This Latinx Heritage Month, mitú is highlighting the root of Latinx joy. We’re digging deep into the subcultures and traditions that have shaped our communities – the reason for our song and dance. We continue to build thriving communities because of our strong roots and with the support of State Farm.
Surrealism was born in France at the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps as a reflection of the metamorphoses that the world was going through at that time. World War I was underway and psychology was in its infancy, with a special emphasis on dreams and consciousness.
New insights into the human mind, coupled with the socio-political climate of the early 1900s, led artists to look within themselves for inspiration, exploring the unexplored corners of their psyche, not only to harness the power of imagination, but to tried and understood everything. About them.
As the Surrealist movement evolved, artists became increasingly influenced by mysticism, mythology, and indigenous practices, drawing from these belief systems to craft their alternate realities.
Latin American artists in particular had a wealth of culture and history to tap into, which is exactly what they did.
The Latin Surrealists did it even better, fearlessly portraying the complexities of wifehood, sisterhood, and motherhood during a time when prejudice against women was at an all-time high (thanks a lot, Freud!).
The Latin Surrealists used unusual lines, colors, and shapes to transport audiences to lush and impossible metaphysical landscapes, often depicting the erotic, the terrifying, and the sublime at the stroke of a brush or the click of a camera.
Here are nine surrealist Latino artists who break the mold. Some of them are already household names, while others may just be floating around in the collective consciousness. No matter what, they all are INthe real deal.
Frida Kahlo
Born in Mexico City in 1907, Frida Kahlo is the poster child of the surrealist movement in Latin America. When asked about her source of inspiration, she once famously replied, “I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my reality.”
After suffering serious injuries in a bus accident in 1925, she was bedridden for nearly two years. During this time, her parents gave her a special easel and placed a mirror above her bed so she could take self-portraits. These self-portraits would go on to be her most iconic paintings, as she often used her art to depict physical and emotional suffering.
For example, Las dos Fridas, which is one of her most famous works of art, alludes to the dualism of her identity in several ways. She portrays herself as a modern Mexican woman and an indigenous woman, single and married, blooded and pure, loved and unloved, fertile and barren, broken and whole; a single red vein connecting the two Fridas through their hearts. When asked about the death, she said: “I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope I never go back.”
Luchita Hurtado
Luchita Hurtado actually met Kahlo and even attended a party in her hospital room, which Hurtado would later describe as “not unlike surrealist theater.” The Venezuelan-born artist moved to New York when she was 8 years old and was encouraged by her stepfather to paint.
In 1946, she saw the first pictures of Earth taken from space and remembers being deeply moved by the sense of “gentleness” and “interconnection” between people on this little blue planet, a theme that would later permeate her work her.
In her series “I am”, she created different portraits from the perspective of the subject looking at her body, confirming the fact that artists invented the selfie. In some variants, she is nude and holding berries, which alluded to female sexuality. In others, she is seen holding a cigarette, which symbolized female empowerment. Hurtado passed away at the age of 99 in 2020.
Ana Mendieta
The suspicious and untimely death of this artist has often eclipsed her work, which is why it is so important to include her here. Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 and fled to America in 1961 to escape the communist regime of Fidel Castro. Her work was largely autobiographical, focusing on exile, feminism, sexuality, nature and identity. She worked with mixed media, often using earth and other natural materials, in addition to being a performance artist.
One of her first performance pieces was titled “The Rape Scene” and featured Mendieta stripped from the waist down, bound at the wrists and bent over a table, blood smeared all over her legs and glass broken on the floor to illustrate implied violence. and stage war.
Her surrealist art shows a return to nature, as the silhouette of a nude figure is often presented among fields, bodies of water, and other natural landscapes, juxtaposing the raw human body with the raw earth; a form she called “body-ground” art.
She died aged 36 in 1985 after allegedly falling from the window of her 34th floor apartment in New York City following a heated argument with her husband, Carl Andre. Andre was initially charged with murder but later acquitted, although the court of public opinion was never so convinced.
Maria Martinez-Cañas
Like Mendieta, María Martínez-Cañas emigrated from Cuba to Puerto Rico to escape political turmoil after Castro rose to power, though she would not stay there for long. She moved to the United States, studied photography in Philadelphia and Chicago, and received a Fulbright-Hays scholarship to study in Spain.
