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

Typically, Osorio debuts his installations in neighborhoods and in front of people that are at the heart of the piece he is working on. This survey was all the more special because they were shown in conversation with one another for the first time. Osorio creates settings that would typically never be seen in the museum arena, like in reForm (2014–17), En la barbería no se llora (1994), and Badge of Honor (1995) which stage large-scale immersive models of a school classroom, a barbershop, and a set of beds (a father’s prison cell and his son’s bedroom), respectively. Originally, reForm took up residency in the basement of Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia; En la barbería no se llora in an abandoned space in Hartford, Connecticut; and Badge of Honor at a storefront in Newark, New Jersey. In this way, Osorio shares the ownership of his artworks in each of these locations and welcomes his collaborators, often working-class communities of Latinx people, to process their landscapes of memory together. No longer being shown separately, these three works, and nine others, together created a new environment on the New Museum’s second floor. The institutional activation of Osorio’s oeuvre is not antithetical to its grassroots origins but, in fact, an extension of it, fusing new and traditional art audiences into his art’s framework of radical intimacy.

Osorio’s heartbeat, part of the exhibition’s titular work My Beating Heart/Mi Corazón Latiente (2000), was one of the first things visitors heard upon entering the exhibition. The sound loop of his beating heart and its abrupt stopping poured out from speakers that rest atop Osorio’s massive heart, a six-foot-two-inch piñata of the vital organ that served as the emblem for the show. Osorio dared the audience to break open his heart and see what goodies lie inside.

My Beating Heart/Mi Corazón Latiente was installed adjacent to his most recent body of work, Convalescence (2023–). A dark-skinned mannequin, who represents Osorio, stands with his arms outstretched at his sides while hooked up to active heart monitors on a plastic-covered chair. His gaze meets his visitors’ (his subjects) through a magnifying glass drilled into the right side of his face, while the rest of the mannequin’s body is obscured by medical and spiritual paraphernalia: covered in layers of Band-Aids, decorated in cowrie shells, and punctured by dozens of needles. The need for—and difficulty in achieving—true healing is a theme coalesced in an accompanying video of a man whom Osorio met in Puerto Rico; the man details his struggles with physical health, and consequently, his livelihood. The film is situated in the man’s wooden food vending cart, covered in plexiglass and decorated with objects of the infirm: sterile clinical tools, a candle for the orisha Osaín, and figurines of nurses, surgeons, and saints. Both men are united in Convalescence by hundreds of bottles between them that form the shape of Puerto Rico, where Osorio was born and raised.

In Convalescence, Osorio narrates a multifaceted story about the myriad ways that healthcare systems in the US invalidate, threaten, and violate people’s autonomy in their own healing journeys. He begins by telling the story of his experience with cancer and how his artistic practice was integral to his recovery. Amid rampant political, social, and systemic apathy, Osorio uses empathy as artistic technique, steeping his pieces in the combined grief, hardship, and hope felt by all convalescents, and by Osorio firsthand. The exhibition, much like the artwork it is named after and this newest piece, is then a celebration of life and a reminder of its inevitable fragility.

Osorio was born in Santurce, a waterfront neighborhood of San Juan, in 1955, where he was raised by two working parents and a caretaker that each encouraged his flair for creativity from a young age. In 1975, he moved to the Bronx after studying at Universisdad Interamericana de Puerto Rico. In New York, he continued his education, studying sociology and social work at Lehman College in 1978 and later getting a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1985. His background as a social worker and educator is imperative to his intimate investigative cultural praxis. His artistic career hinges on interviewing families during their most fraught moments, and he has applied this inquisitive nature and his passionate warmth for teaching into his methods and motive for artmaking.

After his first 15 years of living in New York, Osorio was recognized with a now landmark solo exhibition, “Con to’los Hierros,” while he was an artist in residence at El Museo. “My Beating Heart/Mi Corazón Latiente,” curated by Margot Norton and Bernardo Mosqueira and which closed on September 17, picked up right where that initial survey left off, showcasing the work Osorio has made between 1990 and now.

Osorio’s impressive legacy and his renowned acclaim since the debut of one of his most famous works to date—Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), made especially for the 1993 Whitney Biennial—contributes to why this New Museum survey felt so belated. Scene of the Crime commits and stages the murder of an unknown woman in a South Bronx home, daring the audience, who peer at the scene from one side of a caution tape, to investigate their own role in the perpetuity of structural violence that has contributed to her death. Osorio created the work to directly address and subsequently challenge racist stereotypes of Latinos widely disseminated in the media.

