Acknowledgments

Craven, David

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Acknowledgments

David Craven

Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990

Acknowledgments

Author

David Craven

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00020.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15773

Acknowledgments

This book is based on almost twenty years of intermittent work in Latin America, as well as continuous efforts in the United States. Research for it has involved over a dozen trips south of the us border. These include five trips to Nicaragua (one each in 1982, 1986, 1990, and two in 1995); two to Cuba (in 1984 and 1991); and six to Mexico (in 1986, 1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, and 2001). In addition, during the year that I lived in Spain, from 1984 to 1985, I was able to do primary research and to interview Latin American intellectuals visiting the Iberian Peninsular. Although I have incurred far too many debts for all of them to be mentioned, there are some of such significance that they cannot go unnoted. In acknowledging these debts I list them in reverse, since the last set of interviews are the most numerous owing to how my research was done in an especially dynamic phase of the final revolutionary process discussed: the one in Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990.

In Nicaragua, the people to whom I must express special gratitude for invaluable help and insights are the following: Sergio Ramírez, the former Vice President and a leading novelist; Father Ernesto Cardenal, the former Minister of Culture and a renowned poet; Gioconda Belli, the award-winning author; Claribel Alegría, the noted person of letters; Emilia Torres, the former National Director of the Centros Populares de Cultura; Nidia Bustos, National Coordinator of MECATE (Campesino Movement for Art and Theater); Armando Morales, the one-time FSLN Representative to UNESCO in Paris and Central America’s greatest contemporary painter; Dr. Carlos Tunnerman, the former Nicaraguan Ambassador to the United States; Raúl Quintanilla, the former Director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and a major art critic as well as an important artist.

In addition, I must thank Donaldo Altamirano, an artist and a former editor of Ventana, the weekly cultural supplement of Barricada; poets Juan Ramón Falcón, Gerardo Gadea, and Marvin Ríos, who were the editors of Poesía Libre, the national publication of the Talleres de Poesía; Luis Morales Alonso, former Director of the Sandinista Union of Visual Artists within the ASTC (Association of Sandinista Cultural Workers); Porfirio García, a critic, artist, and professor at the National University of Engineering in Managua; María Gallo, an accomplished painter and one-time coordinator of the program in painting within the CPC (Centros Populares de Cultura); Michelle Najlis, an acclaimed poet who now holds an administrative post at the Universidad Centroamericana; Santos Medina, an award-winning painter in the ASTC; and, finally, the remarkable group of artists and activists comprising ArteFactoría, the artists’ collective that publishes ArteFacto—the leading art journal in Central America for the last decade. This group includes some exceptional artists and intellectuals: Raúl Quintanilla, Teresa Codina, Juan Bautista Júarez, Patricia Belli, Celeste González, David Ocón, and Aparicio Arthola, among others.

The people to whom I must express special gratitude in Cuba and Mexico are fewer in number but no less significant in their impact on other parts of this book. In Cuba, this includes both people with whom I have had informative conversations and those with whom I have had long-term intellectual interchange. In the first group would be Roberto Fernández Retamar, the eminent author and Director of Casa de las Américas, one of the most indispensable cultural insititutions in “nuestra América”; poet Nancy Morejón, who is also at Casa de las Américas; and the architectural historian Roberto Segre. In the second group would be Erena Hernández, the accomplished art historian, and Gerardo Mosquera, who is Latin America’s most internationally recognized art critic at present. Mosquera is also one of America’s most challenging curators, although he once lectured at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in the Fall of 1993 on “The Death of the Curator.” It was Mosquera who put me in contact with painter Raúl Martínez, the “inventor of Latin American Pop Art.” (Martínez was probably the major Cuban artist to gain international fame between the revolutionary victory in 1959 and the emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of such artists as José Bedia and Kcho.)

In Mexico, the special debts of gratitude I owe must be conveyed to the 1995 Fellows at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), then directed by the scholar Rita Eder, and including Leticia López Orozco, Alicia Azuela, and Ida Rodríguez-Prampolini. I have also profited from conversations with Augustín Arteaga, the former Director of the Fine Arts Section of the Palacio de Bellas Artes; Adolfo Gilly, the eminent historian of the Mexican Revolution and a professor at UNAM; Raquel Tibol, the former art critic of Proceso; Irene Herner de Larrea, the art historian; Luis-Martín Lozano, a noted Rivera scholar and curator; Ana Elena Mallet, a curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City; América Sánchez Hernández, Director of the Museo Mural Diego Rivera; and Esther Garza de Navarrete, Director of the Museo Casa Diego Rivera in Guanajuato.

A number of other people should be thanked as well, since they have provided ideas, information, or criticism of value for this book. First and foremost, I must thank John Ryder and Colleen Kattau. John traveled with me on two of the research trips to Nicaragua and Colleen was my traveling partner on one research trip to Nicaragua and one to Cuba. They have both discussed with me many of the things in this study. No doubt they can claim credit for some of the insights that appear here. Compañero Stephen Eisenman read and commented quite perceptively on much of the manuscript, as did Juan Martínez. Alejandro Anreus made several valuable observations that made the book more balanced. My dear friend Linda B. Hall not only discussed with me some of the defining ideas in the book, but also set an example with her research that, I hope, will be readily evident.

