The Americas

Yente’s Object (1946): Strange Presence

A trailblazing figure in the Southern Cone art scene of the middle decades of the 20th century, Yente (Eugenia Crenovich) has, until recently, received little recognition for her critical contributions to abstraction in Argentina. This essay discusses the context in which the artist realized one of her most unusual pieces, Object (1946), a work of art that defies clear alignment with either painting or sculpture.

Banana Craze: María José Argenzio and Oscar Figueroa Chaves on the Impact of the Banana Market in Ecuador and Costa Rica

Starting with an examination of the impact of the global banana market on Latin America, this text analyzes the work of María José Argenzio and Óscar Figueroa Chaves, two artists who expose how multinational corporations operating in Latin America have benefited from monoculture and extraction practices in the region.

The Modernist Gaze and the City: Notes on Photography and Urban Repertoires in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s and ’50s

This essay is the first in a series of texts on the Foto Cine Club Bandeirante, a group of amateur photographers whose ambitious and innovative works embodied the abundant originality of postwar Brazilian culture. The series coincides with the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964, on view at the Museum of Modern Art from May 8 to September 26, 2021.

Regina Vater’s Ecofeminist Rituals of Waste and Renewal, 1983–88

In recent years, the Brazilian artist Regina Vater (born 1943) has gained renewed attention for her contributions to Latin American and Latinx feminist art histories of performance. However, her artistic explorations of ecology and the environment are virtually unexamined. This essay considers these subjects in Vater’s work through an analysis of several site-specific, participatory events that together address ecological themes of waste and renewal.