Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War

In Making Art Panamerican, Claire Fox explores the shifting institutional landscape behind mid-twentieth-century attempts to create a unified artistic tradition in the Americas. She inscribes these attempts within the longer history of Pan-Americanism— formulations centered on the perceived or desired unity of the culture and history of the hemisphere’s diverse nations—which spans the last two centuries. Fox’s four chapters combine a keen analysis of an impressive array of archival sources with a lucid interpretation of artworks. The thread that connects the chapters is the career as a cultural bureaucrat of the Cuban-born José Gómez-Sicre (1916–1991). Gómez-Sicre’s career began in the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union (PAU), an office founded in 1910 in Washington, DC, by a series of governments of the Americas and that became the Organization of American States in 1948. US–Latin American cultural relations, a priority for...