. In Memory in Fragments, Megan E. O'Neil explores how ancient Maya people engaged with history through these sculptures, as well as how they interacted with the stones themselves over the course of the sculptures' long lives. Considering Maya religious practices, historiography, and conceptions of materials and things, O'Neil explores how Maya viewers perceived sculptures that were fragmented, scarred, burned, damaged by enemies, or set in unusual locations. In each case, she demonstrates how different human interactions, amid dynamic religious, political, and historical contexts, led to new episodes in the sculptures' lives.

A rare example of cross-temporal and geographical work in this field, Memory in Fragments both compares sculptures within ancient Maya culture across Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize over hundreds of years and reveals how memory may accrue around and be evoked in material remains.

The hidden life of the greatest surviving work of Inca art

The most celebrated Andean artwork in the world is a five-hundred-year-old Inca tunic made famous through theories about the meanings of its intricate designs, including attempts to read them as a long-lost writing system. But very little is really known about it. The Royal Inca Tunic reconstructs the history of this enigmatic object, presenting significant new findings about its manufacture and symbolism in Inca visual culture.

Andrew James Hamilton draws on meticulous physical examinations of the garment conducted over a decade, wide-ranging studies of colonial Peruvian manuscripts, and groundbreaking research into the tunic's provenance. He methodically builds a case for the textile having been woven by two women who belonged to the very highest echelon of Inca artists for the last emperor of the Inca Empire on the eve of the Spanish invasion in 1532. Hamilton reveals for the first time that this imperial vestment remains unfinished and has suffered massive dye fading that transforms its appearance today, and he proposes a bold new conception of what this radiant masterpiece originally looked like.

Featuring stunning photography of the tunic and Hamilton's own beautiful illustrations, The Royal Inca Tunic demonstrates why this object holds an important place in the canon of art history as a deft creation by Indigenous women artists, a reminder of the horrors of colonialism, and an emblem of contemporary Andean identity.

Expanded and revised in its sixth edition, The Art of Mesoamerica surveys the artistic achievements of the high pre-Hispanic civilizations of Central America--Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Aztec--as well as those of their lesser-known contemporaries.

Providing an in-depth examination of central works, this book guides readers through the most iconic palaces, pyramids, sculptures, and paintings. From the Olmec colossal head 5 recovered from San Lorenzo to the Aztec calendar stone found in Mexico City's Zocalo in 1790, this book reveals the complexity and innovation behind the art and architecture produced in pre-Hispanic civilizations.

This new edition incorporates fifty new lavish color images and extensive updates based on the latest research and dozens of recent discoveries, particularly in Maya art, where excavations at Teotihuacan, the largest city of Mesoamerica, and Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, have yielded new sculptures.

The abstract paintings of Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) evoke elemental forces of earth, fire, and cataclysm. At the same time, through these paintings, Williams bore witness to the deep historical interconnections linking the Caribbean, Britain and wider Atlantic worlds as they transformed through colonial and postcolonial eras.

This book is the first comprehensive investigation of Williams's practice. With an introduction by Kobena Mercer and groundbreaking new scholarship by Ian Dudley, Claudia Hucke, and Giulia Smith, this volume addresses the Indigenous, ecological, and transnational dimensions of Williams's modernist oeuvre. In addition, a memoir by the artist's daughter, Maridowa Williams, offers an intimate look at the biographical dimensions of his work. Alongside an extraordinary and revealing selection of unpublished and out-of-print writings by Williams, artworks illustrating the full range of his practice--from early abstracts and lesser-known murals and portraits to such later major works as the Shostakovich, Bird Paintings, Olmec-Maya & Now and Cosmos series--illuminate the complex cross-cultural dynamics at play across Williams's World Aesthetic.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In February 1939, while visiting Paris at the invitation of writer André Breton, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) became sick and convalesced at the home of American expatriate Mary Reynolds (1891-1950), an avant-garde bookbinder, collector of Surrealist artist books, and partner of Marcel Duchamp. This book traces the story of Kahlo and Reynolds's connection and its influence on their work, even after the friendship had elapsed.

Kahlo and Reynolds's intense encounter unfolds in this volume through the artworks they each made, their shared exploration of Reynolds's expansive Surrealist library, and letters from Kahlo to her lover, American photographer Nickolas Muray, in which she recounted her time in Paris. Included in this focused study are paintings and drawings by Kahlo, selections of books by Reynolds, photographs by Muray of Kahlo, depictions of Reynolds by artists in Paris, and a selection of letters between Kahlo and Reynolds describing their defining experience together.

Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition Schedule:

Art Institute of Chicago
(March 29-July 13, 2025)

Focusing on the period between A.D. 250 and 900, Lives of the Gods reveals that ancient Maya artists evoked a pantheon as rich and complex as the more familiar Greco-Roman, Hindu-Buddhist, and Egyptian deities. The authors show how this powerful cosmology informed some of the greatest creative achievements of Maya civilization, represented here from the monumental to the miniature through more than 140 works in jade, stone, and clay. Thematic chapters supported by new scholarship on recent archaeological discoveries detail the different types of gods and their domains, the role of the divine in the lives of the ancient Maya, and the continuation of these traditions from the colonial period through the present day.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule:

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX
(May 7-September 3, 2023)

The Lost Generation La generación perdida accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. The modern artistic ceramic movement in Cuba, almost exclusively comprised of women artists (including Amelia Peláez, Mirta García Buch, and María Elena Jubrías), emerged toward the end of the 1940s and continued into the next decade. The ceramicists invited Cuba's modernist protagonists, including René Portocarrero, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Wifredo Lam, to participate in designing ceramics at the Taller de Santiago de Las Vegas. The workshop thus became a locus for the fermentation of Cuban modernist expression.

Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz, the workshop's proprietor, recognized the artistic value of the ceramicists' production and he, along with the women he hired, encouraged collaboration with their male contemporaries. A symbiotic artistic practice grew in which the ceramicists introduced ideas and designs to the painters, whose fledgling attempts in ceramics took eventual flight. As the painters' familiarity with the new medium grew, similar forms appeared in their two-dimensional renderings, which are now synonymous with Cuban modernism.

During the post-Revolutionary period of 1959-85, the Taller became part of Cuba's National Patrimony, continuing the tradition of producing serial and artistic pieces. As the Revolutionary regime wore on, the Taller's importance waned, artists left Cuba, and independent workshops flourished. While the Taller de Santiago no longer boasts importance in artistic production today, it left an indelible mark on Cuban modernism.

With essays by Cuban, American, and Cuban-American scholars, The Lost Generation La generación perdida provides a background on the twentieth-century avant-garde movements in Cuba; delves into the narrative of an overlooked group of Cuban women ceramicists, assessing the implications of their work on modernism; and, finally, explores in depth the women artists of the third avant-garde generation (1949-58).

How artists challenged a military dictatorship through mass print technologies in 1970s and 1980s São Paulo.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, during Brazil's military dictatorship, artists shifted their practices to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. Mari Rodríguez Binnie's The São Paulo Neo-Avant-Garde examines these artworks and their engagement with politics and mainstream art institutions and practices.

As Binnie skillfully shows, artists appropriated processes like photocopy, offset lithography, and thermal and heliographic printing, making newly available technologies of mass production foundational to their work of resistance against both the dictatorship and the established art world. Often working collaboratively, these artists established alternative networks of exchange locally and internationally to circulate their work. As democracy was reestablished in Brazil, and in the decades that followed, their works largely fell out of sight. Here, in the first English-language book to focus entirely on conceptual practices in São Paulo in the 1970s and 1980s, Binnie unearths a scene critical to the development of contemporary Brazilian Art.

How the visual culture of food, cookery, and consumption played a central role in the making of postrevolutionary Mexico.

Postrevolutionary Mexico City was a site of anxious nation-building, as rampant modernization converged and clashed with the nation's growing nostalgia for its pre-Columbian heritage. During this volatile period, food became a meaningful symbol for a Mexican citizenry seeking new modes of national participation.

Culinary Palettes explores how the artistic invocation of food cultures became an arena in which to negotiate the political entanglements of postrevolutionary Mexico. Lesley Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, who nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. Through analysis of a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and Indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive--and at times weaponized--agents in articulating competing claims to a new nationhood.

A landmark book reframing ancient Colombian art--including goldwork, ceramics, textiles and more--as vehicles of cultural knowledge across space and time

Spanning all major pre-Columbian cultures of Colombia, and featuring some of the most remarkable artworks ever made in this region--from intricately cast gold pendants and ceramic effigies to modern Indigenous stools, barkcloths and featherworks--The Portable Universe/El Universo en tus Manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia radically recasts how we approach ancient Colombian art.
Featuring an innovative cover design with tip-on images, the book is arranged so as to envelop the works with life and meaning, and guide readers to different ways of understanding the world and our place in it. It includes insightful contributions by Indigenous Colombians, historians, ethnographers, archaeologists and art historians.
The Portable Universe/El Universo en tus Manos recaptures some of the knowledge of Indigenous American cultures and presents new historical findings, drawing heavily on contemporary Indigenous understandings to evoke a worldview in which these ancient pieces make sense and have power today.

An examination of sculpture and authorship in eighteenth-century Quito that documents Caspicara as a participant in the innovative artistic production of the city's workshops and its widespread commerce of polychrome sculptures.

Who is Caspicara? Nothing is known of Caspicara's life, and not a single sculpture has been documented as his work. Yet traditional histories laud him as a prolific Indigenous sculptor in eighteenth-century Quito who created exquisite polychrome figures and became a national artistic icon. Drawing on extensive archival, historical, and object research, Susan Verdi Webster peels away layers of historiographical fabrication to reveal what we do and do not know about Caspicara and his work.

Rather than being a solitary master, Caspicara collaborated with other, largely Indigenous artists in Quito's protoindustrial workshops, manufacturing sculptures now credited to him alone. The high quality of Quito sculptures produced by anonymous artists turned the city into a hub of wide-ranging commerce in religious icons. The art world and post-independence Ecuadorians have lionized the one named sculptor, Caspicara, according to the Western model of the artist-genius, amplifying the market for works bearing his name and creating a national hero on par with European masters. Lost in this process were the artists themselves. Webster returns to their world, detailing their methods and labor and, for the first time, documenting a sculpture made by Caspicara.

Ancient gold artifacts and contemporary gilded artworks trace the legacy of one of the most pervasive myths of colonialism

Presenting art from the precolonial period to today, this publication examines how the myth of El Dorado has shaped the history of the Americas and its cultural production.