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

Artists & Mothers was founded by artist Maria De Victoria and arts consultant Julia Trotta, who had been “workshopping an idea around a resource for artists who are mothers,” Trotta told ARTnews in an interview.

Initially, they thought the project could take the form of a residency program with studios and childcare, but ultimately they decided to “boil it down to the most impactful path, thinking about what really do people need and what we established that they needed was funding to be able to pay a childcare provider, flexible to their needs,” which can range from daycare to hiring a nanny, Trotta said.

The prize money was calculated at $25,000 based on what the average cost of full-time childcare in New York for a year. “We decided that we wanted it to really be something that would make a difference—$25,000 is really a lot,” Trotta said.

“I am grateful to Artists & Mothers for recognizing that social reproduction—or more simply put, the care work that holds us together as families and communities—is a vital part of what makes art possible,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “By addressing the crisis of care that so many of us are experiencing, Artists & Mothers stepped in to provide much-needed support that the professional sphere has long overlooked.

As the inaugural winner, Rodriguez will receive the funds over the course of the next year. As an artist, she is known for her research-based practice that examines the structures of the art world and how they facilitate the creation of work. She was also a founding member of the collective Reena Spaulings Fine Art, which she collaborated with for over a decade.

Among her best-known works is The Maid (2018), which was commissioned by SculptureCenter in New York and has been shown across the country, including in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The film follows several “Newborn” sculptures by Sherrie Levine over the course of a day and their lives in different settings, including museums and private collectors’ homes.

Last month, Rodriguez opened her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Kunstverein München in Munich, Germany. Titled “Imitation of Life,” the show presents a new video work that Rodriguez created during the first year of her firstborn’s life. (Trotta said that selected artists’ practices or forthcoming works do not necessarily have to revolve around motherhood in order to qualify for the grant.)

The exhibition, Trotta said, comes at a “critical juncture” in Rodriguez’s career, one of the main criteria for the prize. Artists often “have children, not at the very beginning of their careers, but [after] they’ve had some success, some attention, some momentum, at that moment, where you have to add this other very important, but very consuming, element to your life,” she said. “We want to make sure that that gap is filled, and that they’re able to still meet the projects, opportunities, and attention that they’ve received so far.”

The geographic restriction for Artists & Mothers, Trotta said, came down to the founders’ own experiences of raising children in the city, having to make decisions based on childcare costs, and “exponentially high costs associated with having a kid here.”

Similarly, the grant is currently restricted to artists with children under 3 years old because enrollment for universal 3-K beings at that age in New York. Trotta said that as the nonprofit grows, they will explore introducing additional programs that would accommodate childcare at different stages.

To help realize their vision, De Victoria and Trotta assembled an advisory board consisting of several other art world professionals that included artists Camille Henrot and Maia Ruth Lee, gallerist Bridget Donahue, communications strategist Sarah Goulet, and publisher Elizabeth Karp-Evans, all of whom Trotta described as important figures who “are leading with care.”

The founders and the board all work on a volunteer basis and have been actively fund-raising. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation, founded by artist Niki de Saint Phalle, provided funding for the inaugural 2024 grant, while the James Family Foundation has supported the 2025 grants. Additional donors include artists Sam Moyer, Hilary Pecis, and Arlene Shechet; curators Lumi Tan, Loring Randolph, and Carolyn Ramo; and dealers Hannah Hoffman and Martha Moldovan. “It’s a simple mission; I think people understand the need right away,” Trotta said of her experience soliciting donations. “There’s so much need out there, so, obviously, the more funds we can raise, the more grants we can give out.”

Trotta said the inaugural grant was designed as a pilot program and would differ from subsequent years. For the first year, artists were nominated and selected by the board as a way to “almost move things along faster,” she said. “There was this urgency to getting this project launched,” she said.

Going forward, the grants will have an open-call application that will be decided by an anonymous jury. For 2025, the foundation will dole out at least two grants, though that cohort could rise to three. Trotta said the open-call is key to the program because the board or invited nominators “don’t necessarily know who has children or who doesn’t” and will allow for us to “expand the net wider.”

She added that the application will not be too labor intensive, as “we understand everybody applying to this will already be extremely busy trying to juggle their professional life and their home life.”

Several changes will be introduced to this year’s fair, including a new floor plan and a new lead partner, American Express. The 2024 edition also marks the second iteration since the fair was acquired, alongside Expo Chicago, by Frieze and the first to be planned completely under Frieze ownership.

The fair is also currently without a director, after its longtime leader Nicole Berry departed the fair in March for a development role at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; it is currently helmed by Frieze’s director of fairs, Kristell Chadé, and its Americas director, Christine Messineo.

In a statement, Messineo said, “The addition of The Armory Show to our network of fairs solidifies Frieze’s standing in New York by building on the collective of galleries. The upcoming edition inaugurates a floorplan that enhances the visitor experience with reimagined meeting spaces, reoriented sections, a new theater hosting conversations with art world luminaries, and engaging partnership activations.”

