Aimed to recognize artists at all stages of their careers, the Latinx Artist Fellowship is awarded to five early career artists, five mid-career artists, and five established artists. Among this year’s winners, whose practices span painting and printmaking to installation and performance to photography and social practice, are pillars of the Latinx art community like Pepón Osorio, Yreina D. Cervántez, John Valadez, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, as well as closely watched ones like Elle Pérez, Sandy Rodriguez, Joel Gaitan, and Chris E. Vargas. (More information on each artist can be found on USLAF’s website.)

“This is what we want this fellowship to be, and this is how we think about the X [in Latinx],” USLAF executive director Adriana Zavala told ARTnews. “This, to me, feels like such an extraordinarily intersectional cohort of artists. I think of all of them, in distinct ways, as dissenters and disruptors—the way they disrupt, siloing tendencies and political exclusion writ large, not just for Latinx artists but for the Latinx community, the Black community, the LGBTQ community.”

This year’s cohort was selected by jury that consists of curators from USLAF’s partner institutions—Angelica Arbelaez at the Whitney Museum, Rita Gonzalez at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cesáreo Moreno at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Maria Elena Ortiz at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth—as well as three of last year’s fellows: artists Felipe Baeza, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, and Tina Tavera. In having artists serve on the jury, Zavala said the organization wanted to ensure that it was “co-creating this with the artists.”

Earlier this year, USLAF launched “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art,” which will commission short essays on each of the previous and current winners divided into seven different collections. The series title, Zavala said, is meant “to signal that, for us, Latinx is a concept. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s not a homogenizing identity. It’s a concept, a political concept, a creative concept.”

The inaugural collection, “Latinx Unsettling,” is edited by Zavala and focuses on artists like Elia Alba, Coco Fusco, Ester Hernandez, Juan Sánchez, and Vincent Valdez, while the second collection, “Materiality of Memory,” is edited by Mary Thomas, USLAF’s director of programs, and will highlight artists such as Lucia Hierro, Carmelita Tropicana, Consuelo Jimenez-Underwood, and Mario Ybarra Jr. The first collection will go live in January, with calls for papers for the other five categories being announced through next year.

“What these artists really need is writing about their work, across multiple genres,” from journalistic pieces to more scholarly articles by both established and early-career writers, Zavala said. “At the end of 2026, we will have 75 essays on Latinx contemporary artists on our website that we’ll be building. I think that’s going to be an extraordinary tool for general audiences, for students at every level, and for scholars seeking out new artists.”

The Latinx Art Fellowship was established in 2021 with $5 million from the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation to fund the first five years of the program, which is set to expire in 2025.

“We’re working very hard to keep all of the work that we do going,” Zavala said. “We’re hopeful that 2025–26 will not be the sunsetting of USLAF or the Latinx Artist Fellowship. But it’s important for people to understand that this is not a given. There’s a lot of work that goes into it every single day.”

The full list of the 2023 Latinx Artist Fellows follows below.

Alberto Aguilar
Artist
Chicago, IL

Yreina D. Cervántez
Painter, Printmaker, and Muralist
Los Angeles, CA

Lizania Cruz
Participatory, Installation, Multidisciplinary, Conceptual Artist, Printmaker, and Designer
New York, NY

Jenelle Esparza
Multidisciplinary Artist
San Antonio, TX

Fronterizx Collective
(Jenea Sanchez & Gabriela Muñoz)
Interdisciplinary Social Practice
Phoenix, AZ / Agua Prieta, Mexico

Joel Gaitan
Sculptor
Miami, FL

Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Performance Artist and Writer
San Francisco CA / Mexico City, Mexico

Maria Maea
Multidisciplinary Artist
Los Angeles, CA

Charo Oquet
Multidisciplinary Artist
Miami, FL

Pepón (Benjamin) Osorio
Visual Artist
Philadelphia, PA

Elle Pérez
Artist and Photographer
Bronx, NY

Gadiel Rivera Herrera
Visual Artist
San Juan, PR

Sandy Rodriguez
Artist and Researcher
Los Angeles, CA

John Valadez
Painter, Muralist, and Photographer
Los Angeles, CA

Chris E. Vargas
Transdisciplinary Artist
Los Angeles, CA / Bellingham, WA

Established in 2021, the Latinx Artist Fellowship was created to honor the practices of Latinx artists, who have historically been under-recognized by mainstream institutions, and to help support their careers, in the form of unrestricted grants of $50,000 per artist. (The fellowship is part of the larger Latinx Art Visibility Initiative, led by Ford and Mellon, that also helps fund museum curators specializing in Latinx art.)

