In line with an international tendency at the end of the 20th century, some Latin American artists returned to more-realistic, figurative representations. Argentine Antonio Berni used figuration to speak to contemporary social and political concerns. In the 1960s and ’70s he created two fictional characters—Juanito Laguna, a street urchin, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute—and depicted their lives in his paintings. Although these characters symbolize urban poverty, Berni portrayed them with humour and compassion in large canvases that combine a flattened figurative style with mixed-medium collage.

Figuration also drove Nicaraguan-born Armando Morales, who achieved fame in the 1960s for his boldly painted geometric abstractions. In the 1980s he created classically inspired images that recalled the proto-Surrealist style of Giorgio de Chirico. Although Morales lived in Europe, his art made reference to the political revolution in his homeland that brought the Sandinistas (so named for the Nicaraguan revolutionary César Augusto Sandino) to power in 1979. His painting Farewell to Sandino (1985), for example, commemorates the 1930s precursors of the revolution; the figures are composed as a sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation of the saints”), and their faces are de-emphasized by blurring and shading. His lush tropical forests, pressing in upon the viewer, recall paintings by José Gamarra, a slightly younger Uruguayan who also depicted dense forests inhabited by people dating back to the time of the conquest. In Gamarra’s Links (1983), what may be the figure of Sandino appears like a vision to a bow-carrying Indian. Such fantastic images can be related to the magic realism of Latin American literature. Although neither Morales nor Gamarra lived in Latin America during the height of their fame, their subject matter refers to archetypal images of the region: bandolier-draped revolutionaries, thick jungles, exotic animals, and an unlikely mix of people.

New folk trends also developed during this period. In Chile, after the 1970s military crackdown under Augusto Pinochet, women commemorated the lives of loved ones tortured, jailed, or “disappeared”— kidnapped and presumably killed by the regime—with fabric remnants stitched on burlap, known as arpilleras (“burlaps”). Another form developed in the Central Andes, where tourist enthusiasm created a market for Indian textiles and portable wooden altars. In the Caribbean, tourists created a demand for Panamanian Kuna Indian molas, trade cloth panels decorated with cut-out patterns that express the Kuna worldview.

Trained artists often adopted folk styles dating back to the conquest, an attitude buttressed by a political rejection of European high culture at the end of the century. In the 1970s Oswaldo Viteri of Ecuador glued onto wooden boards tiny brightly coloured textile dolls bought from highland Indians. These he then selectively painted dark or left untouched, sometimes regimenting them, other times placing them randomly—thus suggesting how the indigenous population is manipulated by institutional forces.

Religious folk images, another form of popular imagery, were also adopted by many artists. The ex-voto, a small commemorative painting honouring the intervention of a saint in its owner’s life, had been produced as early as the 18th century. Formed out of tin or other scrap material, this folk art continued throughout the national period. The untrained style of ex-voto painting had been appropriated at mid-century by Kahlo, who believed they were the most authentic expression of Latin American art. Many late 20th-century assemblage artists and painters, such as Julio Galán of Mexico, also emulated the personal subject and naive style of the ex-voto. Bárbaro Rivas of Venezuela used cheaply printed reproductions of religious images, such as the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in his collages of the 1970s. Juan Camilo Uribe of Colombia combined a Sacred Heart print with another of an admired Venezuelan doctor to create his own collage valentine in Declaration of Love to Venezuela (1976).

A painter of Japanese-Peruvian descent, Tilsa Tsuchiya, used aspects of her Peruvian heritage to create her own folklore, notably of “birdwomen.” One of her paintings (1974) transformed the vertical, biomorphically carved “hitching-post” sun stone at Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, into a figure rising like a Maya Chac Mool. Linked in some ways to earlier Surrealist experiments, Tsuchiya’s work also addressed the contemporary issues of gender and identity.

Political and social revolutions in Latin America in the late 20th century inspired a resurgence of muralism as a means to communicate with the non-gallery-going populace. Artists in Cuba (beginning in the 1960s) and Nicaragua (in the 1980s) created murals painted on public walls, often as a group effort without any individual artist’s signature. Following Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973, the Ramona Parra Brigade painted untreated walls with commercial paints, thus ensuring the impermanence of their work. The act of creation was more important to them than the durability of the finished product.

Economic realities informed the work of many artists at the end of the 20th century. The rapid devaluation of South American currencies from the 1980s inspired Jac Leirner, a Brazilian assemblage artist, to make long strings of worthless cruzeiro notes, which she or curators rearranged into beautiful curves wherever they were exhibited. In this way, money served as the raw material of art, rather than as a final reward for the artist’s talents. Brazilian Cildo Meireles stamped cruzeiro banknotes in 1970 with a political question—“Quem matou Herzog?” (“Who killed Herzog?”)—that put into doubt the official cause of death (suicide) of journalist Vladimir Herzog, who had been a vocal opponent of the military dictatorship. Meireles placed this question on the very money printed to support the regime suspected of conspiracy. Additional statements he stamped included “Eleições Diretas” (“Direct Elections”) and “Yankees Go Home”; the latter phrase has been interpreted as criticism of alleged U.S. complicity with Brazil’s military dictatorships. The notes were then put into circulation, creating a tension between their low value as money and their higher value as propaganda.

The realities of the Latin American economy affected art in other ways. Some artists exploited the junk of industrial society in their art, partly as a way to save money but also as a way to reflect the marginality of Latin America in the industrialized world order. In the 1990s, using discarded material to express the garbage-filled environment in which the poor eke out a living, the Chilean artist Francisca (“Pancha”) Núñez constructed large sculptures from refuse, especially textiles, that she found in the streets around her home.

Performance art also gave voice to political and social issues in Latin America at the end of the century. After the repression of the Chilean revolution, artists of the Avanzada group created performances that pointed out the abuses of the new regime. For example, in 1980 Carlos Leppe had himself videotaped as he was imprisoned in a plaster cast. By this he suggested his abuse and confinement by society. Similarly, Diamela Eltit inflicted cuts and bruises on herself in a brothel in 1980. She then washed the sidewalk outside while the video of her self-abuse was projected on the wall opposite the brothel. In so doing, she alluded to the abuse prostitutes accept to escape poverty while also suggesting the need to clean the stains of a corrupt society.

Latin American artists also used video, an emerging international medium, to address political concerns. After moving to New York City, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar in 1987 used a computerized light board over Times Square to confront viewers with his message; he superimposed the statement “This is not America” on a map of the United States. When the image electronically changed, the word America was superimposed on a map of the whole Western hemisphere. Remaining in New York even after the return of democracy in Chile, Jaar expanded his scope to dramatize abuses worldwide, such as experiences of Haitian boat people or the indifference of the mass media toward the genocide in Rwanda. These works were installed in museum settings.

Throughout the 20th century many Latin American artists had become expatriates in Paris, New York, and elsewhere in search of artistic stimulus, better economic prospects, and political stability. However, with the return of democracy to countries such as Argentina and Brazil and the successful transfer of power to civilian rule in other countries, Latin America began to retain more artists and provide more economic opportunities. By 2000 Buenos Aires housed more than 60 contemporary art galleries as well as Latin America’s leading auction market, held in the municipal pawn shop. Moreover, major New York auction houses devoted entire sessions to modern Latin American art, signaling the rising importance of this area in the international marketplace. At the turn of the 21st century, as the international art world focused on the social and political issues that had long occupied artists from the region, Latin American art increasingly gained a prominent place in the global discourse about art and its role in society.