Claire F. Fox’s latest book, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War, adds fresh perspective to the ongoing scholarly reconsideration of twentieth-century Pan Americanism and U.S. cultural diplomacy through its selected period of study and contemporary methodology. Fox examines the institutional agenda, cultural activities, and continental influence of the Pan American Union (PAU; today the Organization of American States) in the early years of the Cold War. Formed in 1890, the PAU was an inter-governmental organization of national and state delegates whose primary objective was to promote regional solidarity and cooperation among the countries of Latin America and the United States. The institution’s postwar visual arts program—slotted between the U.S. government’s antifascist Good Neighbor Policy and anticommunist Alliance for Progress—has received scant attention from scholars who have overlooked this transitional moment for its relative quietude in U.S.-Latin American diplomacy or, alternatively, dismissed PAU agents, artists, and activities as mere tools of U.S. interests for their proximity to Washington, DC. Fox’s cultural genealogy offers a compelling corrective to the historical record. Mapping the shifting terrain of avant-garde aesthetics, economic liberalism, and cultural diplomacy at mid-century, she explains the PAU’s Cold War exhibition and collection preferences as part of an institutional effort to unite the American republics under a banner of hemispheric cultural expression and free trade. She argues that this cultural work effectively supplanted national art histories with a continental conception of art and helped in joining modernization theory and visual art. Moreover, Fox overturns critical assumptions of PAU puppetry by showing that officials’ and artists’ participation in liberalist politics and the consolidation of Latin American art stemmed not from imperialist U.S. directives, but rather from anti-statist desires to elevate and distinguish regional art in a global context.

Given the mid-century thrust of Fox’s book, readers may be surprised to find that her study opens with New York-based artist Pablo Helguera’s School of Panamerican Unrest (Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego) (2006), a postmodern performance piece that aimed to engender local attachment to a greater American community yet also exposed long-standing inter-American national rivalries and mutual distrust. Fox leverages this contemporary standoff between Pan Americanism (the utopian vision of hemispheric unification) and resistant Latin Americanisms (anti-imperialist/anti-U.S. dissent) to plot the historical dimension and central themes of her book. In addition, she points to the nested and overlapping contexts in which Helguera’s artwork operates to demonstrate an inherent contingency and malleability of cultural meaning that highlights the limitations of artistic agency in hemispheric affairs.

This final point is crucial to understanding what follows, since it serves both as a justification and a methodological framework for the rest of the book. As the title suggests, Fox’s primary argument is that the Pan American Union helped to establish Latin American art as a categorical object of study through its facilitation of transnational artistic exchange and its early avocation of Cold War liberalism. Yet equally significant for Fox is her post-national approach to this discursive history. In addition to explicating the origins of this disciplinary construct, Fox strives to address the current “crisis” in Latin American cultural studies by working in a non-national frame of reference and by understanding history as an institutional struggle to produce cultural work.

Fox puts forward her institutional analysis as a model for future scholarship, a post-hegemonic antidote to current critical debates that disparage the label “Latin America” as reductionist and call for a reorganization of the academic field. So although she exhibits a facility with art analysis in her preface, individual works of visual art are otherwise surprisingly absent from her study. This will be a disappointment to art historians seeking to learn particularities about Latin American art exhibited through the Pan American Union; yet it is a deliberate omission on the part of the author, who considers artworks and exhibitions not as products of culture, but rather as tools for cultural policy formation. Her project thus cleaves narrowly to post-national theoretical perspectives that eschew a materialist approach (for its tendency to cast singular objects or interpretations as exemplary representations of cultural processes) in favor of an open-ended, multilateral investigation into the instrumentalization of culture.

Following the methodological precedents set forth by cultural theorists Tony Bennett and George Yúdice, Fox reconstructs a broad and richly textured transnational network of curators, critics, artists, and organizations alongside the circulation and interpretation of art to delineate both the potentially transformative and normative aspects of the PAU’s Cold War cultural policy. This is extremely labor-intensive scholarship, and Fox seamlessly knits together an impressive array of sources, including published and unpublished materials in Spanish and English. The resulting sociological study, assembled from a range of texts by different kinds of local informants, is a thickly layered consideration of the production and circulation of hemispheric meaning for postwar Latin American art.

Four chapters chart the shifting curatorial philosophy of the PAU’s Visual Arts Section and its impact on the aesthetic development and critical discourse surrounding Latin American art in the decades following World War II. Fox begins by establishing context, first explaining the privileged status of Latin American intellectuals under the nineteenth-century model of foreign diplomacy and describing the formation of the visual arts program at the Pan American Union under the direction of Concha Romero James. Rooted in the political imperatives of the Good Neighbor Policy and heavily influenced by the post-revolutionary Mexican precedent of casting muralists as social leaders, the PAU initially demonstrated an aesthetic preference for social realism and stressed regional coverage above other factors in its collection and exhibition practices.