Each cohort comprises 15 fellows—a mix of established, midcareer, and emerging artists—selected specifically “to reflect the Latinx community’s diversity, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and nonbinary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds” and to be geographically representative.

In a statement, USLAF’s director of programs Mary Thomas said, “As the Latinx Artist Fellowship marks its third year, this cohort of artists speaks to the wide range of aesthetic strategies, conceptual practices, and subject matter that position Latinx artists as vital and significant voices within contemporary art.”

As with the previous two cohorts, this year’s fellows include pillars of Latinx art history, like Ester Hernandez, who is well-known for her incisive political prints like Sun Mad (1982), and Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Best known as a purveyor of Destructivism, he recently had his first career retrospective, at El Museo del Barrio, the New York institution he founded; it included a destroyed piano alongside works made during the pandemic.

The list also includes Postcommodity, the collective now consisting of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist, whose room-size installation, A Very Long Line, for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, poignantly reflected on what it means to confront the US-Mexico border firsthand. Margarita Cabrera, another winner, has staged workshops across the Southwest that bring migrant women together to share stories and collaborate on touching soft sculptures, while Joiri Minaya makes videos and installations that examine vestiges of colonialism in the Caribbean through the concept of the tropical.

Two of today’s leading conceptual sculptors are also among the fellows: Beatriz Cortez, whose monumental works reflect on migration experiences via a collapsing of different temporalities and possible futures, and Edra Soto, whose interventions look at how Puerto Rican domestic architecture has been exported the world over. Cortez recently installed a series of works at the Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, and Soto’s survey of her 10-year “GRAFT” series is on view at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago through August 6.

Among the emerging artists are Verónica Gaona, Daisy Quezada Ureña, and Sofía Gallisá Muriente, the latter of whom was recently featured, along with Soto, in the Whitney Museum’s “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” exhibition.

The artists were selected from a pool of more than 200 nominees by a jury that included past artist fellows Maria Gaspar, Lucia Hierro, and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, as well as curators Rodrigo Moura (El Museo del Barrio), Mari Carmen Ramírez (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Marianne Ramirez Aponte (MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico), and Josie Lopez (Albuquerque Museum).

In a statement, USLAF executive director Adriana Zavala said, “USLAF is thrilled to announce the newest cohort of Latinx artist fellows. Like our first two cohorts, these 15 extraordinary artists embody the originality and talent that abound within the Latinx artistic community. We congratulate them, and we are grateful to Mellon and Ford for their partnership and support of our work to uplift Latinx visual artists.”

The full list of the 2023 Latinx Artist Fellows follows below.

Felipe Baeza
he/they
Visual Artist
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Diógenes Ballester
he/him
Arteologist and Multimedia Artist
Lives and works in New York, NY

Margarita Cabrera
She/her
Interdisciplinary and Social Practice Artist
Lives and works in Arizona and Texas

Beatriz Cortez
she/her
Multidisciplinary Artist and Sculptor
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Sofía Gallisá Muriente
she/her
Visual Artist
Lives and works in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico

Verónica Gaona
she/her
Multidisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in Houston, TX

Ester Hernandez
she/her
Printmaker, Painter, and Mixed Media Artist
Lives and works in San Francisco, CA

Joiri Minaya
she/her
Interdisciplinary Visual Artist
Lives and works in New York, NY

Raphael Montañez Ortiz 
he/him
Interdisciplinary Mixed Media Artist
Lives and works in Highland Park, NJ

Postcommodity
(Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist)
(Mestizo: Genízaro, Pueblo, Manito, and Cherokee)
he/him/his
Sound, Installation, and Performance Artists
Live and work in Tempe, AZ and Los Angeles, CA

Daisy Quezada Ureña
she/her
Visual Artist
Lives and works in Santa Fe, NM

Diana Solís
she/they/them
Photographer
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Edra Soto
she/her
Interdisciplinary Visual and Public Artist
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Maria Cristina (Tina) Tavera
she/her
Multidisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN

Mario Ybarra Jr.
he/his
Interdisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in Wilmington, CA

The Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, together with the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), have created the Latinx Artist Fellowship. Over the next five years, the foundations will put $5 million toward the fellowship program, with $3.75 million going to 75 artists in the form of $50,000 unrestricted grants and the remainder going to USLAF.