It is also the first major museum to showcase the most complete arrangement of his life’s work, the culmination of his journey as a sincerely accessible yet powerfully radical artist. Walking through the exhibition, you hear the sounds of soft-spoken confessions, declarations of love, and demands for justice. This choir of intimate voices is most apparent in installations like Badge of Honor, Convalescence, and reForm, in which his collaborators are speaking directly to visitors and telling their deeply personal stories of incarceration and violence, healing, and loss, respectively. While telling complex stories marked by white supremacist systems, Osorio also engages visitors with his Caribbean sense of humor: always looking for the silver lining or a sign of levity, he manages to joke even in the worst-case scenarios.

reForm, for example, envelopes us in one of these worst-case scenarios: Fairhill Elementary School, one of dozens of public schools in Philadelphia that were shut down in 2013 due to budget cuts, left many students abandoned by their education system. Osorio was able to reunite generations of Fairhill’s former students and teachers to create this installation together, comprised of a classroom filled with items that were taken from Fairhill after its closure. Lining the walls of reForm are students’ letters written in response to the school’s closing by the Philadelphia School Reform Commission. They serve as a background to clay renderings of that very commission; presented almost like a classroom diorama, each government official stands on an eraser that reads “For BIG Mistakes.” Their eraser platforms double as diving boards: a wry punchline only made visible from below.

The curators and Osorio placed reForm next to an installation about masculinity: No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (En la barbería no se llora), from 1994. In leaving the classroom for the barbershop, the exhibition drew out the differences between formal and informal education, from teacher to student and from man to man, and how they aren’t all that different. The barbershop is complete with a pool table and counters on which rest hair products, fake flowers, and mirrors ready to remind the visitor of their role in male-only spaces. Along the walls are dozens of tire rims and portraits of men; elsewhere are hats, suit jackets, and ties. The three barber chairs are screenprinted with nude male bodies, their heads replaced by video monitors playing tapes of a man’s crying face. Each chair is decked out in Osorio’s signature maximalist style. Glued to each chair are dozens of knickknacks (padlocks, little toy wrestlers painted silver, and medallions throwing middle fingers at the viewer): Osorio’s joke at the pervasiveness and absurdity of machismo.

Perhaps most striking in this survey were the smaller works on display: Purificador (2011), Reparación (2021), State of Preservation (1996), Quinceañera (2011), and Sin mal no recuerdo (If I remember correctly), from 2023. In an exhibition that demanded the audience’s presence and attention in order to activate Osorio’s immersive and deeply conceptual installations, Purificador provided an unexpected relief in its simplicity: a glass half-filled with water installed in a corner high above the viewer. (The pieceis named for its believed ability to repel evil.) Placed between Convalescence and reForm, it also served as Osorio’s reminder that each individual object holds weight and currency for him, and that we shouldn’t lose sight of that when seeing the hundreds of ready-made objects that comprise his deeply layered installations. In this way, his smaller works feel protective; good places to collect your thoughts while processing the morbid and playful journey through our lived realities.

In an often sterile institutional art environment, Osorio’s art welcomes the nontraditional museum-goer with decided warmth. Made visually complete with motifs of outstretched hands, heartfelt letters read aloud, and a reverence for the childlike, this exhibition kept our hearts beating. Over the course of more than three decades, Osorio has observed and forged community from Puerto Rico to Philadelphia with each new locale being part of his legacy, provoking all who see it to consider how they, too, create and own the vibrancy of these inherited environments. We are also part of the art, temporary fixtures in his installations, caught in glances exchanged between the many mirrors across the second floor. His work, while deeply autobiographical, is still grounded in telling the stories of communities of people that have kept his heart beating. It is even more special, and saddening, that the time to see these pieces beat together–the many chambers of Osorio’s heart–is fleeting. “My Beating Heart/Mi Corazón Latiente” celebrates the ephemerality of life, the passion it holds nonetheless, and all we do to seize it.

These acquisitions may be a good barometer to track the success that Latinx art (used here to describe artists based in the United States, primarily but not limited to those born here or having arrived as children, with a heritage to Latin America and the Caribbean) is currently having within the art world. The fight for recognition has been ongoing since it was initiated in the late 1960s by artists, activists, and curators, and right now presents what some might call a moment for Latinx art. Characterizing it as a moment is problematic, however, as that would make it seem like a fleeting trend. It would also dismiss the fact that Latinx people have been an important part of this country and will continue to be as the Latinx population in this country continues to grow. (In 2020, Latinxs accounted for 19 percent of the U.S. population, up from 5 percent in 1970.)

