The first U.S. solo museum exhibition of the Argentinean artist León Ferrari (born 1920) featured 31 of Ferrari's calligraphic drawings from the early 1960s, a body of work crucial to the history of Latin American art in the second half of the twentieth century. Ferrari's "written" drawing series, such as Deformed Writing, 1964, erase the distinction between writing and drawing through the artist's semi-delirious handwriting. In a contemporary interpretation of the tradition of calligraphy, Ferrari distorted writing in order to imbue it with new meaning.

Starting in 1962, Ferrari began to address meaning in writing and printed text, including ideological newspaper articles and dictionary entries. This period of his work paralleled similar explorations of text as medium and subject by North American, European, and Asian conceptual artists. However, beginning with his series Letters to a General, 1963, Ferrari's abstracted text-based drawings became a form of political denunciation capable of evading censorship and reprisals from a repressive government. In the later 1960s, Ferrari became a prominent member of a group of artists and activists who created "Tucumán Arde," a groundbreaking exhibition denouncing the exploitation of the Tucumán province by Argentina's military dictatorship. The action remains an example in Latin America for art as a political agent. Ferrari staked his position when he declared, "Art will be neither beauty nor novelty, art will be efficacy and perturbation."