In recent years, the Armory Show has been unable to secure one of the four mega-galleries or several other blue-chip exhibitors that are hallmarks of Frieze’s exhibitor line-up. That appears set to continue for this year’s edition. In its release, however, the fair said it will see more than 145 exhibitors return from last year, which fairs often cite as a metric of successful sales conducted during the fair’s run. Among those are dealers like Victoria Miro, Almine Rech, James Cohan, Nara Roesler, Sean Kelly, Kasmin, Jessica Silverman, and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Exhibitors returning after at least a one-year break include Jeffrey Deitch, Proyectos Monclova, Sperone Westwater, Mariane Ibrahim, Bank, and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, while first-time participants include Commonwealth and Council, Labor, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Hannah Traore Gallery, Gallery Baton, and Experimenter. Blade Study is also a first-timer, after recieving the fair’s Gramercy International Prize, which goes to a New York–based gallery that has never shown at the fair before.

Last December, the Armory Show announced the curators who will organize certain sections of the fair: the Kitchen’s senior curator Robyn Farrell for Focus and independent curator Eugenie Tsai for Platform. Among the galleries in Focus, for single- and duo-artist presentations related to the Armory Show’s first edition in 1994, are Kapp Kapp, Monique Meloche, Lubov, Whatiftheworld, Et al., and Luis De Jesus. Platform presentations, for large-scale works, are being brought to the fair by dealers like Lehmann Maupin, Peter Blum Gallery, Goya Contemporary Gallery, and Tern Gallery.  

In a statement, Chadé said, “For the past 30 years, The Armory Show has been an anchor of the city’s cultural landscape, championing art at the forefront and providing galleries an opportunity to engage with New York audiences. It has been a pleasure working with the team to build on the strengths of the fair and expand its reach. We look forward to welcoming a number of new exhibitors and thoughtful presentations, underscoring The Armory Show’s position as a platform for discovery.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

Galleries

Solo

Focus

Presents

Platform

Not-for-Profit

This year, the exhibition will take the title “Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024” and be curated by El Museo’s chief curator Rodrigo Moura and curator Susanna V. Temkin, and guest curator María Elena Ortiz, who is a curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas.

The exhibition includes several closely watched artists, such as Carmen Argote, Christina Fernandez, Roberto Gil de Montes, Caroline Kent, Karyn Olivier, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya. The exhibition’s three youngest participants—Alina Perez, Ser Serpas, and Kathia St. Hilaire—were all born in 1995, while the oldest exhibiting artist, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, was born in 1929.

In an interview with ARTnews, Moura said the curators chose the title of “Flow States” because they wanted something that was “open-ended” that could at first read as a “resilient, positive tone” but also imply different undertones upon further consideration, similar to that of the first Trienal’s title, “ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21.”

“This idea of a creative state where body and mind come together to put things into the world—any act that could happen under a state of flow,” Moura said. “And, ‘states’ refers to countries or nation-states, this idea of going beyond the boundaries of states through a flow, a movement of fluid exchange between different groups.”

Within the exhibition’s framework, that exchange, Moura said, also relates to the idea of diaspora, both of the Latinx community in the United States, as well as more broadly, now encompassing related diasporas and migration patterns within Latin American countries, from non–Spanish speaking Caribbean countries to the US and England, and from Puerto Rico to Europe.

“At the same time, one of the things we want to bring with this show is this idea of diaspora writ large, without losing our main focus on Latinx artists,” he said. “The idea of migration and the different flows of occupations, of cultures, of languages, of styles, of artists. It’s an understanding that the Latinx diaspora isn’t separate from other diasporic movements. There are so many affinities, solidarities, there is so much shared common ground.”

Four years ago, when El Museo relaunched its recurring exhibition series, previously known as “The (S) Files” and “La Bienal,” which ran from 1999 to 2013, as La Trienal, the museum wanted to also expand its purview. The original shows focused on artists working in New York and the Tristate Area. The first edition of La Trienal provided a scope of Latinx art-making nationwide. “One thing we realized with ‘Estamos Bien’ is that not only proved the relevance of this field but also showed how many conversations could be started by putting these artists in the same show,” Moura said.

And now, this second edition will also look more globally: Norberto Roldan is based in Roxas City, Philippines, the city where he was born; Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now based in Glasgow, Scotland; and Studio Lenca, first migrated to the US from El Salvador and is now based in Margate, England.

As with the first edition of La Trienal, “Flow States” will also include a guest curator on its team: María Elena Ortiz, who joined the Modern Fort Worth in 2022 after nearly a decade at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

“María Elena is a colleague whose work we’ve been admiring for a long time at El Museo,” Moura said. “In her research and curatorial work, there’s a pan-Caribbean perspective to be explored, to be elevated, and to learn from, too.”

Moura said he expects this artist to continue the tradition that El Museo’s biennial-style exhibitions have long served as “a launch pad for several artists and their careers,” whether they be early in their careers or “artists who hadn’t been seen much lately who could benefit from the exposure of a show like this.”

