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

The visual artists awarded this year are Tony Cokes, Todd Gray, Ester Partegàs, Elle Pérez, Ioana M. Uricaru, and Bradford M. Young. The visual arts prize for an Italian fellow, the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellow in Visual Arts, was awarded to Alice Visentin.

The prestigious Rome Prize is awarded to about 30 American scholars and artists every year, ranging from Medievalists to landscape architects. Each winner receives lodging, meals, a studio and a stipend. Previously selected artists include Sarah Oppenheimer, Nari Ward, Jennifer Packer, Mel Bochner, and others.

Cokes, who is also a professor at Brown University, is perhaps the most established artist of the lot. His text-driven video works have been exhibited at such institutions as the Shed and the Museum of Modern Art, and he is currently included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Partegàs primarily works in sculpture, Pérez is a photographer whose star has been on the rise the last several years, and Gray is known for his works that combine photography and sculpture. Uricaru and Young are both filmmakers. Young was the cinematographer for Selma (2014), A Most Violent Year (2014), and Arrival (2016), for which he won an Oscar.

This year prizes were also given in literature, musical studies, design, architecture, historic preservation and conservation, and medieval studies, among other fields. According to a release, 46 percent of the winners identify as people of color, and 23 percent of winners born outside of the United States.

“This year’s Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows represents the diversity of the United States, and their projects build on the Academy’s commitment to the global impact of the arts and humanities,”Mark Robbins, the Academy’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “These fellowships are transformative, and we look forward to seeing the ways this experience is translated in the work to come.”

Elle Pérez’s Brandon T., Activist Educator (2019) in the St. George section of Staten Island.

PHOTOS: ANDREW RUSSETH/ARTNEWS, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED

“Art of the City” is a weekly column by Andrew Russeth that runs every Tuesday.

THIS WEEK… Elle Pérez dots New York with 100 tender photographs, Hadi Fallahpisheh makes a star turn at Tramps, and the glorious return of ART-RITE in reproduction.

Only Connect

A few months ago, I sliced off a tiny bit of my right index finger. I was talking on the phone and using a huge knife to chop cilantro (a fact mocked by my doctors and nurses, which is fair), and I ended up sporting a sizable bandage for quite some time. To avoid injuring the wound as it healed, I stopped biking and running, avoided crowded subways, and walked a lot—slowly. Elle Pérez’s current Public Art Fund project came along at just the right time. Titled “from sun to sun,” it has brought prints of 16 of the artist’s intimate photographs to bus shelters in all five of the city’s boroughs. It’s a project that rewards long strolls.

Elle Pérez’s Roses (2019) at a bus stop in the Tompkinsville section of Staten Island.

Just off the ferry in Staten Island, the black-and-white photo Brandon T., Activist Educator shows its namesake perched atop a desk, looking at the camera with a gentle gaze, iPad in hand. A few blocks away, in another work on view next to Tompkinsville Park, radiant silk roses—red-orange, baby blue—spill from metal baskets outside a shop. And on a quiet street in Sunnyside, Queens, yet another shot shows Puerto Rican flags waving serenely, seen from below in black and white. These pictures recur throughout the exhibition (which spans 100 advertising locations in more than a dozen neighborhoods), along with ones of a cracked sidewalk, a worn subway seat, a weathered door—places and things that have seen a lot and been touched by countless people.

Spotting Pérez’s works becomes a kind of treasure hunt, with the side benefit of awakening you to other sights, like a wonderfully named What U Need Deli & Grill or an orange peel crushed into a brilliant abstraction on the asphalt. They are located in areas that have been important to the Bronx-born artist, who is 30 this year. (An online map guides the way.) Walking to view Pérez’s latest works, one has the uncanny sense of seeing the city through another person’s eyes, finding where their map of New York just might overlap with your own. “I think I went to that bakery years ago,” I found myself thinking, blessedly forgetting the pain in my finger for a few minutes one morning. “And a woman I used to date lived here. Maybe.”