Martínez-Cañas considers herself a Cuban-born, Puerto Rican-raised American citizen, and these intersections have largely influenced her work. She is a photo-based artist, but likes to challenge the boundaries of the medium. Her surrealist art is a constant search for identity, bridging the gaps between all its different parts.
Her printed collage entitled “Años Continuos” is a paradigm of “Poème-Objet”, which was a marker of the Surrealist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. This small movement was characterized by mixing found objects with text. The result is a dizzying and fascinating frenzy of city maps, memories and the weird. Martínez-Cañas is still working, with recent exhibitions at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida.
Alicia Carletti
Born in 1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Alicia Carletti was very aptly named, as the themes in her work were similar in fairy tale to those of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She used elements of surrealism and magical realism to illustrate the magic of everyday things.
Carletti graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón de Buenos Aires in 1969 and went on to exhibit her work throughout Argentina, New Mexico and New York, just to name a few. She married fellow artist Jorge Álvarro and they had a child together.
Her subjects tend to be teenage girls, frolicking in larger-than-life gardens, sitting at small tables and consuming giant loaves of bread. The interplay between subject and size is a unique feature of her work, creating the sense of uncanny usually associated with surrealism. She passed away in 2017, leaving behind a legacy that is increasingly curious.
Rosa Rolanda
Born in California to a mother of Mexican descent, Rosa Rolanda wore many hats. She was an artist, dancer and choreographer, starting on Broadway in the 1920s. Eventually, she met Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and they moved together to Mexico City, where Rolanda began to create her art.
She experimented with photograms, which are made without a camera by placing desired objects on top of a light-sensitive material and then exposing it to light. These were very surreal in nature, as were her self-portraits, often depicting her inner turmoil.
In the true spirit of toxic artistic couples, the relationship soured in 1952 when Covarrubias left Rolanda for a dancer 30 years his junior. Still, the emotional turmoil made it a remarkable art. Rolanda passed away in Mexico City at the age of 74.
Barbara Rivera
Drawing on her Mexican and Cuban roots, California native Barbara Rivera offers a nuanced representation of her life through her art. Although not classically trained, her passion for art began in elementary school.
Rivera’s art is saturated with bright colors, straddling that metaphysical boundary between realism and surrealism. Her process often involves photographing her subjects and then using the photograph as the basis for her painting. Its blend of the Caribbean with Mesoamerica creates a surprising and visually stunning contrast.
When asked about being self-taught, she said it involved “making a lot of mistakes” and that “you just have to do it.” Now, that sounds like good advice for just about anything. Her work can be purchased online.
Cecilia Porras
Born in Cartagena, Colombia, Cecilia Porras taught herself to paint at a young age. She studied at La facultad de Artes de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, where she went on to design book covers for major writers, including Gabriel García Márquez.
Her style evolved, moving from Caribbean and bucolic landscapes to portraits and abstract scenes. Most importantly, her work was imbued with important feminist themes, depicting women in a state of revolution and prioritizing experimentation over conforming to traditional mediums and ideals.
Black eyes were a common motif in her work, perhaps to symbolize prejudice against women. Apparently, Porras was the surrealist female artist who put Colombia, and more specifically, Cartagena, on the map.
Aimee Garcia Marrero
Marrero is another Cuban mixed media artist based in Havana, Cuba. Born in 1972, she graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in 1996, going on to hold exhibitions throughout the Caribbean, as well as South Korea, Spain and Israel, just to name a few.
The artist’s work provides social commentary on the roles of women in society, often portraying them as toys, villains and medieval girls, where something is always a little weak, mocking conventional ideas of beauty. She uses a variety of materials in her artwork, including yarn and hair to reflect the nuance and texture of her concepts.
In her public art installation, titled “Times of Silence,” Marrero used text and language to create various newspaper collage panels to be exhibited in Time Square’s Broadway Plaza. Newspaper clippings were in different languages, inviting audiences from afar under a false pretense and then shocking them upon closer inspection.
Marrero’s message was to make us think about the ways we receive information, what we do with it afterwards, and the importance of silence.
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