Last week both the art world’s major-league auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, held big sales devoted to Latin American art. Combined, the two events earned more than $60 million — a hefty sum for a field about which many art lovers still know very little. In recent years two Texas museums have worked to introduce North Americans to their Southern neighbors’ modern-art legacy, and have produced catalogs that are an excellent starting point for the curious. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston organized a survey of avant-garde art whose mammoth catalogue Inverted Utopias ($80, published by Yale), is organized by thematic “constellations” in which work from different periods or locations shares certain common elements. The University of Texas’s Blanton Museum of Art, on the other hand, has broken The Geometry of Hope ($30) into looks at six cities that proved especially fertile for Latin American artists. The books naturally overlap somewhat, with important names like Joaquín Torres-García and Gego showing up in both, but their differences in presentation and focus make them complementary. The Blanton’s book, which draws on a single patron’s art collection, is only one of the newly revitalized museum’s publications on the topic: Intrigued readers can explore further in this thorough catalog ($40) of the museum’s own Latin American holdings or go in-depth with Bonevardi ($60), an exhaustive look at Argentine-born Marcelo Bonevardi who spent most of his career in New York producing fascinating shaped-canvas works that are as much wall-mounted sculptures as paintings, such as his 1976 mixed media Señuelo grande (pictured) now in the Blanton’s collection.