Often named the most influential artist of Latin American modernism, Frida Kahlo was a Mexican-born painter whose art addressed themes of melancholy, illness, matriarchy, revolutionary politics, and indigenous beauty, often with a Surrealist bent. Born to a wealthy family in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Kahlo was introduced to art at an early age through her father’s photography. Although her father was German and her mother of indigenous and Spanish descent, Kahlo prioritized and celebrated indigenous cultural values and belief systems throughout her life.

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera, was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art

Remedios Varo, was a Spanish-Mexican artist who played an integral role in the Mexico City-based Surrealist movement. She is known for her enigmatic paintings of androgynous beings engaged in magic arts or the occult.

Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s

Born in a rural environment deeply attached to nineteenth-century Mexican Métis traditions, Maria Izquierdo was raised by her maternal grandparents, who pushed her to marry a soldier when she was fourteen years old. In 1926, after leaving her husband and distancing herself from her maternal family, she found herself alone in Mexico City with her three children. From 1927 to 1928 she studied at the prestigious San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Diego Rivera, whom she met during this period, wrote in 1929 that “her personality is like her painting: classically Mexican”

Doris Salcedo is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals

Tina Modotti was an Italian American photographer, model, actor, and revolutionary political activist for the Comintern. She left Italy in 1913 and moved to the USA, where she worked as a model and subsequently as a photographer. In 1922 she moved to Mexico, where she became an active Communist

David Alfaro Siqueiros was one of the three great Mexican muralist painters of the early 20th century. Throughout his life, Siqueiros maintained firm political beliefs that informed every aspect of his artistic practice. Although he was born into a wealthy family, Siqueiros became involved in the ideologies of the Mexican Revolution. He successfully led student strikes and eventually joined the revolutionary army. Siquieros painted murals depicting class struggle and strife. Following the war, in 1921, Siquieros traveled to Europe, where he spent time with Diego Rivera and became interested in Cubism. He was an active member of the Communist political party, and co-founded the Communist newspaper El Machete in Mexico.

Anita Catarina Malfatti is heralded as the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil. Her solo exhibition in Sao Paulo, from 1917–1918, was controversial at the time, and her expressionist style and subject were revolutionary for the complacently old-fashioned art expectations of Brazilians who were searching for a national identity in art, but who were not prepared for the influences Malfatti would bring to the country. Malfatti's presence was also highly felt during the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna) in 1922, where she and the Group of Five made huge revolutionary changes in the structure and response to modern art in Brazil.

Ana Mendieta’s multidisciplinary practice questions static markers of gender identity, sexual expression, and humanity’s connection to the Earth. At age 12, Mendieta was exiled from Cuba and sent to live in the United States under Operation Pedro Pan—a mass movement of unaccompanied Cuban minors, many of them children of counterrevolutionary threats to the Castro regime. Mendieta spent part of her childhood in an Iowan orphanage, and eventually pursued an education in art at the University of Iowa. It was during this early period that Mendieta began to use her own body through performance. Her multidisciplinary practice consisted of performance, photography, and video works addressing the complicated entanglements between bodies, the Earth, and death.

Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Dalí received his formal education in fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a young age, he became increasingly attracted to Cubism and avant-garde movements. He moved closer to Surrealism in the late 1920s and joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931, and is one of the most famous Surrealist paintings. Dalí lived in France throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) before leaving for the United States in 1940 where he achieved commercial success. He returned to Spain in 1948 where he announced his return to the Catholic faith and developed his "nuclear mysticism" style, based on his interest in classicism, mysticism and recent scientific developments.

Fernando Botero Angulo is a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor, born in Medellín. His signature style, also known as "Boterismo", depicts people and figures in large, exaggerated volume, which can represent political criticism or humor, depending on the piece. He is considered the most recognized and quoted living artist from Latin America, and his art can be found in highly visible places around the world, such as Park Avenue in New York City and the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

José Clemente Orozco was a Mexican caricaturist and painter, who specialized in political murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV and of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period.

Yolanda M. López is an American painter, printmaker, educator and film producer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for works focusing on the experiences of Mexican-American women, often challenging the ethnic stereotypes associated with them.

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.

Feliciano Centurión’s textile works from the 1980s and ’90s cement his artwork in global queer discourse, emphasizing themes of love, decay, vulnerability, and compassion. His family was exiled to a town on the border of Paraguay and Argentina. Due to the repressive government of Alfredo Stroessner, his father crossed the border to work in Argentina. Centurión was raised primarily by the women in his family while coming of age as a gay man in a conservative society. In the early 1980s, Centurión moved to Buenos Aires, where he became a central figure in the city’s Arte Light group, which sought to counter the oppressive cultural forces of dictatorship through play, pleasure, humor, and creativity in artmaking. Centurión’s works utilized domestic materials like blankets, pillows, and other found textiles, which he would embroider with poetic phrases and graphic imagery like animals and other iconographic figures from indigenous Guaraní traditions. In 1992, Ceturión was diagnosed with HIV, and as his illness worsened, many of the phrases he included in his works dealt with this melancholy and his acceptance of his own mortality. Centurión’s work embodies an ethos of honest, tender reconciliation during the AIDS epidemic that ravaged artistic communities globally. Centurión died of AIDS in 1996, at the young age of 34.

Wifredo Lam was a painter who explored artistic styles like Surrealismand Cubism in his work while traveling throughout Europe, as well as themes related to his mixed Chinese, European, Indigenous, and Afro-Cuban spiritual heritage. In 1923, he moved to Madrid to study with Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, a portrait painter and teacher to Salvador Dalí. Lam’s early works from this period are dark and foreboding, suggestive of death and warfare. By the early 1930s, Lam’s work reflected Surrealism, and in 1938, he traveled to Paris to study with Pablo Picasso. Ironically, Picasso’s fascination with so-called “primitive” cultures encouraged Lam to incorporate his own Caribbean cultural background in his work, albeit with an acute understanding of cultural hierarchies perpetuated by the European avant-garde.

Born to a family of prominent Black intellectuals, Victoria Santa Cruz was an Afro-Peruvian choreographer, composer, dramatist, and educator. Much of her work is grounded in her roots of Afro-Peruvian culture. In 1958, Santa Cruz co-founded Cumanana, Peru’s first Black theater company. Many of the plays and musicals she directed during this time addressed unexplored gaps in Peru’s national history—in particular, forgotten narratives of slavery. In the early to mid-1960s, Santa Cruz traveled to Paris and studied theater and choreography at the Université du Théâtre des Nations and École Supérieur des Études Chorégraphiques. Following her return to Peru in 1966, she served as director of Teatro y Danzas Negras del Perú and the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore—traveling and performing extensively throughout the region, as well as the United States, Canada, and Europe. It was during this time that she developed and performed her best-known poem, Me gritaron negra (1978), in which she recounted moments of racist prejudice she endured as a child. Beginning in 1982, she served as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she would remain for 17 years. Critical examinations of racism and celebrations of Black pride remained prevalent themes in Santa Cruz’s work for most of her life.

José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar was a Mexican political lithographer who used relief printing to produce popular illustrations. His work has influenced numerous Latin American artists and cartoonists because of its satirical acuteness and social engagement. He used skulls, calaveras, and bones to convey political and cultural critiques. Among his most enduring works is La Calavera Catrina.