Artes Visuales: The Latin American Avant-Garde in Print, Harper Montgomery et al., 2026, Hunter College Art Galleries/Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Graciela Iturbide’s “Nuestra Senora de Las Iguanas” is one of the Mexican photographer’s most memorable images that captures the confident self-assurance of an Indigenous woman trader in an era when doing so was radical.
But there is much more to this image than meets the eye, taken as it was in 1979 in the market of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, a small city with a turbulent and often violent history in which women have played a distinctive role.
A legacy of the Zapotec culture, Juchitán is remarkable for its matriarchal structure through which women largely run the economy and community institutions—a phenomenon captured among others by the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein.
Despite the subject (called Zobeida), the photograph dubbed by locals as “The Juchitán Medusa” does not exoticise its protagonist but empowers her with a pragmatic, authoritative but nonetheless intensely magical quality.
The image was first brought to an international audience through the trailblazing magazine Artes Visuales (issue number 25, 1980), which is the subject of this fascinating collection published by Hunter College Art Galleries and ISLAA as the catalogue for an exhibition.
The book reflects on the extraordinary contribution to documenting the arts in Latin America made by the pioneering Carla Stellweg, who co-founded Artes Visuales at the dawn of the 1970s when progressive artists in the region faced existential questions that required deep solidarity.
The Dutch art historian, curator and writer was deputy director of the Rufino Tamayo Museum at its opening and collaborated closely with Fernando Gamboa, director of the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City.
Together they launched Artes Visuales,the first contemporary avant-garde bilingual visual arts magazine published in Latin America, which was able to tap into Luis Echeverria’s cultural project aiming to counter unrest caused by his ruling party’s massacre at Tlatelolco.
Between 1973 and 1981, 29 editions of Artes Visuales were published on artistic themes so diverse they defied categorisation, with an initial focus strongly upon Mexico.
As Harper Montgomery writes in her introduction: “Leftist liberation movements of the ’60s had failed, and military dictatorships had grown so strong in some countries that they appeared permanent.
“The only way to address the crises was together—as an interconnected community of artists and critics, many of them living in Mexico City or in New York because they had been exiled from their home countries and who were tracked down and gathered together thanks to Stellweg’s tenacity.”
Crucially, many of the contributors to the magazine lamented Mexico’s lack of a vigorous art criticism or sought to bring to wider attention and celebrate its artists who had not received their due recognition.
Iturbide’s image from Juchitán is reproduced in a chapter by Nina Piper and Michelle Rakowsky looking at the contribution made by Artes Visuales to recording and assessing Mexican photography, particularly by women.
Inevitably, the key character who recurs on the magazine’s pages is Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a self-taught photographer who had worked alongside the Americans Edward Weston and Paul Strand and the Italian Tina Modotti in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s.
Álvarez Bravo would later teach at the National University of Mexico, where he mentored a new generation of Mexican photographers—including Iturbide, who became his assistant in 1969 and worked for him for two years.
In 1975, Álvarez Bravo arranged for her first exhibition at the Orozco Gallery in Mexico City which was featuring female photographers.
That same year, Alfredo Josckowicz wrote in Artes Visuales that Iturbide, then only six years into her photographic practice, expertly drew the viewer into her world with “emotion and surprise … without attempting to reach ‘conclusions’”.
Another celebrated image by this photographer, also reproduced in the magazine (issue 5, 1975), was “Soloi, Panamá”, a photograph of an Indigenous girl taken on a march during General Omar Torrijos’s attempt to establish a leftwing regime.
Iturbide visited Panama in 1973 after being invited by Mexico’s Communist Party to record images during the Peace Congress there in Panama City.
The contribution to the visual arts made by Stellweg, who died a year ago, is unrivalled and Hunter’s exhibition and this accompanying collection represent fitting tributes to an unsung heroine of Latin American culture determined to afford the region the recognition it deserves.
Piper and Rakowsky write: “As the creative force behind Artes Visuales, Stellweg highlighted art and cultural movements that were innovative, and not widely featured in art publications.
“Stellweg’s vision and persistence, along with her commitment to contemporary photographers, especially women, allowed Artes Visuales to shine a light over the course of many years on the relatively underrecognized artistic production of photographers in Mexico and across Latin America.”
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