The 1950s and early 1960s in Brazil gave birth to a period of incredible optimism and economic development. In The Affinity of Neoconcretism, Mariola V. Alvarez argues that the Neoconcretists—a group of artists and poets working together in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to 1961—formed an important part of this national transformation. She maps the interactions of the Neoconcretists and discusses how the artists and poets collaborated to challenge existing divides between high and low art and between fields such as fine art and dance. This book reveals how art and intellectual work in Brazil occurred within a local political and social context and also emerged from the transnational movement of artists, artworks, published materials, and ideas.

Books in the Studies on Latin American Art series encompass studies of art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. International and cosmopolitan in scope, the series seeks to address the production, exhibition, and dissemination of art in and between countries and continents. This series is supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Author: Mariola V. Alvarez