Non-Western Traditions

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In the artistic and cultural dynamics underway in Latin America since the fifteenth century, the European tradition has long interacted with indigenous ones (which had a long standing history in the Americas), as well as traditions from other social contexts: including Asia, due to the Portuguese expansion to the Far East, Asian expeditions, over-seas trading and maritime strategies, and Africa, as a result of the diaspora related to the slave trade and slavery.
 

Until recently pre-existing cultures in Latin America and from Africa and Asia  were seen as primitive and, as such, tied to an immemorial and ahistorical time. Today, however, the understanding of these non-European societies has changed substantially. Now they are taken as historical, dynamic and active -- transformable and transformative. These traditions not only had particular artistic ideas and practices but also their own institutions. Moreover, it is important to observe how the study of non-Western traditions has often been led initially by agents and institutions of such disciplines as medicine, anthropology, and archeology, and only later taken up by the field of art history.
 

Therefore, unfolding artistic reflections on non-Western cultures raises a reconsideration of modernity from other angles. How did the existing cultures in the territory known as America react to foreign presence? How did African cultures adapt to new conditions of possibility in America? How are Eastern traditions intertwined with other artistic traditions in the region? How did non-dominant cultures interact with the classical and modern traditions in colonial and post-colonial regimes? How were the connections and interactions of all these traditions' agents and institutions processed? How have their ideas, practices and artistic works been interpreted and incorporated by Europeans? In which ways were European cultures appropriated by them?