Antonio Sergio Bessa

Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism, which developed from a symposium presented by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011, showcases original essays by distinguished Latin American architects, historians, and curators whose research examines architecture and urban design practices in the region during a significant period of the twentieth century. Drawing from the exuberant architectural projects of the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as from critically engaged artistic practices of the present day, the essays in this collection reveal how the heroic visions and utopian ideals popular in architectural discourse during the modernist era bore complicated legacies for Latin America—the consequences of which are evident in the vastly uneven economic conditions and socially disparate societies found throughout the region today. The innovative contributions in this volume address how the modernist movement came into being in Latin America and compellingly explore how it continues to resonate in today’s cultural discourse. Beyond the Supersquare takes themes traditionally examined within the strict field of urbanism and architecture and explores them against a broader range of disciplines, including the global economy, political science, gender, visual arts, philosophy, and urban planning. Containing a breadth of scholarship, this book offers a compelling and distinctive view of contemporary life in Latin America. Among the topics explored are the circulation of national cultural identities through architectural media, the intersection of contemporary art and urban social politics, and the recovery of canonically overlooked figures in art and architectural histories, such as Lina Bo Bardi and Joao Filgueiras Lima (“Lele”) from Brazil, Juan Legarreta of Mexico, and Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico.

Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism

Beyond the Supersquare

Martin Wong: Human Instamatic explores the work of Chinese American artist Martin Wong (1946-1999), tracing his transition from an introspective youth in San Francisco painting haunting self-portraits, to his subsequent engagements with communities in the Bay Area and later New York City. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Wong became an active participant in the thriving countercultural movement in California, where he collaborated with the radical queer performance groups Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978, Wong moved to New York where he could play a pivotal role in the arts scene throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Wong's work of that period captures the vibrancy of the Lower East Side: a resilient, multi-ethnic, bohemian community grappling with an advanced process of gentrification. Diagnosed with HIV in 1994, Wong returned to San Francisco where he lived under the care of his parents until he died in 1999. Martin Wong: Human Instamatic offers a comprehensive overview of Martin Wong's career through a number of scholarly essays, archival material, and an interview with Wong made accessible to the public for the first time. Martin Wong: Human Instamatic is in partnership with the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Human Instamatic

Martin Wong

A significant contribution on the development and aftermath of post–World War II Concretism in Brazil Form and Feeling features a collection of essays by noted scholars exploring the sensorial, experience-based, and participatory practices pioneered in the 1950s by artists and poets such as Flávio de Carvalho, Ivan Serpa, Hélio Oiticica, Haroldo de Campos, Mary Vieira, Lygia Pape, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Clark, Waly Salomão, and Emil Forman, among many others. Fourteen thought-provoking essays examine how many of their strategies constituted a pertinent critique of the country’s wide-ranging embrace of Eurocentric modernity while anticipating a number of practices prevalent among contemporary artists today—namely, the rise of art as social practice, the embrace of pedagogical concerns by artists, and relational aesthetics. The fourteen essays collected in this volume consider the ramifications of modernist abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century and contribute to a growing academic field in postwar Brazilian and Latin American art history. Contributions to this anthology examine the development of modernist ideas that flourished in Brazil during a controversial period interspersed by dictatorial regimes. The global aspect of Brazilian art is especially evident in these studies, presenting the relational complexity of their subjects as transcultural, transnational actors while simultaneously contributing to a growing, increasingly nuanced understanding of visual and material culture, performance, and criticism in Brazil. Form and Feeling continues the important process of re-analyzing the intersections of Concretism and Neo concretism, arguing for greater affinities between the primary and lesser-known cast of characters while equally redistributing the strict geographical divisions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This anthology broadly situates this extraordinary period of artistic experimentation in direct relationship to contemporary factors, such as psychoanalysis, educational systems, poetry, politics, and feminism. It crafts innovative relationships about the constructive hierarchies of form and space, poetry and painting, and mathematics and philosophy, thus engendering new positions for a deeply ensconced period in Brazilian history.

The Making of Concretism in Brazil

Form and Feeling

Jessamyn Fiore

This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York, where he initiated a series of site-specific works in derelict areas of the South Bronx. The borough's many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark's raw material. His series 'Bronx Floors' dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of ther ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with 'Conical Interserct', a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of seventeenth-century row houses slatted for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou's construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark's practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.

Anarchitect

Gordon Matta-Clark

Odile Cisneros

Haroldo de Campos

A generous introduction to one of the key literary figures to emerge from Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century, this book offers English-speaking readers an ample selection of this prodigious writer's celebrated poetry and widely influential critical work. As a poet and as a cofounder of the renowned group Noigandres, Haroldo de Campos made a unique and substantial contribution to the theory and practice of experimental writing, particularly the form known as concrete poetry, and to the Latin American avant-garde as a whole. --Northwestern University Press.

Selected Writings

Novas

Cornelia H.. Butler

Luis Perez-Oramas

Published in conjunction with a major monographic retrospective of the work of Brazilian painter, sculptor and performance artist Lygia Clark, this publication presents a linear and progressive survey of the artists groundbreaking practice. Having trained with modern masters from the late 1940s to mid-1950s, Clark was at the forefront of Constructivist and Neo-Concretist movements in Brazil and fostered the active participation of the spectator through her works. Examining Clarks output from her early abstract compositions to the biological architectures and relational objects she created late in her career, this is the most comprehensive volume on the artist available in English. Three sections based on key phases throughout her career Abstraction, Neo-Concretism and The Abandonment of Art examine these critical moments in Clarks production, anchor significant concepts or constellations of works that mark a definitive step in her work, and shed light on groundbreaking sets of circumstances in her life as an artist. Each section is accompanied by a selection of works by other artists that provide context for understanding the circumstances that shaped her artistic investigations, as well works by a younger generation of Brazilian artists that reflect Clarks own landmark influence. Featuring a significant selection of previously unpublished archival texts of Clarks personal writings, it is a vital source of primary documentation for twentieth-century art history scholarship.

Antonio Sergio Bessa

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