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

In teaming up, the four foundations have pooled together $5 million, which will go toward giving 10 U.S. museums or art institutions grants of $500,000 each to formally create ten permanent early or mid-career curatorial positions with an expertise in Latinx art. Five of the mid-career positions represent promotions for curatorial staff already working at these institutions, while the five early career posts will be newly created.

In a statement, Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander said, “The deep knowledge and understanding of Latinx art these ten curators hold comes from rigorous expertise and commitment to the creative expression of Latinx communities in the United States and Puerto Rico. Through ALAM we are proud to help expand opportunities for Latinx art curatorship across the country, and to do our part in upholding the centrality of this work in our museums and arts organizations.”

The recipients include El Museo del Barrio in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey, and the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California.

E. Carmen Ramos, the NGA’s chief curator who joined the institution in 2021 after over a decade at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she was a driving force in adding Latinx art to the collection, said in a statement, “Institutional change can happen when we have experienced and knowledgeable voices at the table. We are eager to support the new curator as they join our team and help shape our work, all while affirming the importance of Latinx art and artists in the wider story of art and reinforcing our commitment to engage and serve Latinx audiences.”

This initiative represents the second phase of the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative, which the Mellon and Ford Foundations jointly launched in July 2021. For the first phrase of the program, the two foundations gave $5 million to create the Latinx Artist Fellowship, which over five years will dole out $50,000 unrestricted grants to 75 Latinx artists. With a focus on supporting Latinx artists at all stages in its careers, among the winners in the first two cohorts are Amalia Mesa-Bains, Las Nietas de Nonó, rafa esparza, Guadalupe Maravilla, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, and Miguel Luciano.

The third phase of the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative is still being shaped but will focus on supporting academics who creating new scholarship around Latinx art and artists.

In a statement, Getty Foundation director Joan Weinstein said, “We need to invest more if we want Latinx art to be more broadly represented in our museums, with dedicated curators who can focus exclusively on building and stewarding these collections. ALAM is a decisive next step made possible through collaborative funding.”

The full list of 2022 Advancing Latinx Art Museums Recipients Institutions follows below.

516 ARTS, Albuquerque, NM

Arizona State University Art Museum in partnership with CALA Alliance, Tempe, AZ

Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, TX

El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL

Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ

Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College, Los Angeles, CA

Now, the foundations have announced the second cohort of artists who will each receive a $50,000 unrestricted grant to support their careers. Administered by the US Latinx Art Forum, each 15-person cohort is composed of 5 emerging artists, 5 mid-career artists, and 5 established artists.

“As the Latinx Artist Fellowship enters its second year, we at Mellon are energized by the extraordinary sweep of work these fifteen artists envision and create, and the powerful perspectives and stories they bring to the visual arts,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, said in a statement.

This year’s group of artist include pioneering artists like Chicana fiber artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, who is known for her groundbreaking altar installations as well as for her scholarship of Chicanx art, and will have a major exhibition at SFMOMA next months; Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, who is the subject of a major monograph by art historians Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer to be published by Duke University Press in August; and María Magdalena Campos Pons, who represented Cuba at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Other grantees include some of today’s most closely watched artists, like painter Jay Lynn Gomez, the video collective Las Nietas de Nonó, and Tanya Aguiñiga, who won the $250,000 Heinz Award in 2021 and oversaw an initiative known as the BIPOC Exchange at this year’s Frieze Los Angeles.

Chosen from a group of more than 200 nominations, this year’s cohort of 15 artists were selected to “reflect the diversity that exists within the Latinx community, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and non-binary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Chicanx and Ecuadorian-American to Afro-Cuban and Indigenous,” according to a release.

Las Nietas de Nonó, Ilustraciones de la Mecánica, performance at Whitney Biennial 2019, New York, 2019.

Special attention was also placed on being representative of geographical location—from Puerto Rico to California, Texas to Chicago—and to a range of artistic practices. “The second cohort, as the first, represents the dynamic range of aesthetic practices that speak to the complex and diverse experiences of Latinxs throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico,” said art historian Rose Salseda, who also serves as associate director of USLAF.

The selection committee included curators Rita Gonzalez (at Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Marcela Guerrero (Whitney Museum in New York), and Cesáreo Moreno (National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago); poet danilo machado; and three artists from last year’s cohort, Elia Alba, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, and Vick Quezada.

In a statement, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker said, “These 15 visual artists bring an unmatched breadth of perspectives and practices to the initiative and have made an indelible impact on American art today.”

The full list of the 2022 Latinx Artist Fellows follows below.

Tanya Aguiñiga
she/her/ella
Craft Based Artist and Activist
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Maria Gaspar
she/her/hers
Interdisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Candida Alvarez
she/her
Visual Artist and Painter
Lives and works in Baroda, MI and Chicago, IL

Jay Lynn Gomez
she/hers
Painting and Sculpture Artist
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

María Magdalena Campos Pons
she/her
Multimedia Artist
Lives and works in Nashville, TN

Lucia Hierro
she/her
Sculpture and Installation Artist
Lives and works in New York, NY

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
she/her
Contemporary Fiber Artist
Lives and works in Gualala, CA

Amalia Mesa-Bains
she/her
Installation Artist, Curator, and Writer
Lives and works in Monterey, CA and San Francisco, CA

Carmelita Tropicana
she/her
Writer and Performance Artist
Lives and works in New York, NY

Koyoltzintli
she/her/hers
Interdisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in New York, NY

Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
she/her/ella
Multidisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in Farmington, NM

Juana Valdés
she/her/ella
Multidisciplinary Artist
Lives and works in Miami, FL and  New York, NY

Leslie Martinez
they/them
Visual Artist and Painter
Lives and works in Dallas, TX

Las Nietas de Nonó
they/them
Multidisciplinary Artists
Lives and works in
San Antón, Carolina, Puerto Rico

Vincent Valdez
he/his
Visual Artist and Painter
Lives and works in Houston, TX

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.”