MIAMI BEACH, FL.- The Americas Society, dedicated to promoting greater understanding among the countries of the Western Hemisphere through cultural, political, and economic initiatives, announces a major new publication that explores the Society’s rich history of exhibiting and documenting the art of Latin America. A Principality of Its Own: 40 Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society is produced by the Society’s Department of Visual Arts—the longest-standing private entity devoted to the art of the Americas.

The publication presents fifteen scholarly and critical essays by a diversity of art historians and curators who examine various aspects of the history of Latin American art in the United States. They discuss the relevance of the Americas Society’s trajectory vis-à-vis the intricate relationships between art, economics, and politics since the institution’s 1965 founding in New York City by David Rockefeller.

The book is published by the Americas Society in conjunction with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and is distributed by Harvard University Press. The publication is an outgrowth of the exhibition Beyond Geography: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, mounted at the Americas Society gallery in the summer of 2005.

A Principality of Its Own is co-edited by José Luis Falconi, Art Forum Curator at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; and Gabriela Rangel, Director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society. In addition to an introduction by Ms. Rangel and an afterword by Mr. Falconi, the book includes essays by Ms. Rangel and fourteen art historians, curators, and artists, representing a spectrum of American nationalities, cultures, and viewpoints.

Among the themes explored in the book are the origins and role of the Society’s Visual Arts program in the context of Cold War geopolitics and its aftermath. In this vein, art historian Beverly Adams analyzes the Society’s beginnings and its relationship with The Museum of Modern Art. Adams quotes curator Stanton Catlin, the Americas Society’s first Visual Arts Director, who envisioned the Society’s gallery as a “principality of its own.” In another essay, art historian Anna Indych-Lopez rethinks the role of Mexican art in the gallery’s groundbreaking exhibitions from 1970 to the present—many of which introduced Mexican artists to New York viewers for the first time. Independent curator Paulo Herkenhoff delves into the history of Brazilian photography as an art form. Many of the essayists re-examine what came to be established as the Latin American canon in light of current globalization and the internationalization of modern and contemporary art. Curator and critic Mary Schneider Enriquez, for example, writes about the role of the Americas Society in the presentation of Latin American art in a post-NAFTA world.

Some of the Society’s most notable exhibitions, presented during the 1960s, focused on neo-avant-garde works. Contributor Alexander Alberro discusses the Fashion Show Poetry Event (1968), a “post-happening” collaboration among the Argentinian artist Eduardo Costa and the U.S. poets Hannah Weiner and John Perreault; and Argentinian Marta Minujin’s performance piece Minucode (1968). Artist and writer John Pruitt complements this account with an analysis of the 1972 solo exhibition of the 1960s–70s work of pioneering Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow. Reformism is also addressed: Artist and critic Luis Camnitzer recounts the struggles of the militant Latin American artists who organized as the Museo Latinoamericano during the 1960s, rejecting the Cuban embargo and the establishment of dictatorial regimes in the Southern Cone and Central America.

A Principality of Its Own reproduces the photographic series Incas Room (2005), by Alexander Apóstol, who was specially commissioned to create a work inspired by the architecture of the Americas Society’s landmark building on Park Avenue. An illustrated exhibition timeline rounds out the book.

The 300-page paperback contains 100 photographs, 40 of which are in color. It has a retail price of $27.95 and will be available in book stores in December 2006.