1. It is impossible to talk about Latin America (and its artistic and design production) without considering its history and the confluence of factors that played a vital role in the continent’s artistic development:

Colonialism → Politics → Power grabs → Religious interventions → Revolutions → Social and political uprisings → Migration and immigration → The disappearance, erasure and marginalization of the Indigenous and local histories → The conflict between la gente/el pueblo(the people) and the bourgeoisie

These are all key motivators and influences that are present in the efforts of many artists and designers whose works originate in the complex societies of Latin America.

2. The influence of European ideas, either through colonization or, later, through migration, has left an undeniable and indelible imprint on the work of artists and designers from Latin America.

3. Historically, the field of graphic design 5 has focused on and elevated the work and thinking of the Global North. Like much of art and design, the fields of graphic design and typography emerge from the European Renaissance and modernist movements in Europe (such as the Bauhaus and its progeny). These ideals and ways of seeing and making have been codified as accepted or “universal” norms.

4. Graphic design should be referred to as Western European graphic design.

5. Graphic design in the contemporary Latin American context has been deployed for commerce and capitalistic endeavors—“Buen diseño para la industria” (good design for industry)—such as branding for multinational corporations and state-owned entities). 6 

6. Local culture, el pueblo, and la gente are expressed through artes gráficas (graphic arts). 

7. Artes gráficas move through communities; they are more inclusive, pluralistic, and localized; and they maintain a fluid way of being that mirrors the continent’s cultures, histories, and geographical landscapes. They consider the interdisciplinary movement of artists and communities through artistic mediums, ways of making, gestures, ideas, and perspectives.

8. In a local context, artes gráficas are deployed to create works that speak to the community in languages specific to those being addressed: Diseño que ayuda a facilitar la creación de una comunidad social y política, llena de ideas y felicidad, manifested through espacios públicos, acciones, acciones gráficas, y lo colectivo. In this approach, local production methods are used in collaboration with community members to make work that speaks directly to the community. The artists and designers who create artes gráficas experiment with the “standards” of graphic design in localized ways, using what has been left behind by colonialism writ large. 7 

9. Latin American artists and designers deploy artes gráficas to gather, join, develop, and support communities. In these communities, conversations and ideas about cultures and politics emerge from a multitude of perspectives.

10. These communities are making “designs [and art] that foster convivial reconstruction beyond the cultures of expertise and that promote a pluriverse of partially connected worlds in which all worlds strive for justice and craft autonomous relational ways of being while respecting the ability of other worlds to do the same.” 8 

11. When we speak of typography in the context of design, we are generally referring to a tradition that is primarily defined by the Latin alphabet.

12. In the words of designer and curator Ellen Lupton, “Typography is what language looks like.” For the purposes of this text, we are speaking primarily of giving the Spanish and Portuguese languages—holdovers of colonialism in the continent—a visual form. This linguistic homogeneity is in stark contrast to the lingual wealth that preceded colonization. Some studies estimate that more than two thousand languages were spoken throughout the Americas. 9  Despite the devastation caused by the European conquest, there are currently more than four hundred languages spoken in Latin America—some quite widely, such as Quechua and Guaraní, which are respectively used by ten million and six-and-a-half million people today.

13. Since the invention of the letterpress in 1455, printed matter—such as announcements, newspapers, and flyers—has become an important and accessible mode of communicating and sharing ideas. 10 

14. The first traditional printing press in the Americas appeared in Mexico City around 1539. 11  The history of printed matter and its use in disseminating ideas (artistic, social, and political) has deep roots in Latin America. An example is the work of the “Taller de Gráfica Popular,” founded in Mexico City in 1937. 12 The collective’s printed matter dealt with various subjects, including history and political and social themes.

15. Digging through the ISLAA Library and Archives, one encounters various iterations of modernism. The works in the reading room present extensive incorporation of the codified gestures of Western European graphic design and typography: the exacting use of grids and typographic conventions of the European Modernists (see the press announcements and catalogues from the Centro de Arte y Comunicación [CAYC]); a sharp focus on order, hierarchy, clarity, and reduction (especially apparent in the work created in the second half of the twentieth century); and the abandonment of maximalist and ornamental gestures in favor of functional, reductive ones. 

16. Of particular prevalence in this period is the use of sans serif typefaces, particularly the Swiss Helvetica, 13  which were readily accessible to printers and used extensively in work created for corporations, business, and industry. Helvetica and the associated design approach and philosophy became the “good” way to communicate visually worldwide: the universal style. This approach was believed to provide the work with authority and legitimacy. The visual language of forms created in Europe thus became cemented as the norm. 

17. These forms (graphic gestures such as Helvetica, which were associated with hierarchy and order) carry centuries of baggage. They are part of colonization’s legacy of brutalization of the land, the Indigenous peoples, and their ideas, customs, and language. These typographic artifacts have become a manifestation of centuries of atrocities and erasure.

18. Modernist typographic forms (Helvetica) and structures (grids and other comparable compositional approaches to “organizational clarity”) gave this printed matter authority and legitimacy while often bypassing established local vernaculars. 14 

19. Designer, researcher, and editor Silvia Fernández writes, “This modernity—or, better, ‘proto-modernity’—brought the period of ‘good taste and good speaking’ adopted from the Spanish colonizers to an end. Nevertheless, it was connected to Europe: travelers, immigrants, and exiles carried in their luggage testimonies of modernity in the form of books, magazines, works of art, and above all, ideas, which—along with the local ‘Criolla’ [lo cotidiano] culture—formed the new imaginary.” 15 

20. Of the printed matter that I encountered in the ISLAA Library and Archives, I gravitated particularly toward invitations and records of gatherings and meetings. These objects are examples of design and artes gráficas in the service of and as a conduit for community—they create spaces for engagement, gathering, and discussion. These “communities” included galleries and pop-ups that functioned outside of institutional spaces.

21. Printed matter and typography are conduits for building local communities.

22. Printed matter and Mail art are forms of decentered, communally created art and design. The networked and multireferential nature of these forms co-opt systems of power and put them to novel and anti-institutional use. Regarding Mail art’s relationship with state institutions such as the postal service, Mexican artist and publisher Ulises Carrión said that the art movement “knocks at the doors of the castle where the Big Monster lives.” 16