Laura Aguilar, Clothed/Unclothed #20, 1992.

This shift is still not enough—it might never be. But things do seem to be changing, and if museums—and the art world as a whole—want to continue to be relevant, this is an audience that needs to see itself represented across the art world. As curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas writes in essay for a standout issue of Aperture this year given over to Latinx photography, “As the canons of art and history must be pushed to meet the world we live in, so too must the systems that support its visual documentation—from academia, to museums, to the market, and beyond.”

What the Museum of Modern Art in New York chooses to show tends to be telling, and it was notable that, as part of a rehang in the fall, two significant rooms were given over to Latinx artists: one gallery devoted to Pepón Osorio, the other to Guadalupe Maravilla. Not far from the custom-built room for Monet’s Water Lilies is Osorio’s groundbreaking 1995 video and mixed-media installation Badge of Honor, which looks at how incarceration affects not just those imprisoned but their families as well. In the work, an incarcerated father (whose image is projected onto a bare yellow cell) has a conversation with his teenage son (whose image is shown in a bedroom bedecked in classic ’90s teen accoutrements). The conversation isn’t imagined. Rather, it was a real one mediated by Osorio, who traveled between Northern State Prison in Newark, New Jersey, where the father was imprisoned at the time, and the son’s home over the course of several weeks.

Pepón Osorio, Badge of Honor, 1995, installation view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017.

Unfortunately, this powerful work is neither shown well (the gallery’s acoustics were not suited for this kind of work) nor properly contextualized sufficiently (the wall text was cursory at best). After all, why exhibit it nearby works made decades beforehand? But you couldn’t say the same for MoMA’s elegant gallery for Maravilla, titled “Luz y fuerza” (Hope and strength). Here, Maravilla, who was also the subject of a solo show at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens this summer, presents various examples from “Disease Thrower” mixed-media sculptural series, which he describes as “healing machines” that can be activated by sound baths that the artist has been staging at various intervals since the show opened. These works are complex and visually rich, and have gravitas, particularly in their installation here at MoMA.

The cover of Aperture’s Latinx issue.

Still, there is a dearth of Latinx art just about everywhere else in the museum. “Masters of Popular Painting,” a gallery focused on the work of self-taught artists working during the early and mid-20th century, excludes Mexican American artist Martín Ramírez, whose work is contemporary to that time. “Divided States of America,” about social unrest and the art that came out of it in the 1960s and ’70s, is devoid of any Latinx art at all. Countless Latinx artists, from Rupert Garcia and Carmen Lomas Garza to Los Four and ASCO, could have been included, though MoMA hasn’t collected their work. The goal isn’t representation—it’s to tell a fuller history of art. To discuss protest movements in the late ’60s and ’70s without discussing the Chicano Movement or the Chicano Blowouts of 1968 (often considered a pivotal year with regard to student activism around the world) is an harmful and ultimately despicable form of erasure. Similarly, a gallery titled “Picturing America” leaves out images of Latinx people as well as paintings or photographs by Latinx artists. The curators would do well to thumb through Aperture‘s “Latinx” issue or Elizabeth Ferrer’s Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History, both of which detail early photographic contributions by Latinx artists.

Installation view of “Border Vision: Luis Jiménez’s Southwest,” 2021–22, at Blanton Museum of Art, Austin.

Other museums seem to have done the work institutions like MoMA should be doing. At the end of last year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston opened its new Kinder building, which came with the institution’s first-ever dedicated permanent collection galleries for Latinx art. (Previously, the museum would rotate its Latin American and Latinx art holdings in a poorly lit basement gallery.) Now, work by the likes of Amalia Mesa-Bains, Teresa Margolles, Tania Bruguera, Tanya Aguiñiga, Luis Jimenez, Camilo Ontiveros, Jay Lynn Gomez, and others are afforded the same space as pieces by Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns, Turrell, and others. The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, has long prided itself on its Latin American art collection, and it, too, has now begun to place a greater emphasis on Latinx art. Nowhere was this more apparent than in its small survey of the groundbreaking Chicano sculptor Luis Jiménez, whose work has never been the subject of a posthumous retrospective in the 15 years since his untimely death in 2006.

