Hemispheric Integration: Materiality, Mobility, and the Making of Latin American Art

Exploring art made in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, Hemispheric Integration argues that Latin America’s position within a global economic order was crucial to how art from that region was produced, collected, and understood. Niko Vicario analyzes art’s relation to shifting trade patterns, geopolitical realignments, and industrialization to suggest that it was in this specific era that the category of Latin American art developed its current definition. Focusing on artworks by iconic Latin American modernists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joaquín Torres-García, Cândido Portinari, and Mario Carreño, Vicario emphasizes the materiality and mobility of art and their connection to commerce, namely the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods from Europe and the United States. An exceptional examination of transnational culture, this book provides a new model for the study of Latin American art.

Books in the Studies on Latin American Art series encompass studies of art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. International and cosmopolitan in scope, the series seeks to address the production, exhibition, and dissemination of art in and between countries and continents. This series is supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).