The inaugural cohort of 15 artists selected for 2021 represents a mix of artists from different generations (five are emerging, five are mid-career, and five are established). They hail from across the country—from New York to Los Angeles to Texas to Massachusetts—and represent a spectrum of diversity within the Latinx community.

Those 15 artists are Elia Alba, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Carolina Caycedo, Adriana Corral, rafa esparza, Christina Fernández, Coco Fusco, Yolanda López, Miguel Luciano, Guadalupe Maravilla, Carlos Martiel, Michael Menchaca, Delilah Montoya, Vick Quezada, and Juan Sánchez. (More information on each artist and the overall initiative can be found here.)

“Giving each of the fellows $50,000 to do their work for a year will support them first and foremost, but with the power of the Mellon and the Ford foundations, this will bring visibility to this kind of initiative and we hope to encourage museums to get on board,” Adriana Zavala, an art historian at Tufts University and the director of USLAF, said in an interview. “We wanted to create a deliberate and intentional jury process so that the full diversity of the very complicated Latinx community could be represented from gender, gender identity, ethno-racial, class, geographic, and disability. This is how you build a sustained legacy by supporting artists at all phases of their career.”

To assemble the inaugural cohort, USLAF solicited dozens of experts in contemporary Latinx art to submit nominations for the grants. That process yielded some 200 names that were given to a jury of curators from the initiative’s six museum partners—Rita Gonzalez at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marcela Guerrero at the Whitney Museum in New York, Mari Carmen Ramírez at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Cesáreo Moreno at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Rodrigo Moura at El Museo del Barrio in New York, and Sylvia Orozco at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin—plus one independent curator, the art historian Yasmin Ramirez.

Yolanda López, Portrait of the artist as the Virgen of Guadalupe, 1978.

The partnering institutions are a mix of three mainstream art museums and three contemporary art museums founded by Latinx people for their local communities. “The combination acknowledges the importance of community-based grassroots context for these artists, but it also insists that the mainstream needs to be listening,” Zavala said.

Traditionally, the Ford and Mellon foundations have not given grants directly to artists, but the pandemic changed that. Though the Latinx Artist Fellowship isn’t specifically Covid-related, it is part of an effort “to get money into the hands of artists, especially these generally under-resourced and highly overlooked artists that are commensurate with 20 percent of a population demographic,” Deborah Cullen-Morales, a program officer at the Mellon Foundation, said. “I see this as field-wide effort to draw the attention of others in philanthropy.”

The initiative is in part meant to rectify a larger inequity found in the philanthropic world. Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, said that, while designing this initiative, the foundations found that only around 2 percent of overall philanthropic giving goes to Latinx-focused organizations. (Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population identifies as Latino/Latina/Latinx or Hispanic, and that number is expected to grow in the coming years.) In fact, funding for Latinx organizations in arts and culture has been decreasing since 2013, dropping from a high of $40.2 million that year to $13.2 million in 2019 (per the latest available figures), according to Hispanics in Philanthropy’s Latinx Funders data sets.

“We hope that other foundations join us in this effort, especially those that focus on arts and culture and in regions of the country that have large Latinx populations, to come along with us and think about how they can also be supportive of these really important issues,” Aranda-Alvarado said.

Vick Quezada, 500+ years a Plague, 2021.

The Latinx Artist Fellowship announced today is the first of three parts in a program known as the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative. The other two parts, which will focus on supporting museums and academics, are still in development. For the museum-focused funding, Cullen-Morales and Aranda-Alvarado said the foundations hope to learn from the institutional partners that served on the jury for the artists fellowships and that it could include funding to support entry-level and mid-career positions focused on Latinx art as well as money for acquisition budgets for work by Latinx artists.

“We want to dig more deeply into what is needed to promote and ensure that Latinx artists are part of the DNA of our museums both on the community-rooted level and on the national-encyclopedic level,” Cullen-Morales said. “All museums that deal with U.S. art in this nation should be thinking about Latinx artists as part of their work.”

As part of the overall initiative, USLAF has also received funds to hire two full-time employees to administer the initiative: Mary Thomas, who will serve as director of programs, and Michelle Ruiz, who will be project coordinator for the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative. (Since its founding in 2015, USLAF has been an all-volunteer organization.) Over the course of the next year, USLAF will host programming with the six partnering museums to highlight the work of the 15 artists receiving grants.

