The Brooklyn Rail

Luis Camnitzer is a Uruguayan artist born in Germany in 1937 and has lived in the U.S.A. since 1964. He is a Professor Emeritus of Art, State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He graduated in sculpture from the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and studied architecture at the same university. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for printmaking in 1961 and for visual arts in 1982. In 1965 he was declared Honorary Member of the Academy in Florence. In 1998 he received the “Latin American Art Critic of the Year” award from the Argentine Association of Art Critics and in 2011 the Frank Jewitt Mather Award of the College Art Association and the Printer Emeritus Award of the SGCI. In 2010 and 2014 he received the National Literature Award for Art Essays in Uruguay. In 2012 he was awarded the Skowhegan Medal and was a USA Ford Fellow. He represented Uruguay in the Venice Biennial in 1988 and participated in the Liverpool Biennial in 1999 and in 2003, in the Whitney Biennial of 2000, and in Documenta 11 in 2003. His work is in the collections of over 40 museums, among them Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sao Paulo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; and the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de Costa Rica. He is the author of: New Art of Cuba (University of Texas Press, 1994/2004); Arte y Enseñanza: La ética del poder, (Casa de América, Madrid, 2000); Didactics of Liberation: Conceptualist Art in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2007), and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias (University of Texas Press, 2010).