Within New York, some museums did offer Latinx artists prominent displays. At PS1, artist and activist Djali Brown-Cepeda staged “Nuevayorkinos,” a show about how various organizations and activists fought to secure $2.1 billion for the Excluded Workers Fund, which provided money to people who had lost income during the pandemic but had previously been unable to receive any relief because of their immigration status. And BRIC mounted “Latinx Abstract,” a modest but important survey of abstraction by Latinx artists that brought together the work of Candida Alvarez, Glendalys Medina, Freddy Rodríguez, Sarah Zapata, and others. But nowhere was the re-embrace of Latinx art in New York felt more acutely than at El Museo del Barrio in Upper Manhattan.

Installation view of Xime Izquierdo Ugaz’s work in “La Trienal 20/21,” at El Museo de Barrio.

El Museo’s relaunched La Trienal exhibition, curated by Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and artist Elia Alba, felt like a rebirth for an institution roiled by protests over a lack of Latinx art at the museum during the past couple years. The vast array of works included standout pieces by Francis Almendárez, Fontaine Capel, Collective Magpie, Dominique Duroseau, Justin Favela, María Gaspar, Xime Izquierdo Ugaz, Esteban Jefferson, the Museum of Pocket Art, Sandy Rodriguez, and Edra Soto. This exhibition felt like new life had been breathed into the institution, as it returned to its roots of supporting emerging Latinx talents look before mainstream institutions paid attention. Hopefully, the museum continues to nurture this refreshing energy.

A similar tectonic shift could be seen taking place at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where E. Carmen Ramos organized “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now.” That show brought together hundreds of graphic prints by Chicanx artists as a way to show the ongoing influence of the Chicano Movement. In May, Ramos was appointed at the chief curator of the National Gallery of Art, making her the first woman and the first person of color to hold the position. That same month, the Whitney Museum in New York announced a promotion and endowed curatorial post for Marcela Guerrero, who has reshaped how the museum presents and engages with Latinx artists.

On the commercial front, a handful of galleries have been influential in presenting the work of Latinx artists in New York. Ruiz-Healy Art, which also has a space in San Antonio, showed the work of Texas-based Latinx artists, including Carlos Rosales-Silva and César A. Martínez this year. Calderón gallery opened this fall with a mission to showcase the work of Latinx artists in New York. Similarly, young curator Kiara Cristina Ventura’s roving Processa arts space now has a permanent home in the Queens’s Ridgewood neighborhood. Ortuzar Projects mounted an important exhibition of Chicano artist Joey Terrill; it was one of the first shows Terrill had had in the city in decades.

Installation view of “Joey Terrill, Once Upon A Time: Paintings, 1981–2015,” 2021, at Ortuzar Projects, New York.

Galleries like these can provide crucial support to artists, and so, too, can awards. This year, the Ford and Mellon Foundations partnered with the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, and launched what looks to be the most significant monetary support for Latinx art in a generation—or possibly ever. Spearheaded by two Latinx art curators now working in philanthropy, Rocío Aranda-Alvarado (at Ford) and Deborah Cullen-Morales (at Mellon), the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative is comprised of various components that will unfold over the next five years. It includes a major new artist fellowship through which 75 artists will each win $50,000 fellowships over the next five years. Among the first 15 winners were Carolina Caycedo, Coco Fusco, Miguel Luciano, Carlos Martiel, and Juan Sánchez.

Tanya Aguiñiga won the Heinz Family Foundation’s annual $250,000 artist awards, and Guadalupe Maravilla won the $100,000 Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award from the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway, which will mount an exhibition of his art next year. United States Artists awarded its $50,000 unrestricted grants to a bevy of Latinx artists like Naima Ramos-Chapman, Carmelita Tropicana, Ofelia Esparza, Maria Gaspar, and Daniel Lind-Ramos, who was also the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship this year, marking the first time a Latinx artist has been honored with one in over a decade.

Yolanda López, from the series “Tableaux Vivant,” 1978.

As with Aguilar’s passing months after her retrospective opened, Yolanda M. López died just one month before her first museum survey in decades was set to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in the city where she made so much of her consequential work in the 1970s. The loss of López to the Latinx arts community, especially the Chicanx community, cannot be understated. As one of the members of the first generation of Chicana artists, López helped our community, in particular women, imagine new possibilities for themselves. She reclaimed the iconography of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and poignantly asked: How do we see ourselves?

I fear that many artists of her generation will pass away before any museums mount major retrospectives, but I’m also hopeful for what 2022 will bring. Already, there are some exciting projects on the horizon. The Mistake Room in Los Angeles will organize a series of exhibitions over the next two years that will look at the complexities and nuances within Latinx art. That series will culminate in a citywide biennial-style show titled “Wetlines,” which is itself a reclamation of a slur used by Cesar Chavez against undocumented workers.

