The Grapevine

Visual culture in Latin America, like visual culture everywhere, is shaped and influenced by the social and political histories that define the realities of the place. The interaction of local traditions with outside cultural influences is instrumental in the formation of social reality.  When considering the elements of visual culture: art and photography, film and television, news and advertising, architecture, fashion, design, and the very look of contemporary life itself, the integration of these images is what constructs social, political and cultural meaning in the creation of identity. 

In the varied nations that constitute Latin America, manifestations of visual culture are inextricably bound to a history of colonization and military dictatorship.  Throughout each nation’s struggle for independence, civil war and the horrors of state imposed terror have (to staggering degrees and at varying periods during the twentieth century) informed visual culture with a uniquely political dimension.  The belief that art…

Okay, I won’t quarrel with cause/effect/outcome. I will quote a wise southern woman who lived through it all :

“Non-violence does violence to us all.”

It is my opinion that Americans who by birthright were entitled to every right and responsibility of citizenship should never have had to survive years of that particular iteration of racist domestic terrorism to be able to exercise those rights. Many did not survive, black and white, and I, for one, will never forgive our government for a single death or attack from the first sit-in forward.

…in 1863, the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first black regiment from the North, paraded in full dress uniform on Boston Common. Crowds cheered as 1,007 black soldiers and 37 white officers passed in review. After ceremonies at the State House, they marched to Battery Wharf and boarded steamships for South Carolina. Just seven weeks later, 74 men and their commanding officer, Robert Gould Shaw, were killed in an heroic assault on Fort Wagner. On Memorial Day 1897, 60 veterans of the 54^th were among hundreds of people who gathered on the Common for the unveiling of Augustus Saint-Gaundens’ Memorial to Robert Shaw and the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment. This statue remains one of the great works of public art in the country.