Hands appear repeatedly in these pictures: they’re caring for a garden, or digging into an absolutely sumptuous-looking bowl of arroz con pollo with plastic forks, or, in a series of majestic close-up shots, enacting the intricate steps of completing the Flight, a handshake from the Bronx punk scene. One could think of “from sun to sun” as an impressionistic memoir, or as a distillation of the little jolts of beauty this city delivers at unexpected moments, through exquisite fake flowers, a hearty meal, a beloved flag, or a greeting passed by code from one individual to another. (Organized by PAF’s assistant curator, Katerina Stathopoulou, the exhibition runs through November 24.)

Installation view of “Hadi Fallahpisheh, Almost Alone” at Tramps, New York.

COURTESY TRAMPS

Spring a Trap

Hadi Fallahpisheh’s current outing at Tramps gallery is alluring, delirious, chancy, bizarre, comic, and even a little evil. (You can’t beat evil.) It is easily one of the best gallery shows of the year in New York. The most exciting works are line drawings (they’re unique photographs, technically), which Fallahpisheh makes atop vibrantly glowing grounds by means of darkroom alchemy. He ingeniously manipulates light, chemicals, and paper, and all of a sudden, a mouse with cool shades is standing behind bars, glowing burnt amber. In an electric blue piece, a blob-like human form crawls in a cage—or is it a crib?—toward a dark hole. Set in spare prisons and houses, they recall Bill Traylor drawings or slapstick cartoons. These are captivating visions of cat-and-mouse shenanigans, brutal psychological brinkmanship, and dream logic (or just a fertile mind) run amok.

There are white ceramic cats, too, with mischievous grins and dinner-plate-flat faces that suggest they are pressing up against the bottom of a glass table, plus simple constructions that are perhaps best described by quoting the checklist’s deadpan explanation: “All the pillow houses are stolen pillows filled with rice and dirt.” Fallahpisheh, who was born in Tehran and is now based in New York, turned 30 just two years ago. He’s overflowing with piquant, improbable ideas. His show runs through November 17. I can’t wait to see what he gets up to next.

Let’s Get Rite

Art-Rite No. 5, Spring 1974, with a cover by Christo.

COURTESY PRIMARY INFORMATION/PRINTED MATTER

At a time when there is much fretting about the health of art criticism, it’s refreshing to come across Printed Matter and Primary Information’s exquisite new facsimile of Art-Rite, the charmingly scrappy outlet that ran in New York from 1973 to 1978, billing itself as an “unpredictable art magazine with nonformidable criticism in a disposable format.” It crackles with good ideas that are ripe for replication and adaptation, and it contains an irreverent tone that actually does exist today, though usually only spotted in scattered artists’ blogs, sardonic Instagram accounts, group chats, and the odd podcast.

Where to begin? No issue was ever quite like another, but a defining thread of the vision of editors Edit DeAk, Walter Robinson, and Joshua Cohn (who dropped out midway through its 20-issue run) was a commitment to the voices of artists and writers. “I enjoy giving books I have made to others,” John Baldessari says in one issue. “Art seems pure for a moment and disconnected from money.” Writes Les Levine, “What the audience expects from the artist is that you be some heroic figure, which they can look up to.” In a condensed interview, Julian Schnabel expounds on man’s best friend; an editorial note concedes, “We should say that he does talk about things other than dogs.”

One element remained constant: artists designed the covers, and Dorothea Rockburne crafted a heartbreaker by simply folding it diagonally to form a triangle below the logo.

An all-visual issue of Art-Rite, No. 13, January 1977, guest-edited by Alan Suicide.

COURTESY PRIMARY INFORMATION AND PRINTED MATTER

Semi-recurring features included breezy reviews, artist projects, and substantial, unsigned profiles of art critics like Max Kozloff (“Maximum Kozloff” is its winning headline), Lucy Lippard, and Douglas Davis, who offers an opinion that could have been delivered this morning: “If you’re seriously involved in art I don’t see how you can be completely satisfied about any of the ways to earn a living it.”