Judith F. Baca, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, curated by Alessandra Moctezuma and Gabriela Urtiaga, is also due for greater visibility next year. In 2022, her World Wall mural will be the subject of a major survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and over the next several years, she’ll be at work with a team of collaborators and community input to extend the imagery for her iconic Great Wall of Los Angeles, thanks to a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Meanwhile, her contemporary, Amalia Mesa-Bains, will be the subject of a retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2023, curated by Laura E. Pérez and María Esther Fernández. In July, Duke University Press will publish a new volume of essays, edited by Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer, on the groundbreaking work of Northern California–based Chicana artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood; it will be the first such book on her pioneering textile and multimedia art. And in May, the long-awaited Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture will open in Riverside, California, under the artistic direction of Fernández.

In thinking toward what must happen, I’m reminded of something Cheech Marin told me earlier this year: “My mantra during all these years has been: You can’t love or hate Chicano art unless you see it. … I’ve heard it said all the time: ‘I didn’t know what Chicano art was—but I liked this.’ Well, that was the goal: to get as many people as possible to see Chicano art.”

The fellowships look “to address the lack of unrestricted funding available to artists,” according to the organization’s website. The fellows come from across the United States, from Montana to West Virginia, Alaska to Puerto Rico, Los Angeles to New York, and represent various fields of artistic production: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Arts, and Writing.

“[The 2018 USA Fellows] produce some of the most moving, incisive, and powerful artistic work in this country, and it is our privilege to honor them,” Deana Haggag, the foundation’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “Collectively, they are a reminder of the beauty produced by hardworking artists on a daily basis, too much of which is often overlooked.”

This year’s recipients include: in media, the film production company TNEG, founded by Elissa Blount Moorhead, Arthur Jafa, and Malik Sayeed; in writing, poet and scholar Fred Moten; and in theater and performance, Tarell Alvin McCraney, who adapted his play for the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, and the performance art collective My Barbarian, which is composed of Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, Alexandro Segade.

In visual arts, the fellows include Cassils, who recently had an exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York; Abigail DeVille, who staged a performance at the Whitney Museum as part of the programming of the “Calder: Hypermobility” exhibition; Pepón Osorio, whose moving installation, Badge of Honor (1994), is currently on display in the traveling exhibition “Home—So Different, So Appealing” at the MFA Houston; Dread Scott, whose 2015 flag A Man Was Lynched by Police was acquired by both the MCA San Diego and the Whitney; and Cauleen Smith, whose banners were included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and some of which were acquired by the museum.

Past recipients of the fellowship include Judith F. Baca, Senga Nengudi, Shirin Neshat, and Stanley Whitney.

The full list follows below.

Architecture & Design

Norman Kelley (Carrie Norman, Thomas Kelley) – Architects & Designers – Chicago, IL
Amanda Williams – Public Artist – Chicago, IL

Craft

Julia Galloway – Potter – Missoula, MT
Tony Marsh – Ceramicist – San Pedro, CA
Martinez Studio (Wence Martinez, Sandra Martinez) – Weaver & Painter/ Designer – Sturgeon Bay, WI
Warren Newton Seelig – Sculptor – Rockland, ME
Patti Warashina – Ceramicist – Seattle, WA

Dance

Oguri – Dancer & Choreographer – Venice, CA
Okwui Okpokwasili – Performer & Choreographer – Brooklyn, NY
Allison Orr – Choreographer – Austin, TX
Bill Shannon – Performance & Video Artist – Pittsburgh, PA
Amara Tabor-Smith – Dancer & Choreographer – Oakland, CA

Media

Starlee Kine – Podcaster & Writer – Brooklyn, NY
Terence Nance – Artist – Brooklyn, NY
Elaine McMillion Sheldon – Filmmaker – Morgantown, WV
TNEG (Elissa Blount Moorhead, Arthur Jafa, Malik Sayeed) – Filmmakers – Baltimore, MD, Los Angeles, CA

Music

Terence Blanchard – Trumpeter & Composer – New Orleans, LA
Amir ElSaffar – Multi-Instrumentalist & Composer – New York, NY
Ruthie Foster – Singer & Songwriter – Atlanta, GA
Tania León – Composer & Conductor – Nyack, NY
Danilo Pérez – Pianist & Composer – Quincy, MA
Toshi Reagon – Musician – Brooklyn, NY
Wayne Shorter – Composer – Los Angeles, CA
Somi – Vocalist & Songwriter – New York, NY
Tyshawn Sorey – Composer & Musician – New Haven, CT

