How a constellation of Latin American artists explored the body, power, and emancipation—and expanded the meanings of feminist art.   In The Political Body, art historian Andrea Giunta explores gender and power in the work of Latin American artists from the 1960s to the present. Questioning the social place of women and proposing alternative understandings of biological bodies, these artists eroded repressive systems and created symbolic strategies of resistance to dictatorships, racism, and marginalization.   Giunta presents close readings of works—paintings, films, photography, multimedia art, installations, and performances—by a myriad of artists spanning from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay to Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Examining themes of visibility, subjectivity, empathy, and liberation, The Political Body tells the story of an ongoing revolution, providing an active intervention in the history of feminist art in and beyond Latin America.

The profile of Latin American abstract art in North America and Europe has dramatically increased over the past decade or so, thanks in large part to the activities of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. However, this is the first publication to specifically address the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements, spanning the 1930s through to the 1970s, and focusing on centers of activity throughout Latin America, in cities such as Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Caracas. In these decades, artists such as Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jesus Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Judith Lauand, Geraldo de Barros, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Luiz Sacilotto, Willys de Castro and Ferreira Gullar infused European Concrete art with fresh energy and warmth, extending it into the realms of performance and interactive sculpture (as seen in the works of Clark, Pape and Oiticica). The book organizes this rich range of work into five thematic sections: "Geometry," "Illusion," "Dialogue," "Vibration" and "Universalism." Accompanying an exhibition at the Reina Sofia, "Concrete Invention" also includes texts by several of the artists; an essay by sound artist and scholar Steve Roden; a questionnaire on the legacy of these movements answered by Luis Camnitzer, Jesus Carillo, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy and Ana Longoni; and a series of geometric-abstract gatefolds designed for the catalogue by Jose Leon Cerrillo.

Gyula Kosice (born 1924) is an innovative Argentine artist and poet. His constructions and sculptures were inspired as much by local discussions and disputes in the cafes of 1940s Buenos Aires as by the international avant-garde. In dialogue with Gabriel Perez-Barreiro in this latest volume from the Fundacion Cisneros' "Conversaciones/Conversations "series, Kosice recalls his contributions to an era of hotly debated movements and manifestos; the magazine "Arturo"; the formation of Arte Madi; his interactive mobiles; and his groundbreaking use of materials like neon and water to articulate a futuristic vision that includes "Hydrospatial City," a community suspended in space.

Argentinian figurative artist Antonio Berni (1905-1981) is known for his aesthetic originality and for art steeped in social commentary. In the 1950s, he inaugurated a series of works that documented the lives of two fictional characters, Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel. Through the stories of Juanito, a denizen of Argentina's shantytowns, and Ramona, who rises from the working class to the upper echelons of society, Berni addressed topics from industrialization to neocolonialism to economic backwardness and their effects on the population of underdeveloped countries. Written by leading scholars of Latin American art, this handsome volume presents the first comprehensive survey of the internationally acclaimed Juanito and Ramona series. Richly illustrated with more than 250 color images, the volume brings together nearly two decades of Berni's monumental, mixed-media reliefs and assemblages, experimental works on paper, and sculptural constructions made of found, everyday objects.

The 1960s were heady years in Argentina. Visual artists, curators, and critics sought to fuse art and politics; to broaden the definition of art to encompass happenings and assemblages; and, above all, to achieve international recognition for new, cutting-edge Argentine art. A bestseller in Argentina, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics is an examination of the 1960s as a brief historical moment when artists, institutions, and critics joined to promote an international identity for Argentina's visual arts. The renowned Argentine art historian and critic Andrea Giunta analyzes projects specifically designed to internationalize Argentina's art and avant-garde during the 1960s: the importation of exhibitions of contemporary international art, the sending of Argentine artists abroad to study, the organization of prize competitions involving prestigious international art critics, and the export of exhibitions of Argentine art to Europe and the United States. She looks at the conditions that made these projects possible-not least the Alliance for Progress, a U.S. program of "exchange" and "cooperation" meant to prevent the spread of communism through Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution-as well as the strategies formulated to promote them. She describes the influence of Romero Brest, prominent art critic, supporter of abstract art, and director of the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Tocuato Di Tella (an experimental art center in Buenos Aires); various group programs such as Nueva Figuracion and Arte Destructivo; and individual artists including Antonio Berni, Alberto Greco, Leon Ferrari, Marta Minujin, and Luis Felipe Noe. Giunta's rich narrative illuminates the contentious postwar relationships between art and politics, Latin America and the United States, and local identity and global recognition.