Insurgent Beauty: Indigenous Art in Urban Panama examines artistic and political developments from 1968 to the present, exploring how Native American artists leveraged Panama’s populist military reforms from 1968 to 1989, and the subsequent neoliberal transition, to assert their presence in society. Breaking new ground, the book situates Indigenous art in previously overlooked contexts.Historically, scholars of Latin American Indigenous artistic expression have focused on ...

Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, associated with Panama's black population. Its practitioners are self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned designs, vibrant portraits, and landscapes appear in cantinas, barbershops, and restaurants. The red devil buses are popular art's most visible manifestation. The old school buses are imported from the United States and provide public transportation in Colón and Panama City. Their owners hire the artists to attract customers...

How did a country whose past is intertwined with African slavery ignore its cultural legacies through much of history? And how did Blackness recently break through this amnesia so that nearly a third of Panamanians now self-identify as Afro-descendants? Wolf Tracks explores these and other related questions through the lens of Panamanian street culture.Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, pioneered by self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned design...