Theater & Performance

Luis Alfaro – Playwright – Los Angeles, CA
Lileana Blain-Cruz – Theater Director – New York, NY
Las Nietas de Nonó (Lydela Nonó, Michel Nonó) – Performance Artists – Trujillo Alto, PR
Tarell Alvin McCraney – Writer – Miami, FL
My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, Alexandro Segade) – Performance Art Collective – New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA
Mary Kathryn Nagle – Playwright – Tulsa, OK

Traditional Arts

D.Y. Begay – Textile Artist – Santa Fe, NM
Sonya Kelliher-Combs – Mixed-Media Artist – Anchorage, AK
Dawn Nichols Walden – Basketry Fiber Artist – Vulcan, MI

Visual Art

Cassils – Multidisciplinary & Performance Artist – Los Angeles, CA
Abigail DeVille – Installation Artist – Bronx, NY
Vanessa German – Sculptor & Citizen Artist – Pittsburgh, PA
Pepón Osorio – Installation Artist – Philadelphia, PA
Ebony G. Patterson – Painter & Mixed-Media Artist – Lexington, KY
Dread Scott – Multidisciplinary Artist – Brooklyn, NY
Cauleen Smith – Multidisciplinary Artist – Los Angeles, CA

Writing

Molly Brown – Poet & Essayist – Sweet Briar, VA
Lucas Mann – Writer / Literary Nonfiction – Providence, RI
Fred Moten – Poet & Cultural Critic – New York, NY
Susan Muaddi Darraj – Writer / Fiction – Phoenix, MD

Studio in a School artist-instructor James Reynolds advises students at P.S. 196 in the Bronx.

SARI GOODFRIEND

In 1976, New York philanthropist, art patron, and collector Agnes Gund read in The New York Times that art programs were being slashed from New York City public schools due to drastic budget cuts. Her response to the article was to found Studio in a School, a program that since its inception in 1977 has brought over 620 professional artists—including MacArthur-Award winner Pepón Osorio—into classrooms as teachers and creative role models for more than 800,000 New York City school children, 90 percent of whom are from low-income families.

“I thought that every child had the right to an arts program in their school,” Gund says, “not as a frill or an extra, but as a consistent thing taught really well as both an academic subject and a joyful pleasure.” To date, Studio has contributed over $90 million in services to students ages 3 to 23 at more than 700 locations, and is currently operating in over 150 public schools, daycare centers, community-based organizations, and museums.

“In art, there’s no right and wrong,” Gund continues. “If one child makes a rabbit that doesn’t look like the next child’s rabbit, that’s not a failure. I think art should be taught for its own sake, but it also can be brought into other subjects so easily. It helps with science, it helps with math, it helps with verbalization.” As she conceived her program, Gund felt that practicing artists would intuitively understand this integrated approach—and could benefit from a steady job with a flexible schedule that still allowed for their own studio time.

In partnership with the New York City Department of Education, Studio began training artists as teachers and then offering several candidates to each school, giving principals final hiring power. And while the program funds approximately 80 percent of the budget for administrative support, supplies, and ongoing mentoring for the students—with generous support from sources including the Robertson Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, and Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky—it asks participating schools to come up with the remaining amount. Requiring schools to make some financial commitment is something Gund was advised to do early on.

“If you give something away for free, you don’t get the community involved,” she explains. “Schools wouldn’t try to raise the money and interest the parents in it, or try to get teachers to understand how important the program is. This way, they have a real stake in it.”

Studio was piloted in three schools during its first year and was immediately embraced within the school system. Two years later, Gund hired Tom Cahill—a practicing artist who had been teaching art classes through the Brooklyn Museum—as the organization’s president and CEO, and he quickly expanded the number of schools the organization reached and the range of services it offered. In addition to its core program in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms, Studio now offers discovery-based initiatives for pre-kindergarten, Saturday workshops and apprenticeships for teens, courses in portfolio-development for students interested in applying to art school, and a summer internship program at museums for college students that is helping to bring more diversity to the field.

“We’ve developed expertise and a comprehensive art curriculum that really is broad across many schools and is relevant to many age groups,” Cahill says. In 2004, he was asked by the Department of Education to cochair a committee whose aim was to create a set of standards for arts education. The program, called the “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts,” is now implemented throughout New York City public schools.

“Studio has been a motivator for the schools to hire,” continues Cahill, who sees it as a great achievement when Studio can cycle out of a school that then builds its own art program. To enable and support this, Studio now provides extensive professional development for artist-instructors who are being hired directly by schools.