Minutiae delight. Linda Nochlin shows up in the letters section of an early issue declaring Art-Rite “too cute for words,” while scolding the team for misspellings of Clement Greenberg and Claes Oldenburg. Nochlin, née Weinberg, writes: “Most Artb-rgs are bergs; most Jewishb-rgs are bergs; more other b-rgs are one or the other.”

The ads alone are worth spending time with: Castelli and Sonnabend marketing videotapes, Betty Parsons quoting herself (“Feeling is the content of art”), a one Norm Dolph offering “portable discotheque for loft parties” (“We can work it out” was his catchy slogan).

It all amounts to a portrait of an art world much smaller than today’s, and also one a bit more cloistered from mainstream culture. Artists and writers were experimenting, and a great deal of fun was taking place, the volume suggests, but the go-go 1980s were approaching. A lot was about to change.

RECENT COLUMNS… The new MoMA, public art and a Chase flagship branch in Midtown Manhattan, a guide to art museums and ice cream around New York.

Andrew Russeth is executive editor of ARTnews. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram, and reached at arusseth@artnews.com.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled,” 1989, installation view, Sheridan Square, New York, organized by Public Art Fund.

©FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES/COURTESY THE FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES FOUNDATION AND PUBLIC ART FUND, NEW YORK

In recent years, public art in New York has come to represent monumental, spectacular sculptures, but now one institution is returning to its roots by using modes of advertising as public and artistic interventions.

For the entire month of June, the Public Art Fund will present Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s first billboard, which was unveiled in 1989 in the West Village in New York. The work will be situated in its original location, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street, above Village Cigars and steps away from the Stonewall Inn.

The organization worked with Gonzalez-Torres to create the work to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, which is often cited as a catalyst of the Gay Liberation movement. Now, 30 years later, on the eve of the event’s 50th anniversary at the end of June, the Public Art Fund has collaborated with the foundation of the late artist, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1996 at 38, and Google, which usually advertises in the billboard space.

“While the work has been installed in many locations around the world, there is not a time I go by that corner that I don’t imagine the billboard being there,” Andrea Rosen, the president of the artist’s foundation, told ARTnews in an email.

[Read a roundtable discussion about Stonewall’s impact on the art world.]

Nicholas Baume, the director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, said that the work had always been one that the fund had been proud of, partly because it presaged Gonzalez-Torres’s later use of billboard spaces as artworks. “It adopts the format of advertising in the sense of being a printed billboard,” Baume told ARTnews, “but, of course, its minimal appearance contradicts the typical style of urban, large-scale billboard advertising. Even 30 years on, it looks like something that would make you stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Is that an ad? What is that?’ ”

The billboard is mostly black, save for two lines of white text, and relies on the artist’s typical nonlinear presentation of dates and events as a means to collapse the notion of history as something chronological. The text for the billboard reads: “People With AIDS Coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1895 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969.”

“We’re 30 years further removed from those dates,” Baume said. “It’s an opportunity to reflect on history and the struggles, the individuals, the movements, the activism, the bravery, the risks, the challenges. Those layers are woven into the work.”

An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 participants in the 1989 Gay and Lesbian Liberation Day March passed by the piece during its original presentation. This year, even more people may see it when New York City acts as the host of World Pride, an international 30-day extravaganza that is expected to bring more than 3 million people to the city. Two Pride marches also will be held in New York on June 30.

The presentation of the Gonzalez-Torres work is the latest example of the Public Art Fund revisiting its storied history of artists’ commissions in advertising years. From 1982 to 1990, among its regular exhibition sites was the Spectacolor board in Times Square, which hosted “Messages to the Public,” a series of commissions through which important works by Jenny Holzer, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Barbara Carrasco, and Jeffrey Pittu debuted. Last month, the Public Art Fund announced a new exhibition series across 100 bus shelters throughout New York City, a collaboration with JCDecaux. The first artist to take up the task, opening in August, will be Elle Pérez.

