Thirty years after her death, Marta Traba (Buenos Aires, 1923-Madrid, 1983) was remembered in the 7th International Art Theory and History Conference – 15th CAIA Meeting: The Networks of Art: Exchanges, Processes, and Trajectories in the Circulation of Images, organized by the Argentinean Center for Art Researchers in Buenos Aires. The roundtable on "Marta Traba: Homenaje 30 años" was coordinated by María Amalia García with the participation of Alessandro Armato, Andrea Giunta, Fabiana Serviddio, and the author of this note, who is also the author of a biography of Marta Traba.
As is known, Marta Traba died in the November, 1983 Avianca airplane crash that also took the lives of her husband the critic Ángel Rama and writers Jorge Ibargüengoitia and Manuel Scorza, among the 180 total victims. Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco summarized the feelings of many when he wrote: "Let's say goodbye to Ángel Rama, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Manuel Scorza, and Marta Traba. If the dead could hear what the living say, they would all know how their works and their memory will be with us for as long as we are on this Earth, poorer and sadder as it is without them".
In front of an auditorium filled with young students, several aspects of the life and work of Marta Traba—one of this magazine's founders—were reviewed. She always understood Latin America as a unit and for almost 40 years devoted her best efforts to the region's arts and letters. She wrote seven novels, one volume of poetry, and two short-story collections. She also published 22 books of art history and criticism and more than a thousand journalistic pieces and essays on topics related to the visual arts.
An outstanding woman for many reasons, including her early understanding of the importance of the mass media (already in 1955 she was the presenter of art-history programming on radio and television, something she also did at the end of her fertile career), Traba taught regular courses and seminars on art history at more than 25 universities throughout the region. She founded museums and one magazine. She opened a gallery and a bookstore. Many travels, many loves, legendary feuds, political positions, all were part of her complex private life. A daughter of her times, the story of Marta Traba was also the story of thousands of Latin American intellectuals forced out of their places of origin.
It was surprising the level of interest in this tribute among the researchers present, many of whom hadn't even been born ay the time of Traba's death. While Armato discussed the relationship between Traba's work and the work of José Gómez Sicre—a Cuban critic, founder and director of the Museum of the Americas (OAS)—, Serviddio talked about Traba's work in that museum's reorganization (Arte de América Latina, 1900-1980, Washington, D.C., IDB, 1994), And Giunta presented some aspects of Traba's survey of Latin American art in her still relevant Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950/1970 (1973).