Issue No. 2 

In 1945 the architect Richard Neutra visited Brazil and delivered a series of lectures which were published with an introduction by one of Brazil's leading modernists Gregori Warchavchik, as Architecture of Social Concern in Regions of Mild Climate in São Paulo in 1948. Neutra foresaw that unless it were checked the relative deprivation of rural areas from, as he puts it, 'Canada to Patagonia' would result in ever-faster immigration to the metropolitan centres; this would lead, in turn, to increased poverty in both the countryside and the cities. His solution was that architects should turn their attentions to the countryside and should design simple cheap schools of mass-produced elements. Prophetically, Neutra envisaged that these rural schools, by means of 'television and broadcasting, microphoto libraries and standardized mass-manufactured instructional equipment of many kinds', could be at least the equal of urban schools. Nowadays it is easy to read Neutra as patronising and naïvely idealistic but of course the problems he identified have not gone away and the provision of rural education is still painfully inadequate throughout Latin America. Nor have the possibilities of information technology yet to be exploited in the way Neutra foresaw, but it is exciting to think of the way that, assuming the necessary equipment, an internet journal could now reach such rural schools and communities not only in Latin America but around the world. It is even more exciting to think that its readers, however far-flung, can respond. It will be interesting to see if you do.

That this new internet journal should be the brain-child of post graduates in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex is a source of great pride and pleasure to me but it is not entirely a surprise. Thanks to the pioneering work of Dawn Ades and Gordon Brotherston Essex is well-established as a centre for the study of precolumbian, native and Latin American art and architecture and over the last three decades or so we have had the good fortune to have attracted many outstanding students who have helped to extend the range of our activities and enthusiasms: an annual graduate symposium on precolumbian art; exhibitions on a range of topics from Mexican masks to Argentinian Constructivism, from precolumbian Peruvian pottery to colonial maps or contemporary Chilean painting; workshops, seminars, campaigns, dance classes - all made possible because of our students. In 1993 a Brazilian post graduate student Charles Cosac donated a painting by Sirón Franco to the University and the idea of founding a collection of Latin American art was born. Six years later, again thanks in no small part to the energy and enthusiasm of our students, the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art comprises over 400 works including pieces by many of the best Latin American artists of the twentieth century. And so an internet journal is but a natural development: may it make good connections and stimulate further interest and debate in this infinitely rich field.

VALERIE FRASER

Department of Art History
University of Essex