Books in Celebration of Latinx Heritage Month from Perpich Library

September 25, 2023

September 15-October 15 is National Hispanic/Latine/Latinx Heritage Month! The Perpich Library is celebrating by highlighting books in our collection that focus on visual artists and photographers who come from, or whose ancestors come from: Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

All items on this list are available at the Perpich library. Click on titles for more information.

1. Ana Mendieta, Traces edited by Stephanie Rosenthal
During her short career, Ana Mendieta (1948-85) created a body of work that was provocative and radically inventive. Using her own body, together with elemental materials – blood, fire, earth and water – she created visceral ‘tableaus’ and ephemeral ‘earth-body’ sculptures exploring life, death, rebirth and spiritual transformation. Born in Cuba, but sent to the U.S. as a child, much of her art expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement and exile. Encompassing a wealth of drawings, photography and film, Ana Mendieta: Traces provides a comprehensive and illuminating overview of this highly influential artist’s work.

2. Daniel Guzmán: Lost & Found by Daniel Guzmán
Daniel Guzmán, born in Mexico City in 1964, is one of the most important artists of his country’s internationally acclaimed new generation. Lost & Found, a beautifully printed, oversized collection of Guzmán’s trademark drawings and clippings constitutes a concise self-portrait in 64 pages. It is the first book to make Guzmán’s work widely available internationally.

3. From the Ground Up by Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez
The Cuban-born husband and wife team of Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez has worked collaboratively for thirty years, receiving international acclaim for their photographs of subjects in a state of flux. From The Ground Up is a three-part photographic essay focusing on the metamorphosis of the vernacular architecture in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. This fascinating study, comprising photographs taken from the mid-1980s to the present, is surely the most comprehensive record of the design and evolution of this region’s built structures.

4. Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008 by Guillermo Kuitca
Offers a survey of the Argentinean artist Guillermo Kuitca’s work in the United States. This illustrated catalog examines the artist’s production between 1980 and 2008. It emphasizes the artist’s thematic groupings, and drawing, which significantly influenced his notion of painting.

5. Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood edited by Mari Carmen Ramirez
Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) is one of the most influential artists to have emerged from Latin America in the early 20th century. His unique innovations in the medium of wood – constructed three-dimensional grids and planes known as maderas – foreshadow later artistic developments in Europe and the Americas (such as the work of Louise Nevelson). Torres-García was also much celebrated for his work as a modernist painter, teacher, and author. This handsome catalog focuses on Torres-García’s wood constructions and accompanies the first exhibition held in North America of these works and the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States in over forty years.

6. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water edited by Lisa D. Freiman
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. Campos-Pons works primarily in photography, performance, audiovisual media, and sculpture. She is considered a ‘key figure’ among Cuban artists who found their voice in a post-revolutionary Cuba. This is the first full-scale survey of the artist’s career. The book’s title, borrowed from one of her works, evokes the dangerous sea crossings faced by her enslaved ancestors from Africa and her Cuban contemporaries seeking greater freedom in America. The title also evokes a sense of dislocation felt when physical and geopolitical barriers divide family and friends, past and future.

7. Martínez Celaya: Work and Documents 1990–2015 edited by Tessa Blumenberg and David Chickey
In 1990, Enrique Martínez Celaya left a promising career in physics for art and since then he has pursued his work with a singular and uncompromising vision. Working in a variety of media and deeply engaged with philosophy, literature and science, Martínez Celaya has created an expansive body of work that has led him to become one of his generation’s most influential artists. This publication, the product of extensive research from his studio’s archive, traces the development of Martínez Celaya’s thought through previously unpublished photographs; illustrations of hundreds of artworks; archival notes and writings; sketches and drawings for his public projects and exhibitions; excerpts from the critical reception of his work; and an insightful introduction to the artist’s work by art historian and long-time collaborator Daniel A. Siedell.

8. A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi Corazón: The Art of Carmen Lomas Garza by Carmen Lomas Garza
Carmen Lomas Garza is the first Chicana to be the subject of a major traveling retrospective. The artist came of age during the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and El Movimiento helped shape her identity and goals. Lomas Garza’s evocative portraits of faith healings and tamale-making parties, of girls fixing their hair, and children gazing at the moon add a distinctly female perspective to her male compatriots’ earnest depictions of the oppressive living conditions of Chicanos. A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi Corazón presents the artist’s finest works, including paintings, etchings, cut-paper hangings, and altarlike installations.

9. A Selection of Snapshots Taken by Félix González-Torres edited by Alejandro Cesarco
Félix González-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995 after attending university in Puerto Rico. This book presents a selection of snapshots, and accompanying inscriptions, sent by Félix González-Torres to a variety of people between the years 1991 and 1995.The snapshots are quick poetic communiqués, a visual report on Felix’s outlook at particular moments in time, small gestures of hope, pleasure, and desire. They give evidence to some of his multiple fascinations: pets, furniture, collectible dolls, politics, art, friendship, beauty, love, and optimism.

10. Toledo Múltiple curated by Fernando Gálvez de Aguinaga
As Mexico’s most prolific and influential graphic artist, Francisco Toledo has been exploring the fantastical and expanding the expressive range of his printmaking over more than 50 years. This exhibition catalog encompasses a wide range of Toledo’s work, revealing the progression and creative process evidenced in his printmaking.

All items on this list are available at the Perpich Library.