Though Latinx artists are increasingly being included in major group exhibitions and biennials, Zavala said that progress is still slow in terms of institutional acquisitions and major solo surveys. “Mainstream institutions need to do the data research to understand how much of the collection is or is not representative of the diversity of the United States. That needs to be a crucial piece of this conversation.”

Zavala continued, “My sincere hope is that this initiative builds momentum and that others recognize the impact that this can have on building equity in the art world. That’s really what this is about. This initiative is an opportunity to educate.”

Alison Jacques Gallery Now Represents Carol Rhodes
The London-based Alison Jacques Gallery now represents the late artist Carol Rhodes, who died in 2018 and is known for her landscape paintings and drawings. The gallery, which will represent the artist in partnership with her estate, will open an exhibition of Rhodes’s work in February 2021. During her lifetime, the Edinburgh-born artist had solo shows at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the MAC in Belfast, and other institutions. Her work can be found in the collections of the Center for British Art at Yale University, Tate in London, and elsewhere.

Ural Industrial Biennial Names 2021 Curators
While plenty of question marks hang over any exhibition scheduled for 2021, the Ural Industrial Biennial is going ahead with plans for its sixth edition, which is due to open in the fall in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and the surrounding area. The biennial said that it has selected a team of three curators to stage its central show: Çağla İlk and Misal Adnan Yıldız, who together direct the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Germany, and Assaf Kimmel, an architect and curator in Berlin. Titled “A Time to Embrace and to Refrain from Embracing,” the biennial will take up themes like “touch, the right to touch, bodily boundaries, and the shifting conventions of interpersonal communication,” according to the organization. The selected trio’s exhibition will be named “Thinking Hands, Touching Each Other,” riffing on architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s book The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami.

Thursday, December 10

Victoria Miro Now Represents Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami has joined Victoria Miro, which maintains spaces in London and Venice, Italy. Hwami is known for her paintings about life in South Africa, where she lived from ages 9 to 17, as well as notions of displacement. The gallery will present a new work by Hwami in an upcoming online exhibition, opening December 10, and the artist will have her first presentation with the gallery in summer 2021. The painter’s work has been shown at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Gasworks in London, Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, and other venues.

Tiwani Contemporary Now Represents Charmaine Watkiss
Tiwani Contemporary in London has added Charmaine Watkiss to its roster. Watkiss’ drawing practice centers themes of Africa diaspora, ancient and modern spirituality, and cosmology. Her work was on view in “The Abstract Truth of Things,” a two-person show at the gallery which closed in September. She was also featured in the exhibitions “Me, Myself and I” at Collyer Bristow Gallery (2020), the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2019), and “Against Static” at Wimbledon Space (2018).

Toledo Museum of Art Appoints New Board Members
The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio has added Romules Durant, Lisa McDuffie, and Brian Chambers to its board of directors. Durant is CEO and superintendent of Toledo Public Schools, McDuffie serves as president and CEO of the YWCA of Northwest Ohio, and Chambers works as chairman and CEO of  roofing and insulation company Owens Corning. Each new member will serve a five-year term with the opportunity to have a second term of the same length.

Luminaria Names Yadhira Lozano Next Executive Director
Yadhira Lozano will succeed Kathy Armstrong as executive director of Luminaria, a nonprofit arts organization which manages San Antonio’s annual contemporary art festival. She will begin her transition this month and assume full responsibilities in 2021. Lozano previously served as Tejano Conjunto Festival coordinator for the the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and head of communications for the Briscoe Western Art Museum. She represents District 3 for San Antonio’s Arts Commission and is the inaugural chair of the city’s Centro de Artes gallery.

Berry Campbell Adds Estate of Frederick J. Brown
Berry Campbell in New York now represents the Estate of Frederick J. Brown, who died in 2012 at the age of 67. Brown was a central figure in downtown Manhattan’s art and music scene of the 1970’s and 80’s. A painter who frequently collaborated with multidisciplinary artists, his work fused religious and historical themes with scenes from the city. Among his best-known works is a portrait series of jazz and blues musicians including Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, among institutions elsewhere. Berry Campbell will present an exhibition of his work in September 2021.

Courtney Willis Blair.

