Gaudêncio Fidelis - Repression, Resistance, and Spirituality in LatAm Art

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

This lesson examines artistic production across Latin America during periods of political and social conflict, when authoritarian regimes and state censorship affected cultural expression and public discourse. Early modernist experiments in Brazil, including the work of Anita Malfatti, Emiliano Cavalcanti, and Tarsila do Amaral, whose contributions to the Anthropophagic movement reinterpreted European modernism through local cultural references and strategies of appropriation and hybridity, are going to be examined, along with the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, with figures such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica. The lesson also considers political performance and counter-narrative practices in Argentina and Chile, including Tucumán Arde, Marta Minujín, Carlos Leppe, and the CADA collective, whose interventions in public space and ephemeral installations confronted state violence while fostering civic engagement. In Ecuador, the VAN movement, represented by Enrique Tábara, Theo Constanté Parra, Juan Villafuerte, and Luis Molinari, is presented to show how abstraction and modernist strategies were combined with local symbolism to assert cultural autonomy and respond to political and social transformations. Neo-expressionist tendencies in Ecuador and Chile are also considered through the work of Manuel Felguerez, Teresa Cito, Jan Hendrix, Carlos Eduardo Maturana Piña, Bororo, and Samy Benmayor. Finally, the lesson addresses the political deployment of folklore and vernacular practices, showing how artists such as Bárbaro Rivas, Tilsa Tsuchiya, and Juan Camilo Uribe, and collectives like Las Arpilleras mobilized traditional imagery, narrative forms, and community-based strategies to confront social injustice and preserve collective memory.

Gaudêncio Fidelis is an art historian and curator with extensive experience in curating exhibitions (he has curated more than 50 exhibitions) and publishing. His work mainly focuses on Brazilian and Latin American art, institutional and cultural politics, and issues of social inclusion, identity, and freedom of expression in the arts. Now Adjunct Associate Professor at the City University of New York.