“It’s a very different thing to put a static work on a pedestal in a public square versus to use an advertising billboard as a space for a work of art,” Baume said. “It’s not like seeing it in a museum, but in a very specific context that resonates with the content of the piece. You don’t need to wear the robes of a museological presentation to be a powerful work of art.”

Sam Contis, Denim Dress, 2014, pigmented inkjet print.

©2018 SAM CONTIS/THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, ACQUIRED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF THOMAS AND SUSAN DUNN

In recent years, photographers have been turning inward, looking not just at what goes on in front of the camera but also what’s happening behind it. Borne out of this phenomenon is “Being: New Photography 2018,” the latest exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing series of showcases for up-and-coming photographers. “Being” is a gripping survey of how photographers today are dealing head-on with the knotty things that make us, us—the ways communities, politics, and systems influence various people’s identities, for better and worse.

This is a different direction from the last “New Photography” show, 2015’s “Ocean of Images,” a mind-numbingly academic exploration of how pictures circulate, both on- and offline. A lot has changed since then. A racist, sexist xenophobe was elected President of the United States, a wave of far-right nationalism has swept through large parts of the world, and new technologies have been widely released. “Being,” a show of 17 artists organized by MoMA assistant curator Lucy Gallun, is partly a response to all that. It’s a political show, but not a ham-fisted one, and the rare biennial-style exhibition that actually does feel reflective of our current moment.

Re-photography—the technique involving taking pictures of pictures—figures prominently in “Being,” most notably in a work by Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong called The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold. (2016). Ngo and Truong shot photographs of banal snapshots that their families collected in albums; between each photograph, the artists have placed barely visible text that suggests a police interrogation or a testimony. (“Well, sir, if we could get rid of the illegals, it would open up a considerable number of slots,” says a general in one piece of dialogue taken from a real U.S. Congressional meeting during the 1970s.) They also photographed the album covers: one has an image of a river rushing through a green valley, the other a couple kissing by the fading light of a blazing red sunset. The artists seem to offer them as a metaphor for the durability of family over time, and for the importance of recognizing shared histories.

Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong, The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold (detail), 2016, pigmented inkjet print and laser cut print.

©2018 HUONG NGO AND HONG-AN TRUONG/COURTESY THE ARTISTS/JERRY MANN

Harold Mendez’s work is also based on found photography, but unlike Ngo and Truong’s subtle project, some of his photography relies on dramatic shifts in scale for effect. For his piece entitled Sin nombre (2017–18), Mendez has blown up a glass slide he found in Havana—it shows a man on horseback—into an image that he transferred onto a 15-foot-long aluminum plate. Scratches resulting from the transfer process spider across the image of the rider, who, rendered here in faded black and white, is spectral—he’s a hanger-on from a different era. Mendez’s moving work—as well as Em Rooney’s sculptural pieces, which encase pictures from her personal archive in stacks of a paper, steel ladders, and see-through sheets of crystal—demonstrate that sometimes, when context is lost, personal meaning is gained.

Aïda Muluneh, All in One, 2016, pigmented inkjet print.

©2018 AÏDA MULUNEH/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID KRUT PROJECTS

Other artists in “Being” aren’t content to simply re-photograph images. Paul Mpagi Sepuya cuts up, recombines, and re-photographs his own pictures to create abstract compositions that merge nude male bodies, camera gear, and photoshoot props. For Yazan Khalili’s hypnotic video Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind (2016), footage of a woman photographing herself with an iPhone plays on a computer screen as cryptic text is typed and images of masks are analyzed by an algorithm, creating a rabbit hole of pictures within pictures within videos within pictures within videos within a video.

