Call for papers
LASAR SEGALL MUSEUM JOURNAL
DOSSIER – ISSUE 2/2026
PUBLIC ART FOR MANY PUBLICS: DYNAMICS OF PRODUCTION AND APPROPRIATION OF PUBLIC ART IN LATIN AMERICA
Guest editors:
Rafael Dias Scarelli
Professor of Art and Image History at the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Federal University of Goiás (FAV-UFG). PhD in Social History from the University of São Paulo.
Luis Gómez Mata
Curator at the Museo Nacional de San Carlos. PhD candidate and Master’s in Art History from the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IEE-UNAM).
From the second half of the 19th century onward, and with increasing intensity until the first decades of the following century, the urban space of major Latin American cities became the setting for the installation of numerous public monuments, ranging from magnificent equestrian statues to herms, obelisks, and more modest columns. On the one hand, not only through public sculpture but also through urban toponymy, there was an effort to do justice to the memory of those then recognized as national heroes—figures generally linked to the struggle for emancipation from colonial rule and to the organization of the new nation-state—transforming the urban fabric into a “public lesson in history,” in the words of Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales [1], or into a “textbook of civic religion,” according to Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo[2]. On the other hand, amid the euphoria brought about by economic progress resulting from full national integration into the global market, this furniture of stone and bronze also served to emulate the European model of the cosmopolitan city, seen in the “mirror of Paris,” as José Luis Romero [3] summarized. Latin American public art thus emerged tied to monumental scale and noble materials, as well as to the self-celebratory effort of political and social elites to affirm the successful path toward modernity followed by the young American nations under their guidance.
Many decades later, while part of this urban statuary still stands—amid the justified anti-racist iconoclasm of social movements, the neglect of public authorities toward urban heritage, and the indifference of most contemporary passersby—the public space of Latin American cities has come to host a variety of new forms of artistic and cultural expression. Often with a dissident and questioning bias, contemporary Latin American public art ranges from temporary and ephemeral initiatives to lasting interventions, promoted—with or without the endorsement of urban management bodies—by individual or collective artists and by political and social activist groups. Perhaps the only defining feature shared by this heterogeneous set of works associated with public art is the fact that, by coexisting in public space and before “many publics,” as expressed in the title of our Dossier, they are subject to reinterpretations and re-significations produced by their urban context and by potentially destructive interaction with city dwellers. “Without display cases or guardians to protect them,” as occurs in museums, notes Nestor Garcia Canclini, where “historical objects are removed from history and their intrinsic meaning is frozen in an eternity in which nothing will ever happen again,”[4] monuments and other works of art present in public space are immersed in the contradictions of everyday urban life, competing for space with the nighttime glow of neon lights and with advertising.
The proposal of the dossier Public art for many publics: dynamics of production and appropriation of public art in Latin America is to welcome texts that explore some of the many possibilities of languages, formats, materials, and supports through which contemporary Latin American public art is manifested, from sculptural monuments to mural art and graffiti. We hope that the works will emphasize the “public” dimension of the work or artistic ensemble analyzed, exploring the possible meanings and conflicts that this dimension has engendered, whether in its context of conception or implementation, or throughout the trajectory of these works after their entry into public space. To be in public space and to speak to many publics—what can this mean, and what tensions can it generate, in the present or in the past? These are the questions that will serve as the guiding theme for this Dossier. We believe there could be no more appropriate proposal for the second issue of the Lasar Segall Museum Journal, an open-access publication linked to a public cultural institution that, we hope, will also reach and engage with many reading publics.
[1] Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales. Monumento conmemorativo y espacio público en Iberoamérica. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2004, p. 9 [edição digital].
[2] Mauricio Tenorio Trillo. I Speak of the City. Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
[3] José Luis Romero. Breve historia de la Argentina. 5ª ed. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013 [1ª ed. 1965], p. 109.
[4] Nestor García Canclini. Culturas híbridas: estratégias para entrar e sair da modernidade. São Paulo: Edusp, 2015 [1989], 301.