Many others have been supportive as well as stimulating in various ways. They include Dawn Ades, Rasheed Araeen, Dore Ashton, Lavinia Belli, Kirsten Buick, Luis Camnitzer, the late Stanton Catlin, the late Eva Cockcroft, Russell Davidson, Leonard Folgarait, Jonathan Harris, Kathleen Howe, David Kunzle, Mauricio Lara, Francisco Letelier, Lucy Lippard, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Alison McClean-Cameron, Félix Masud-Piloto, Patricia Mathews, Gil Merkx, Symrath Patti, James Petras, Raquel Quesada, Margaret Randall, Sergio Rivera, Ken Roberts, Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino, Eric Selbin, Bill Stanley, May Stevens, Joyce Szabo, Leonardo Vargas, Thomas Walker, Alan Wallach, John P. Weber, and Mary Weismantel.

UNM’s distinguished Latin American and Iberian Institute has always been a stimulating place for the interchange of ideas that really matter. Similarly, in the Department of Art and Art History at the UNM, I must thank not only my colleagues on the faculty, but also a number of excellent graduate students. Many of them have done research into the arts in Latin America and some of them have already published scholarly articles in the field. These current and former students at UNM include Jasmine Alinder, Teresa Avila, Stacy Berenguel, Leah Cluff, Joanna Corrubba, Catherine DiCesare, Brenna Drury, Lara Evans, Danny Hobson, Alejandra Jiménez, Christopher Jones, Lindsay Jones, Feliza Medrano, Florencia Bazzano Nelson, Susan Richards, Teresa Rivera, Gina Tarver, Heather Van Horn, Neerja Vasishta, Brian Winkenweder, and Diane Zuliani.

Several institutions off campus, which do invaluable work in their respective fields, have been supportive of my research since the 1980s. They include the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City, under the able direction of Sandra Levinson, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, directed by Carol Wells. The latter institution now contains numerous posters from Cuba and Nicaragua (as well as from elsewhere), that I have donated to their archive.

In addition, there is the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico—with its excellent Center for Southwest Research and deeply impressive Latin American Holdings (such as the Donald C. Turpen Collection). In the area of Mexican culture and history, this library is surely one of the finest institutions in the nation. A major reason for this distinction is the astute leadership of Dr. Russell Davidson, who headed the Latin American section at the Zimmerman. Over the past decade he and Dr. Kathleen Howe, the Curator of Permanent Collections at the University Art Museum, deftly coordinated their efforts with those of Peter Walch, Director of the University Art Museum, and Stella de Sá Rego, the Archivist of the Center for Southwest Research, to acquire a huge number of Mexican prints, photographs, and books from the first half of the twentieth century for the collections at UNM.

The remarkable result of their joint archival and curatorial efforts is that UNM now has a collection of prints by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) which, as national rankings go, is second only to that of the Library of Congress in scope and quality. Moreover, the entire Archive of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (with its hundreds of unpublished primary documents) is now on microfilm in the Center for Southwest Research at UNM. Most recently, the Latin American Collection in the Zimmerman was augmented considerably by the acquisition of the ten thousand posters (silkscreens and photo-offsets) in the Slick Collection of Graphic Art, with strong holdings in Cuban and Nicaraguan posters. When added to the TGP print holdings (and the unsurpassed collection of photographs from Latin America), this immense new collection now makes the Zimmerman one of the foremost repositories in the entire United States for the graphic arts in Latin America, with special emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Surprisingly, parts of this book were written during 1998 and 1999 while I was a Fellow at the Collegium Budapest in Hungary. Despite its considerable geographic and cultural remove from Latin America, Central Europe proved to be a thought-provoking place in which to consider some of the key issues at stake in this study. After all, the challenging topics of art and the state, along with those of socialism and democracy, were discussed at length by the outstanding group of Fellows from Central Europe at this exceptional institution. In several respects I owe thanks not only to Rector Gabor Klaniczay and Secretary Fred Girod at the Collegium, but also to many of the Fellows during the academic year of 1998–99: Prof. Dr. Franz-Joachim Verspohl, Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp, Prof. Dr. Martin Warnke, Prof. Dr. Anna Wessely, Prof. Dr. Wolfram Hogrebe, Dr. Adam Bžoch, Dr. Marina Blagojevic, Dr. Líbora Oates-Indruchova, Dr. Claire Chevrolet, and Ms. Anke Doberauer. All of them gave me much to think about and some of those thoughts have found their way into this book.

Finally, I would like to convey warm thanks to my editors Gillian Malpass and Elizabeth McWilliams at Yale University Press, to my friend Feliza Medrano for helping me to prepare the manuscript, to my parents Dr. and Mrs. Albert Craven, and to my partner Susanne Baackmann.

David Craven, July 2001 and May 2006

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