Gund and Cahill strongly believe that visual intelligence permeates other academic subjects and aspects of life, and they have been keen to prove it. Since 2009, Studio has worked with the national consulting firm Metis Associates to study the actual impact of integrating rigorous visual arts education into the core curricula of high-poverty urban elementary schools. Preliminary results, which compare schools using the “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts” to those that aren’t, show that the program is correlated with improvement among students in state literacy and math tests, greater job satisfaction from teachers, and more awareness from principals about art’s capacity to engage parents in their children’s academic development.

“Innovation and the arts go together,” says Cahill. “It’s part of the curriculum where there are multiple perspectives and multiple answers. We know that once kids are thinking and responding and asked to examine a work of art and describe it, they are using higher-order thinking skills. Those critical faculties are the things we’re saying are 21st-century workforce skills.”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

Agostino Brunias, A Planter and His Wife, Attended by a Servant, ca. 1780. From “Counterpoints” at El Museo del Barrio.

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, NEW HAVEN, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION

The first thing to understand about “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World,” the cluster of exhibitions opening concurrently at El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Queens Museum of Art in June, is that these aren’t shows of Caribbean art. They’re shows of art about the Caribbean.

That distinction is crucial, says Museo del Barrio curator Elvis Fuentes, a driving force behind the landmark project. In the planning for more than five years, “Caribbean” is an unprecedented collaborative effort to consider the multiple historical, cultural, and social forces that shaped not only 28 countries but also their diasporas in North and South America and beyond.

In its multidisciplinary approach, and its focus on how the movement of peoples and products around the globe created new, hybrid civilizations and artifacts, “Caribbean” is part of a wave of recent scholarship on American cultures that includes studies such as Charles C. Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

But “Caribbean” tells the story entirely through art. Natives, newcomers, slaves, revolutionaries, plantations, tobacco, coffee, Carnival, merengue, Toussaint, Trujillo, Castro: all of these and more are rendered, or represented, in objects.

The shows offer a large selection of what might be described as Caribbean art as traditionally defined. There are portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes, by figures such as Puerto Rico’s José Campeche, Haiti’s Hector Hyppolite, Jamaica’s Edna Manley, and Venezuela’s Armando Reverón, among many others, reflecting the meeting of native and foreign cultures and the emergence of new creole societies. And since the project is concerned with how the outside world sees the Caribbean, the exhibitions feature images by well-known foreigners, such as John James Audubon, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro (a Saint Thomas native), Walker Evans, and Jacob Lawrence.

Contemporary artists bringing a more conceptual and metaphorical approach to the project include Nari Ward and Renée Cox (born in Jamaica), Janine Antoni (Bahamas), Pepón Osorio and Enoc Pérez (Puerto Rico), Edouard Duval Carrié (Haiti), Abel Barroso, René Peña, and Sandra Ramos (all from Cuba), and Hank Willis Thomas (from the United States), to name a few.

The project was launched when staff members of El Museo and the Queens Museum discovered that both institutions were considering shows on contemporary Caribbean art and decided to join forces. They then approached the Studio Museum, and so began the collaboration. As two of the original museum directors and many of the original curators moved on, the team pondered a strategy to use the medium of art to “make order out of chaos,” bringing perspective to a region smaller than the United States but “much more fractured,” as Queens Museum director Tom Finkelpearl puts it.

As curators’ ideas coalesced, they became aware that the story they wanted to tell had not been told anywhere before, within the Caribbean or outside it. And they realized that the contemporary era alone doesn’t contain the whole story. For this reason, they decided to start in the late 18th century, around the time of the Haitian revolution. Then they abandoned their chronological approach in favor of individual exhibitions based on themes. They also determined that they would have to go beyond the Caribbean to properly explore the subject, and so they included coastal regions and diaspora cities like New Orleans and Miami.

“There’s a common history—and at different times very different histories that are fascinating in their differences,” comments Julián Zugazagoitia, who ran El Museo del Barrio when the project was conceived and now directs the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. “The life of the project itself reflected life in the Caribbean—as much as we tried to be organized and rational, the Caribbean took over in the process.”

Fuentes was largely responsible for determining the themes of the individual exhibitions. “Kingdoms of This World,” the Queens Museum show examining popular traditions and religious practices, is named after Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s novella The Kingdom of This World, set in Haiti around the time of the revolution. The exhibition focuses on subjects including Santeria, Rastafarianism, and the idea of Carnival, which has become a form of visual art in itself. “Fluid Motions,” also at Queens, looks at the geographical and political realities of a region whose components are separated by water.

