Published last month, the fourth issue of the journal on our Burlington Contemporary digital platform is the first to have a theme – Art from Latin America. Like each of the preceding issues, its contents were submitted in response to a call for articles and so their subjects, which range from Surrealism in Mexico to indigenous art in Paraguay, could not have been predicted. Although the authors were not provided with any editorial guidance over and above the academic peer-review process, this issue has proved no exception to the way that, as previously, an overriding  theme has come to the fore. In the second issue, for example, a number of the articles discussed artists who looked back to avant-garde practices in the 1970s.(1) One theme that emerges from the articles in the latest journal is an interest in borders and barriers – between cultures and countries most obviously, but also the metaphorical borders involved in, for example, conceptions of the centre and periphery.

When the call for articles for this issue was first posted, in December 2019, the coronavirus had yet to push out of the headlines many of the issues of border control that had been global problems for years – the migrant crisis in Europe, for example, or Donald Trump’s insistence on extending the wall between Mexico and the United States. Free movement of peoples was still thought of as a matter involving political refugees or economic migrants. A year on, there is scarcely anyone in the world who has not been affected by restrictions imposed in an attempt to halt a pathogen that does not recognise boundaries of country, culture or class.

Although the articles in this issue concern art created before the pandemic, they raise questions about borders that feel especially resonant in a world where travel is so difficult. For example, in 1992 the Mexicanborn artist Laura Anderson Barbata, whose complex multi-disciplinary practice is the subject of an article by Madeline Murphy Turner, travelled to the Amazon region of Venezuela, where she encountered members of the Ye’kuana making traditional dugout canoes. When she asked if they would accept her as an apprentice, they replied ‘what can you teach us in return?’ She proposed a papermaking project with them and other local communities, who used the new practice to circulate their histories, so allowing them to take control of their own narratives. This encounter has guided Anderson Barbata’s subsequent artmaking, in which ideas of the circulation and exchange of knowledge, practices and language challenge constructed societal borders.

By contrast, an article by Sofia Gotti on indigenous artists in Paraguay raises questions about the way ideas of unification can be deployed for colonialist purposes. Gotti’s examination of the worldviews expressed by a number of Guaraní, Ishír Chamacoco and Nivaclé artists working in Asunción and the region of El Chaco raises issues familiar in other countries – Australia comes to mind – of the way indigenous art confronts environmental damage and decolonisation. In a way that has not previously been explored, these themes are set by Gotti in the context of the concept of mestizaje. This word refers to the creation of a national identity based on a synthesis of Spanish and native cultures that, although promoted as harmonious and egalitarian, has been instrumental in the subjugation of indigenous groups in general and women in particular.

Insistence on the divisions between nations or culture can obscure the way artists work across such barriers. Little known in Europe, the artist Alan Glass is positioned as a Mexican Surrealist with a complex identity in an article by Abigail Susik and Kristoffer Noheden. Born in Montreal in 1932, Glass studied painting in Paris, where his work was discovered by André Breton and Benjamin Péret. In 1963 he moved to Mexico City, became a naturalised Mexican citizen and played a significant part in the Mexican Surrealist art scene. Exploring the ways in which Glass’s work speaks to questions of displacement and migration, the authors write, ‘Traces of the material and visual culture of Mexico proliferate in Glass’s extensive oeuvre and are in some cases woven into a transnational amalgam of French, Canadian and American sources and references’.

An especially powerful theme is the way that art engages with the idea of self-representation and autonomy in immigrant cultures and communities. An article by Caroline Tracey on photographs of the Chicanx community – American people of Mexican origin or descent – in East Los Angeles discusses the work of Guadalupe Rosales and Graciela Iturbide. Rosales grew up in the 1990s in East Los Angeles, the daughter of Mexican immigrants from the state of Michoacán, and later worked for ten years in New York. In 2015 she started the Instagram account @veteranas_and_rucas, where she has now posted nearly 5,000 photographs submitted by the people they portray. A method of accurate representation, the photographs document a turbulent decade that was often defined by violence. Tracey compares Rosales’s platform with the work of the eminent Mexican photographer Iturbide, specifically her Cholos series from the late 1980s. Examining the idea of an ‘outsider’ looking in, Tracey assesses the way both artists experiment with assumptions within, as well as about, Mexican and Chicanx communities.

Boundaries of a very different sort – between history and fiction – are the subject of an article by Corey Dzenko that focuses on two Brazilian artists – Marcelo do Campo, well known in the late 1960s and the 1970s for his radical performance works and films, and Marcelo Cidade, who grew up in the São Paulo punk scene of the 1980s, participated in the 1990s hip hop and graffiti movements and worked in New York during the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, both men were invented by the Brazilian artist Dora Longo Bahia while studying at the University of São Paulo. The convincing careers she imagined for them possess an implied critique of the way critics have legitimised Latin American artists by highlighting their training in Europe or the United States and their relationship to an earlier and largely European avant-garde. Longo Bahia’s metafiction was also a strategy for a female artist to insert herself invisibly into an art-historical narrative concerned overwhelmingly with men.

The idea of a journal focusing on art from the region being edited and published in London in itself raises uncomfortable issues of barriers, given that Latin America has so often in the past been conceptualised as peripheral to Europe’s (or North America’s) centrality. The substantial barriers – cultural, political and economic – that exist in the worlds of both art and scholarship are not likely to be dissolved soon, but at least the emphasis placed by the artists under discussion in this journal on the permeability and shifting nature of the borders that separate us is of consolatory value, especially at a time when even those who pride themselves on their freedom have learned what it is like to be confined.

1. See ‘Editorial: ‘Forward to the 1970s’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 161 (2019), p.983.