This volume brings together papers presented at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, held at the University of Virginia in 1989. The papers focus on diverse and multiple aspects of the visual arts in Latin America since independence, with special emphasis on the arts role in the construction and consolidation of national cultures and identities. As might be expected, of central concern are sources and resources for academic research in this very broad field, ranging from architecture and painting to photography, film, posters, and textiles. The collection is divided into five parts: Latin American Diversity in the Arts, Visual Art Forms, Art Sources, Art Collections, and Marginalized Peoples and Ideas. Each part includes 3 to 15 entries.
The origin of the volume’s contributions—an academic conference—explains both its strengths and its shortcomings. The strong points are the great diversity of topics covered and the volume’s usefulness as a reference book. Numerous entries, especially, though not exclusively, in parts 3 and 4, include excellent bibliographies and reference lists for such subjects as Bolivian, Chilean, and Central American art; Latin American government documents on the arts; Andean weaving; Sandinista revolutionary posters; dramatic arts; photography; and music. The volume includes descriptions of some important art collections and information on art cataloguing, bibliographic control, copyright issues in the use and reproduction of photographs, and possibilities for using optical disks to distribute information about the region’s art.
As for the shortcomings, gathering papers on a wide variety of topics with an unspecified degree of refereed selection or editorial intervention inevitably produces uneven results. This is especially evident in those cases in which bibliographic sources are secondary to more focused “academic” presentations. The limitations of the conference format preclude sustained intellectual argument or analytical depth. Thus the five papers in part 1, for example, address the common theme of the relationship between the arts and the state or, in a broader sense, between art and politics. Dealing with Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Cuba (in comparison to Mexico), and Haiti, they range from studies that recognize and attempt to interpret the problematic, often contradictory nature of the relationship to essays that simply accept that relationship as natural and offer little more than a descriptive chronology of the state’s role as Maecenas.
Despite its rather unwieldy scope, Artistic Representations of Latin American Diversity will serve its intended purpose as a research tool in a broad, diverse, and all too often unexplored area of cultural practice in Latin America.