The pieces in “Being” that aren’t physically collaged often feel as if they are. Through a clever use of mirrors, B. Ingrid Olson makes puzzling photographs of women’s bodies that make you question what’s a ready-made image and what isn’t. Aïda Muluneh’s brightly colored photographs feature anonymous female characters that appear to be cut-and-pasted together—one shows a woman painted in white who sprouts two sets of arms, one of them rendered chili-pepper red. Shilpa Gupta’s pictures contain written stories from people whose surnames have been altered at some point in their lives, for reasons both political and not; Gupta severs, then mixes and matches these photographs, disassembling and re-assembling her subjects’ identities to produce new, hybrid personas.

But there is also work in “Being” that feels refreshingly traditional—a return to photography’s roots—even if the subject matter is not. Sam Contis’s elegant documentary photographs of students at an all-male college in California allude to the history of straight, white, male American photographers journeying into the American West, albeit in an unusual way. They show masculinity that’s American as apple pie, as well as subversions of it. One work features a man wearing a denim dress, sprawled out on a field of grass like an Ingres odalisque.

Deana Lawson, Nation, 2018, pigment print, collaged photograph.

©DEANA LAWSON/COURTESY SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

‘Being” also serves as proof positive of the current craze for portraiture. Andrzej Steinbach’s sleek black-and-white images of gender-ambiguous Europeans and Stephanie Syjuco’s visually dazzling self-portraits—each done in a style evoking colonialist photography (with meta alterations, such as the inclusion of color calibration bars)—suggest new possibilities for the genre.

So, too, do two gallery shows currently on view in New York. At Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea, Deana Lawson continues pushing her style in new directions. Her beguiling photographs of black families look, at first glance, like quick-witted documentary works, but they are staged. One features a man and woman photographed in a way that makes them seem like lovers, with him standing behind her, his hands gently gripping her hips. But, as Doreen St. Félix has noted in the New Yorker, before Lawson took their photo, these two barely knew each other. The point of Lawson’s trickery is to show that images lie. People perform their identities for the public, especially when a camera is present.

In Soweto Queen (2017), a woman wearing nothing but a watch poses on a sofa, her eyes locked on the camera’s lens. Two remote controls, a set of keys, and some trinkets lie strewn around her. More than just props, the scattering of objects grounds her in a reality that may or may not exist.

By far the weirdest—and by far my favorite—of Lawson’s new works is Nation (2018), a picture of three men in a living room, with two of them seated on a leather couch. One gestures toward the camera. The other, who lounges, wears a metal contraption that holds his mouth open. In the upper right-hand corner of the work, Lawson has inserted an appropriated archival picture of something strange: George Washington’s dentures, according to a press release.

Elle Pérez, Ian, 2017/18, archival Pigment print.

JOERG LOHSE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK

At 47 Canal gallery, a show of new work by Elle Pérez further questions what can be gleaned from portrait photography. In Ian (2017/18), a person fresh out of the shower, hair dripping wet, looks knowingly into the camera’s eye. Like many photographs by Pérez, it is formally stunning, particularly in its use of color: warm red light dominates, but a tiny sliver of baby blue slices through a cracked-open door in the background. Pérez’s sophisticated use of color puts them in a league of young photographers who’ve begun experimenting, to magnificent effect, with bold hues, such as Farah Al Qasimi, Awol Erizku, and Ketuta Alexii-Mekhishvili.

Ian also features an unexpected detail: Pérez’s own image, caught in a mirror behind their subject, one indication that these aren’t portraits in the traditional sense. In another work, a subject’s bloody hand hides their genitals in a close-up shot, and in yet another, a different person’s hand—possibly Pérez’s—tenderly reaches out toward a pair of legs in front of the camera. In Binder (2015/18), a chest-flattening device dangles limply from a wire hanger attached to a shower rod; it’s a perfect stand-in for its wearer.