Fuentes conceived “Land of the Outlaw,” slated for the Studio Museum, when he searched for the word “Caribbean” in the New York Times. Examining the results, he says, “70 percent of the things related to some kind of crime”—though, he adds, that crime was usually chronicled in some kind of fiction, ranging from books to music. The show, about “dual images of the Caribbean as a utopic place of pleasure and a land of deviance and illicit activity,” explores the role of iconic figures ranging from pirates to missionaries. A companion show, “Shades of History,” addresses the significance of race in Caribbean culture, past and present.

“Counterpoints,” at El Museo, taking off from studies by anthropologist Fernando Ortiz on the impact of sugar and tobacco on Cuban culture, looks at the role of plantations and international trade. “We have a love/hate relationship with sugar in the Caribbean,” says Fuentes, who was born in Cuba. Using art objects commissioned by plantation owners for their mansions—among them the first landscape images painted in the region—the show also explores the culture of tobacco, its workers, its marketing, and its associations with modernity. The sixth segment, also at El Museo, titled “Patriot Acts,” examines how artists and intellectuals contributed to the identity of nascent Caribbean nations.

With an accompanying publication that covers music, literature, and other arts not addressed in the exhibitions, along with extensive educational initiatives that were conceived hand-in-hand with curatorial programs, the project is considered a game changer by the leaders of the three institutions, each of which is expanding its mission by engaging in the collaboration. “The historical aspect is very new for us,” notes Finkelpearl, whose museum has focused on the era from 1939 (when its building was constructed) to the present.

For El Museo, it is a foray into the non–Spanish speaking Caribbean. And for the Studio Museum, it offers a new model of presenting shows rooted in anthropology and history—not to mention the collaborative aspects of the curatorial and educational planning.

“It’s not just the exhibition, it’s the way it’s being formed,” says Studio Museum director Thelma Golden. “It will impact the way we think about the institution.”

The exhibitions will be at the Queens Museum and El Museo del Barrio through January 6 and the Studio Museum through October 21.

Robin Cembalest is the executive editor of ARTnews.

Pepón Osorio is a storyteller of the first order. The Puerto Rican artist, who spent many years as a social worker, builds multimedia installations that address universal concerns while remaining grounded in the real-life narratives of the different communities he engages. In his recent exhibition, Osorio brought together four pieces that locate a profound sense of tragedy within the quotidian space of the family home.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was a rotating life-size diorama built on a circular platform that reconstructs a pair of opposing domestic landscapes: one rich, one poor; one outside, one inside. A tall wall separates the two spaces, which are rife with symbolic objects. On one side, a hospital gurney sits on a lawn, representing the exterior of an affluent family’s home. Beside the gurney is a gold-painted heart in a display case, atop which rests a pocket watch that no longer ticks. The inside of the poor household shows more signs of life, though it is in utter chaos. Kitschy trinkets and disused wall clocks litter the ground along with scattered puzzle pieces and toy police cars. A family is present—a mother and her two children—but they are absorbed in their own activities, existentially isolated. Their skin is composed entirely of Band-Aids. Conceived and created over a yearlong engagement with the communities of Williamstown and North Adams, Mass. (it was exhibited in both of those towns), Drowned in a Glass of Water (2010) refers to that stifling feeling one has when life’s obstacles seem insurmountable. It’s impossible to know the actual story Osorio started with, but the emotional tone suggests struggle and recovery.

Other pieces approach tragedy from the precursory angle of protection or prevention. For Purifier (2010), Osorio installed a glass of water just below the ceiling. Exceedingly discreet, it’s in the same room as Drowned and very easy to overlook. Puerto Rican superstition holds that keeping a glass of water near the ceiling will purify the air and improve the health of those living in the house.

In Todo o nada (All or nothing, 2011), the gallery walls are covered in aluminum siding like the exterior of a house, but the focus is on a freestanding wall in the center of the space where a video monitor replaces a window. In the video, makeup is applied to the face of a young boy, creating the appearance of a bad bruising. Meanwhile a mother recounts the day her son came home with a concussion from a beating. Osorio’s ever-present attention to contradiction comes through in the disjunction between the illusion of violence on screen and the reality of it in the mother’s story.

Photo: View of Pepón Osorio’s installation All or Nothing, 2011, video and mixed mediums; at Ronald Feldman.

The tragedy of these domestic situations is, perhaps, the breakdown of communication. Psychological trauma locked in silence cannot be healed, a lesson Osorio knows by heart.