Through film and installation, Natural Disaster extends the long-term research of Colombian artist Alberto Baraya (born 1968) and Mexican artist Jonathan Hern ndez (born 1972) on the ethical, social, environmental and educational connotations of public and private zoos in Mexico City.

Alfredo Jaar's immersive site-specific installation in the Chilean pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venezia Venezia is a call to examine how today's culture, composed of increasingly complex global networks, can be adequately represented on a world stage.This publication features essays by 18 prominent, international authors from different fields of work and thought, including political and philosophical thinkers, critics, theorists, art historians and curators. Their contributions consider Venezia Venezia in its critical context, as well d recent global developments and the volatile conditions of contemporary art practice.

Mexican artist Alicia Paz (born 1967) creates paintings, paper reliefs and cutout sculptures that are infused with cultural references and female personages. This catalogue, embossed with glitter and special paper inlays, provides an overview of her most recent ventures into painting.

Argentinian Alicia Penalba (1913-82) became a sculptor in France in the '50s; her work was soon sought after for museum collections and graced public spaces across Europe. This volume draws on the artist's personal archive, featuring the totems and winged sculptures that launched her career.

Evoking the pleasures of music as well as food, the word sabor signifies a rich essence that makes our mouths water or makes our bodies want to move. American Sabor traces the substantial musical contributions of Latinas and Latinos in American popular music between World War II and the present in five vibrant centers of Latin@ musical production: New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Miami. From Tito Puente's mambo dance rhythms to the Spanglish rap of Mellow Man Ace, American Sabor focuses on musical styles that have developed largely in the United States--including jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, punk, hip hop, country, Tejano, and salsa--but also shows the many ways in which Latin@ musicians and styles connect US culture to the culture of the broader Americas.

With side-by-side Spanish and English text, authors Marisol Berr os-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pall n challenge the white and black racial framework that structures most narratives of popular music in the United States. They present the regional histories of Latin@ communities--including Chicanos, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans--in distinctive detail, and highlight the shared experiences of immigration/migration, racial boundary crossing, contesting gender roles, youth innovation, and articulating an American experience through music. In celebrating the musical contributions of Latinos and Latinas, American Sabor illuminates a cultural legacy that enriches us all.

One of the most fascinating women of the early 20th century, Anita Brenner (1905-74) was a Mexican-American Jewish writer who played a vital role in making Mexican art and culture accessible to American audiences.

She came to occupy a central part in the world of postrevolutionary Mexican and American thinkers, artists and writers of the avant-garde, influencing American perceptions through her writing about Mexican culture. Brenner also championed the work of Diego Rivera, Jos Clemente Orozco, Jean Charlot, Pedro Friedeberg, Leonora Carrington and others. With text in English and Spanish, this book explores her life as a translator between cultures in six essays by Mexican and American scholars.

This new interpretive history of Mexican art from the Spanish Conquest to the early decades of the twenty-first century is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject in fifty years. James Oles ranges widely across media and genres, offering new readings of painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, and photographs. He interprets major works by such famous artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but also discusses less familiar figures in history and landscape painting, muralism, and conceptual art.

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.

This nuanced account explores Maya mythology through the lens of art, text, and culture. It offers an important reexamination of the mid-16th-century Popol Vuh, long considered an authoritative text, which is better understood as one among many crucial sources for the interpretation of ancient Maya art and myth. Using materials gathered across Mesoamerica, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos bridges the gap between written texts and artistic representations, identifying key mythical subjects and uncovering their variations in narratives and visual depictions. Central characters--including a secluded young goddess, a malevolent grandmother, a dead father, and the young gods who became the sun and the moon--are identified in pottery, sculpture, mural painting, and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Highlighting such previously overlooked topics as sexuality and generational struggles, this beautifully illustrated book paves the way for a new understanding of Maya myths and their lavish expression in ancient art.

The Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2008 to examine the arts of South America during the culturally complex period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the early modern era. Specialists in the arts and history of Latin America traveled from Venezuela, Spain, Portugal, and the United States to present recent research. The topics ranged from architecture, painting, and sculpture to furniture and the decorative arts. Edited by Denver Art Museum curator Donna Pierce, this volume presents revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the symposium.

Thomas B. F. Cummins (Harvard University) opens the volume with a discussion of the reception and reinterpretation of American motifs by European artists in the centuries after contact. Through a detailed analysis of the architecture of Franciscan churches in Brazil, Nuno Senos (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) discerns political alliances and posits a structural timeline. Susan Verdi Webster (College of William and Mary) uses new evidence from Ecuadorian archive documents to recover the names and works of native artists in colonial Quito. Sabine MacCormack (University of Notre Dame) analyzes a series of mural paintings in the church of St. Augustine in colonial Lima and traces their graphic and theological sources. Luisa Elena Alcala (Universidad Aut noma de Madrid) examines the treatise of one of the earliest documented Indian artists in Peru, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, and his famous carving of the Virgin of Copacabana. Through a detailed analysis of manuscipt drawings of furniture and architecture by native artist Guaman Poma of Cuzco, Jorge Rivas P rez (Colecci n Cisneros, Venezuela) assesses their accuracy and relationship to actual examples of the early colonial era. Michael Brown (Denver Art Museum) concludes the volume with an essay on Daniel Casey Stapleton and the collection of Spanish colonial art now housed at the Denver Art Museum, acquired while he was working and traveling in South America at the turn of the century.

An interdisciplinary study bringing together new research on an understudied era and area, this illustrated volume will be an important resource for scholars and enthusiasts of Latin American art and history.