Wednesday, December 9

Courtney Willis Blair Named Partner at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York has named Courtney Willis Blair a partner. Willis Blair has worked at the gallery since 2016; she is currently a director, and was previously an artist liaison, working with Pope.L, Martha Rosler, and others on the gallery’s roster. She also facilitates Entre Nous, a collective of Black women dealers, and is a member of Triple Canopy’s publishing circle.

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery Adds Shannon T. Lewis to Roster
Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago now represents Berlin-based artist Shannon T. Lewis, who will have her first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2022. Lewis is known for her dreamy figurative paintings that examine femininity, Blackness, and other topics, oftentimes through a dystopian lens. “I feel called to portray bodies fluidly throughout my work, setting the stage for Black women to be as ubiquitous and as universal as any other,” the artist has said of her work. “I am interested in deciphering regulatory structures of society—and how the bodies who are not deemed as equal are regulated the strongest.”

BRIC Names Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President
BRIC, a nonprofit arts organization based in Brooklyn, has appointed Seneca Mudd as its chief operating officer and executive vice president. In this new role, he will oversee development and operational strategy across the organization’s business sectors. Prior to joining BRIC, Mudd was senior vice president for business development at MDC Partners Inc., an advertising and marketing company, and vice president for global clients at Xaxis, a digital media company, where he led audience strategy and revenue development, among other responsibilities.

Marianne Boesky and Goodman Gallery Open Exhibition Space in Miami
Marianne Boesky Gallery and Goodman Gallery have joined forces to present a temporary exhibition space in Miami’s Design District from December 12 to January 20, 2021. Both galleries will show group exhibitions featuring works by artists from their respective rosters. Marianne Boesky Gallery’s showing will include pieces by Gina Beavers, Sanford Biggers, Allison Janae Hamilton, Frank Stella, and others. Goodman Gallery will exhibit works by William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Alfredo Jaar, and more.

The Shed Names Artists In Open Call Commissioning Program
The Shed has revealed the 27 New York City–based artists who will participate in its second Open Call commissioning program for emerging artists, who will create and present new works at the arts center from summer 2021 into 2022. Artists receive a commissioning fee up to $15,000 depending on the scale of their projects. Artists selected for Open Call include Aisha Amin, Caroline Garcia, Simon Liu, Merche Blasco, Anne Wu, and DonChristian Jones. The full list of Open Call recipients can be found here.

Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), You don’t see us. But, we see you. Pursuing the stragglers from the siege of Paramaribo, soldiers of the Dutch West India Company are ambushed in the jungle to devastating effect.The syncretic spider god is pleased, 2020

Tuesday, December 8

Sanford Biggers, Somethin’ Close to Nothin’, 2019.

Monday, December 7

Sanford Biggers Work Acquired Through Public Vote
By way of a public vote, the Art in Public Places Program in Miami Beach has chosen Sanford Biggers’s Somethin’ Close to Nothin’ (2019) to join the collection of the Miami Beach Convention Center. The artwork, which was on view in Art Basel’s OVR: Miami Beach via David Castillo Gallery in Miami, incorporates cut antique quilts and graphite. The work will join a collection that features art by Franz Ackermann, Ellen Harvey, Elmgreen & Dragset, Joep van Lieshout, and Joseph Kosuth.

USLAF Announces First Round of Microgrants for Artist Projects
The U.S. Latinx Art Forum, a professional organization comprised of artists, scholars, educators, and graduate students, has announced the recipients of its first round of the Charla Fund, a Ford Foundation–sponsored initiative that provides $400 microgrants to support informal artist-generated conversations. The format is open-ended and includes projects spanning curated Zoom conversations, artist studio visits, oral history initiatives, and recipe exchanges. Among the artist recipients are Lionel Cruet, Magda Fernandez with Dell Marie Hamilton, Carlos Martiel, Las Nietas de Nonó, and Vick Quezada, among others.

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone Awarded  Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the Human Rights Project have announced that Ama Josephine B. Johnstone has been selected as the seventh recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, an annual award for an artist, activist, or scholar to teach and further a research project at Bard College. Johnstone is a speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist currently pursuing a Ph.D. candidate in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. In a statement, she described her work as centered on “a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black universe.” She will be in residence at Bard during the spring 2021 semester.

The New York Hilton Midtown, where the 2017 CAA annual conference will take place.

