Born in Germany in 1937, Camnitzer moved to Uruguay with his family in 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazi regime. Growing up as a bilingual German and Spanish speaker, he then studied sculpture and architecture in the city of Montevideo before moving to New York City in 1964. In New York, Camnitzer became part of a wider set of artists who rejected the conventional approach to making art at the time. Instead of creating objects to be looked at by passive viewers, this set of artists proposed that an artwork could be an idea. For some conceptual artists, as they became known, artworks could be a way of interrogating the nature of art in language. For others, idea-based artworks could be proposed and realized by anyone, in a variety of forms – potentially making art more democratic and accessible.

By the 1970s, Camnitzer began relating his artworks to the political events and history of Uruguay and its wider regional context. This was a period when multiple countries in South and Central America, including Uruguay, were ruled under repressive military regimes – often directly or indirectly supported by North American and European governments. Many artists living and working in these countries also used art as a means of communicating ideas, of subverting repressive political structures, and of conveying knowledge. For these artists, creating art based on ideas – not objects – was not only a way of transforming art. It was also a strategy for transforming an oppressive social reality.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as Camnitzer reflected upon his conceptual art practice and connections both to Uruguay and New York, he began to question how conceptual art was defined, and by whom. In many mainstream art institutions, “conceptual art” was work produced by artists in the U.S. and Western Europe. This narrative obscured the work of artists in Latin America who produced idea-based art using similar, but different strategies. For Camnitzer, this situation could be traced back to structures of economic and cultural power. This guide presents Camnitzer’s artistic methods for questioning and contesting these structures of power.