Fox then devotes a chapter to the curatorial philosophy of Romero James’s institutional successor, José Gómez Sicre, a Cuban-born curator and critic who served as chief of the PAU’s Visual Arts Section for more than three decades. Her analysis privileges Gómez Sicre’s cultivation of an inter-American arts network and program of traveling exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s, noting especially his early experiments with multinational corporate scholarship and his discursive linkage of Latin American aesthetic experimentation to incipient Cold War theories of economic and political developmentalism. In this way she asserts that Gómez Sicre and, by extension, the Pan American Union engaged in performative strategies of hemispheric cultural citizenship that heralded the “universality” of Latin American avant-garde art and artists in a bid to attain greater visibility and access to Anglo-European circuits of economic and cultural exchange.

Having established Gómez Sicre’s rhetorical reliance on the rebellious “young artist” as an agent of Latin American social transformation, Fox reveals the cultural work of inventing Latin American art to be a complex process of transnational collaboration, contestation, and negotiation. Even Gómez Sicre’s professional mentorship and friendship with the Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, which included critical essays from the former published under the name of the latter, stands as a testament to the anti-imperialist dispositions of the many PAU-affiliated artists who resisted institutional appropriation and closed readings of their art. Through a careful analysis of Cuevas’s essay “The Cactus Curtain” and other writings, Fox highlights the artist’s malleable public personae and discursive code-switching in various governmental, institutional, and intellectual contexts. She concludes that Cuevas’s negotiation of international liberalism and Mexican nationalism ultimately produced fraught relationships both with the Mexican state and with the PAU’s Visual Arts Section, thus refuting critical Mexican characterizations of the artist as an apparent instrument of PAU-sanctioned U.S. imperialism.

In the final chapter, Fox traces the declining influence of the Pan American Union in hemispheric art worlds by the 1960s. To explain this phenomenon, she examines the intersection of Latin American art and PAU claims of liberal citizenship at HemisFair ’68, a world’s fair exposition held in San Antonio, Texas, to mark the 250th anniversary of the city’s founding. According to Fox, the exposition’s geographical location in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands precipitated a curatorial program that celebrated U.S. foreign aid through its promotion of heritage tourism and urban renewal. Reflecting both the theme of the fair, “The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas,” and a broader cultural policy shift toward U.S. modernization initiatives, the placement of monumental art throughout the fairgrounds deliberately blurred the boundaries between North/South geographies and public/private funding sources. In addition, PAU Director of Cultural Affairs Rafael Squirru and other fair organizers utilized Latin American and U.S. Latino art to cast local tejanos as ideal hemispheric citizens whose hybridized identity and social uplift emerged through a modernization process of mestizaje, or transnational integration, uniting Latin American culture with U.S. technology and capital. This visual and spatial template, Fox concludes, facilitated the subsequent flourishing of neoliberalism in contemporary U.S. cultural policy.

Scholars already well versed in the various national art histories and institutions will gain the most from this book. Fox’s narrative is economical yet also extremely dense, and non-specialists may find themselves adrift in analyses rich in detail but thin in exposition. Extensive footnotes—many including brief biographical sketches—speak to the impressive synthesis this book represents. What gets lost in all of the research is a more concrete link between the personal interactions, artworks, and exhibitions and the larger cultural work that serves as the book’s central premise. Readers encounter a dizzying array of artists, critics, and state officials whose institutional affiliations, personal relationships, opinions, and actions intersect and overlap in interesting, if sometimes indistinct, ways. But generally speaking, Fox seems more comfortable with textual analysis than visual, and she often provides only superficial examinations of exhibitions and artworks—such as her brief reference to paintings by indigenous artists Carlos Mérida and Rufino Tamayo as evidence of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic agenda—that require readers without a strong grounding in Latin American abstraction to take her at her word. A greater balance between post-national excavations of exchange with more fine-grain object-based analyses elucidating aims and outcomes of policy initiatives (successful or not) would strengthen the presentation of what is an otherwise incisive argument about Latin American art. As it stands, many readers will want to turn to Robert Alexander González’s excellent architectural history of HemisFair ’68 and related secondary literature to supplement Fox’s book (Robert Alexander González, Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).

These criticisms notwithstanding, Fox’s richly textured and deeply perceptive book is a valuable addition to the burgeoning new literature on Pan Americanism. Her decentered analysis interweaves disparate geographical, theoretical, and institutional perspectives, and conveys a lively sense of the transnational processes through which culture gains meaning. In short, Making Art Panamerican is a thoughtful and provocative book that encourages us to reassess not only the story of U.S. cultural policy in Latin America but also the ways in which we research, write, and conceptualize Latin American art.