JIM HENDERSON, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Last September, ARTnews reported on the findings of a study, conducted by Rose G. Salseda and Mary Thomas, that showed that Latinx art was underrepresented at the College Art Association’s annual conferences between 2012 and 2016. The study reported that, on average, just 1.4 sessions and 7.2 papers on Latino art were presented per year at the conference, with the 2013 and 2014 gatherings featuring no sessions on the topic. A preliminary report on the 2017 CAA annual conference, which runs through Saturday, February 18, in New York, found that, of 256 sessions, only 3 (1.17 percent) will be dedicated to the subject of Latinx art, while 14 of the 949 papers (1.47 percent) discuss Latinx art. Taking into account the growth in sessions and papers between the 2016 and 2017 conferences, the preliminary report states that these are 0.13 percent and 0.43 percent increases, respectively.

As these numbers circulate, the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), which seeks to create a network of Latinx art world professionals and scholars similar to CAA, has reapplied for official affiliated status with CAA, after being denied such recognition last year. (CAA’s executive committee will vote later this month, after the conference.) On Thursday, as part of the CAA conference, USLAF will hold a formal business meeting and then a plenary session on Friday, in which O’Hanian, Salseda, and Zavala will be among the eight participants. Ahead of those events, I spoke with the major players in this dialogue between CAA and Latinx art: Hunter O’Hanian, CAA’s executive director; Salseda, associate director of USLAF; and Adriana Zavala, a professor in Latinx art at Tufts University and director of USLAF.

From left: Hunter O’Hanian, Adriana Zavala, Rose G. Salseda.

FROM LEFT: KYLE S. DUNN; CHRISTINE CAVALIER; STEPHANIE BERGER

This interview has been edited and condensed.

ARTnews: What does this year’s annual CAA conference look like for the U.S. Latinx Art Forum?

Adriana Zavala: For the plenary session, we’ve brought together individuals from a variety of different museums and cultural institutions to really think about Latinx art in relation to the academy and in relation to museum and exhibition representation, and really trying to have a conversation that is intersectional and relational. We’re not just talking about advocating for Latinx art as a sort of category isolated unto itself, but really trying to jumpstart a conversation that positions Latinx art in relation to other fields, in relation to the broader discipline. USLAF has really been trying to conceptualize how to bring some new energy to the conversation and how to shift the conversation somewhat. It’s really this effort to engage in a conversation across fields.

Rose G. Salseda: Another aspect of our plenary is that we’re also thinking about how the Trump administration might affect all the gains that we’ve been able to accomplish within the field of Latinx art. We’re hoping to discuss that too with our participants to figure out how we can foster that growth in a climate where arts funding might be cut, with immigration policies that affect our community.

Zavala: Yeah, that seems absolutely crucial at this juncture. It’s about finding ways to create solidarity at a moment when not just Latinos and Latinx art are going to be under attack, but marginalized communities across the board. We really have to mobilize to try to have these conversations across different dimensions and to find ways to create community and solidarity.

Hunter, can you talk about the statements CAA has put out about the travel ban and the possible defunding of the NEA and the NEH?

Hunter O’Hanian: CAA has a long history of advocating for both academic and artistic freedom. CAA’s international program goes as far back as the 1930s. CAA was providing opportunities for refugees from Poland, Germany, and Eastern Europe who were facing very severe circumstances. We’ve got a long history of trying to be as inclusive as we can be. I guess over the years we probably always haven’t been as successful as people have wanted us to be. But that’s well within the DNA of CAA.

So now, when I look at where we are with this current government and at this conference we have, it’s really about being as inclusive as possible. When I use the word inclusivity, I’m talking about it on the micro level and on the macro level. On the micro level, I think about inclusivity as one-on-one, person-to-person. I want every individual to feel as included as they possibly can be. On the macro level, I think it’s important to think about all of the different constituencies and fields of studies and emerging areas and how they, too, can be represented through the largest art history and visual arts learned society in the United States.

Zavala: I agree with that really capacious definition of inclusivity. I hope what I’m seeing is a real openness and willingness to both strive for inclusivity but also tackle some of the really complex and longstanding issues, particularly those that have shaped the field of art history. As complex as a history as it has, it also has a history of racism and deeply entrenched, hierarchical notions of quality and aesthetic value. We want to create a forum for having really challenging intellectual and ethical conversations about where our field is and what this all means to us at this given moment.

