Adele Nelson

Studies on Latin American Art

University of California Press

Book cover features a geometric canvas with cream, black, and deep-red shapes, overlaid with title and author information in serif font.
Authors
  • Adele Nelson
Info

2022
Hardcover
392 pages
7 × 9 in.
ISBN 9780520379848


Publisher's Description
Art produced outside hegemonic centers is often seen as a form of derivation or relegated to a provisional status. Forming Abstraction turns this narrative on its head. In the first book-length study of postwar Brazilian art and culture, Adele Nelson highlights the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil. By focusing on the formation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951; the early activities of artists Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Ivan Serpa; and the ideas of critics like Mário Pedrosa, Nelson illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of both local and international forms. The book ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in a newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.

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 proudly supported by a gift from ISLAA.



/

50 East 78th Street

New York, NY 10075

Tue–Fri: 12–6 PM

Sat–Mon: Closed

Based in New York City, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) expands scholarship, public engagement, and the international visibility of art from Latin America.

Instagram

Copyright © 2023

Institute for Studies on Latin American Art