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The Latin American Spirit--Page 3

in 1952. Lam was appointed a member of the Graham Foundation of Advanced Study in the Fine Arts in Chicago, in 1959 and received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1964. By the late 1960's, retrospective exhibitions of Lam's work had been held in Hanover, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Brussels, and Paris. Lam died in 1982.

Matta
Born in 1911 in Santiago, Chile, Matta was educated at the Collegio del Sagrado Corazon, and Unversidad Catolica de Santiago, where he studied architecture. During his career, he travelled extensively in Europe, Latin America, New York, and Cuba, and visited the Soviet Union. While in Paris from 1934 to 1935, Matta served as an assistant to the noted architect, painter and writer, Le Corbusier. A member of the Surrealists in the 1930's, his pictures presented volatile forms which seem to be engulfed in cosmic transformation--the effects of which are often compared to science fiction. Some of Matta's works can be found in the permanent collections of the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Matta now resides in Rome.

Rafael Montanez-Ortiz (Ralph Ortiz)
Rafael Montanez-Ortiz was born in New York City in 1934, and is of Puerto Rican descent. He studied at the High School of Art and Design, the Brooklyn Museum of Art School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University Teachers College in New York. Ortiz has served as director and curator of El Museo del Barrio in New York, committee member for the Ghetto Arts Panel of New York, and chairman of the board of Fondo Del Sol in Washington, D.C. He also founded the Museum of Computer Art in New Jersey in 1984. Ortiz has been an instructor at New York University, Rutgers University, and Hostos Community College in the Bronx. He was the recipient of a John Hay Whitney Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A major retrospective of the artist's work was recently held at El Museo del Barrio in New York. Ortiz is credited with staging the renowned "Piano Destruction Concern" for the BBC Network in 1966. His work appears in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Jose Clemente Orozco
Mexican muralist, genre painter and lithographer, Jose Clemente Orozco was born in Jalisco, Mexico in 1883. After studying at the Escuela Agricultura de San Jacinto and the Academia de San Carlos, he became an architectural draughtsman. In the early 1900's, Orozco published caricatures and architectural drawings in local newspapers and worked as an illustrator for La Vanguardia Mundial, the official publication for Venustiano Carranza Constitutionalist Army. In 1908, he began focusing on painting. After visiting the United States, he returned to Mexico in 1922 to paint his first murals in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. 

Orozco's work is bold in execution and deals compassionately with social themes, especially with man versus machine. Much of his work is true fresco painting, executed directly on wet plaster. He pointed several murals at United States museums and universities before his death in 1949. The "Orozco Memorial Exhibition" travelled throughout the United States in 1953, but was banned in Los Angeles because of Orozco's alleged affiliation with the Communist party. In subsequent years, exhibitions of his works