O’Hanian: When you put together panels and forums, they just create the framework. We as an organization can create those frameworks and we can bring people to the table and then try to move the conversation along. But the next part of that is really for people in the field to start participating in those conversations and realizing how things can change. As you say, some of this is difficult work, some of the work is around people recognizing past practices and understanding how some of those things might be unpacked. If CAA can’t create a forum for that conversation, I don’t know who can.

Zavala: Right.

What do you think this conversation will look like in five or ten years? How do you expect it to change, and what steps are you taking to make sure that that happens?

O’Hanian: I don’t know where it’s going to end up. As far as CAA as an entity is concerned, it’s very easy for us to set the table, to put this stuff out there and to have these conversations. But then I think about taking it to the next step, where do we and how do we bring it to practitioners in the art history field? How do we begin to change minds in that field? I think that’s going to take longer. When we look at an art history department, whether it’s at a small college in New England or a large college in the Southwest, the aim is that students and topics are accepted and are given the recognition that they deserve. People shouldn’t have to fight for that recognition.

Zavala: One approach that we’re taking is to gather data, not simply to point fingers—that’s one important piece of it, to point out underrepresentation, inadequate allocation of resources—but then to use the data to strategize. Our ultimate aim in those things is to open up conversation, to track the field, to track lack of representation, and then to say, Okay, what are strategies to beginning to overcome this? You have to create fora to have these conversations and you have to invite people who aren’t part of your in-group to learn from you, and you also have to be open to learn from them. I think that’s what this political moment requires of us.

Salseda: For our organization, we really want to create initiatives and create different programs where our artists can be supported and where the scholars in our field will be supported. It’s not just these other fields needing to learn from us, and us wanting to teach them; they really need to encompass our field. The Latin Americanists are being asked to teach Latinx art, and Americanists need to learn Latinx art history with our growing demographic. It’s critical that these histories be taught and absorbed by other fields.

O’Hanian: I’m just sort of curious, Rose, what do you think is holding the other Americanists back from learning Latinx art and teaching it?

Salseda: Really, I think it’s this long history of racism and discrimination and value that’s put on certain types of art. That’s what I think it is. Adriana, do you agree?

Zavala: I agree. It’s painful to say and we don’t want to malign another subfield of the discipline, but the level of misunderstanding and the kinds of stereotypical assumptions about what Latinx art is are upsetting. We’re living another virulent moment of the culture wars. Frankly, the field of American art in the United States hasn’t really changed much in terms of inclusion. The percentage of Latinx artists who are not only included in a tokenizing way but actually understood in a profound way I would say is pretty small. The elephant in the room is that there is structural racism within the discipline.

O’Hanian: I assumed that that was what the answer was. My own personal experience, running the only gay art museum in the world, was seeing a lot of that work being completely marginalized and ignored because of another –ism out there, in that case homophobia. What’s next is really looking at where you can put your energy, where things are, and then how you can actually monitor change.

Zavala: Absolutely. I think part of the quandary is that there’s the assumption—or a lack of understanding—in the field of American or even global contemporary art history that there is an insider culture that is going to be opaque or not understandable or that can simply be ignored in the interest of mainstreaming. The point of the matter is, whether you like globalization or not, we have to be able to talk across different dimensions and we have to be able to think, to teach across different dimensions. Artists need to be able to self-name, self-identify and then it’s really beholden to the critics and the art historians who interpret their work to become conversant in the issues that these artists are dealing with, whether you’re talking about a queer artist or a Latinx artist.

Salseda: That naming is really important and it’s also political. If we don’t name ourselves, if we don’t acknowledge our field of Latinx art, we’re at risk of further making ourselves invisible or continuing that invisibility. If we don’t name it, it’s a further threat of all of these issues and problems not being addressed.

Zavala: I would add that you can never say enough times that there is no neutral linguistic or theoretical or static system. All of these things are—even if that culture or ethnicity is whiteness—constituted through identity. We accept white Anglo-European norms as neutral but they’re just not. This political moment shows us that in such a virulent way.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Zavala: I hope anybody that reads this—regardless of who they are, Latinx, black, white, queer—sees that this plenary session is an opportunity to come and learn and participate in conversation. It’s not just for the groups that appear to be represented in the roster of panelists. It really is about anybody who’s curious to come and to learn and to participate.

Salseda: Really, we’re talking about a field, Latinx art, that is inherently intersectional as well. Latinx art encompasses African American art and history, queer art and history. So really this is for everybody.