The full artist list follows below.

Carmen Argote b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico; lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Hellen Ascoli b. 1984, Guatemala City, Guatemala; lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland
Esteban Cabeza de Baca b. 1985, San Ysidro, California; lives and works in Queens, New
York, and the Southwestern United States
Widline Cadet b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Ayiti; lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Liz Cohen b. 1973, Phoenix, Arizona; lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona
Tony Cruz Pabón b. 1977, Puerto Rico; lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Lance De Los Reyes b.1977, Houston, Texas; d. 2021 New York, New York
Christina Fernandez b. 1965, Los Angeles, California; lives and works in Los Angeles,
California
Verónica Gaona b. 1994, Brownsville, Texas; lives and works in Houston, Texas
Roberto Gil de Montes b. 1950, Guadalajara, Mexico; lives and works in Nayarit, Mexico
Maria A. Guzmán Capron b. 1981, Milan, Italy; lives and works in Oakland, California
Madeline Jiménez Santil b. 1986, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; lives and works in
Mexico City, Mexico, and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Caroline Kent b. 1975, Sterling, Illinois; lives and works in Chicago, Illinois
Koyoltzintli b. 1983, New York, New York; lives and works in New Jersey
Anina Major b. 1981, Nassau, Bahamas; lives and works in New York, New York
Mario Martinez b. 1953, Penjamo, Scottsdale, Arizona; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
Mark Menjívar b. 1980, Virginia; lives and works in San Antonio, Texas
Karyn Olivier b. 1968, Trinidad and Tobago; lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alina Perez b. 1995, Miami, Florida; lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut
Carlos Reyes b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois; lives and works in New York, New York, and Caguas,
Puerto Rico
Gadiel Rivera-Herrera b. 1963, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives and works in San Juan, Puerto
Rico
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya b. 1989, Parral, Mexico; nomad
Norberto Roldan b. 1953, Roxas City, Philippines; lives and works in Roxas City
Sarah Rosalena b. 1982, Los Angeles, California; lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Ser Serpas b. 1995, Los Angeles, California; lives and works in New York, New York
Chaveli Sifre b. 1987, Würzburg, Germany; lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Kathia St. Hilaire b. 1995, Palm Beach, Florida; lives and works in New York, New York
Studio Lenca based in Margate, England
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess b. 1929, Caracas, Venezuela; lives and works in Venice,
California
Sarita Westrup b. 1989, Edinburg, Texas; lives and works in Dallas, Texas, and Penland, North
Carolina
Alberta Whittle b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados; lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland
Cosmo Whyte b. 1982, St. Andrews, Jamaica; lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Joe Zaldivar b. 1990, Rosemead, California; lives and works in Los Angeles, California

First among them is the fair’s expected relocation to the Grand Palais, which had closed for renovations ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics; the first two editions were staged at the Grand Palais Éphémère in the Champ de Mars. That relocation has made it possible for the fair to expand from 154 galleries last year to 194 this year. Following the renovation, the fair now has the same locations and scale as FIAC, which used to be Paris’s main fair.

Perhaps the biggest news is that the fair has a new name: the cumbersome Paris+ par Art Basel is no more. Long live the newly christened Art Basel Paris.

According to a release, the name change was done “in agreement with Rachida Dati, France’s minister of culture, and follows extensive consultations with Art Basel’s local partners and interlocutors.”

When Art Basel announced the fair’s former peculiar name, it said the event would highlight “the dynamic dialogue between its cultural industries—from fashion and design to film and music,” hence the plus sign. The past two editions, however, mainly featured art.

Art Basel Paris’s 194 exhibitors for 2024, which runs October 18–20 with VIP days on October 16–17, are drawn from 42 countries and territories, with 64 galleries, or about 33 percent of the participants, operating spaces in France. (That figure includes several international operations not headquartered in the country.) In this cohort, there will also be 51 first-time exhibitors at Art Basel’s Paris edition.

The 2024 fair will be divided into three sections: Galeries, the main sector with 169 exhibitors; Emergence, for 16 solo booths of emerging artists; and Premise, a new section featuring 9 galleries presenting “highly singular projects” that “challenge the conventional art historical canon, with a particular focus on compelling yet little-known artistic practices,” per a release.

Galeries will include several blue-chip dealers, such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, High Art, Mennour, Galerie Lelong & Co., Marian Goodman Gallery, Michael Werner Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Sprüth Magers, Templon, and White Cube. First-time participants in the Galeries section are Casey Kaplan, Goodman Gallery, Standard (Oslo), and Labor.  

As part of the programming for this edition, Galeries exhibitors will take part in what the fair is calling Oh La La!, a new initiative for which they can “present rarely seen work in their booth” as way to “energize” the Friday and Saturday dates of the fairs, when VIPs have long departed.

In the Emergence section, galleries include Exo Exo, ROH Projects, What Pipeline, Whatiftheworld, and VI, VII, while Nara Roesler, Parker Gallery, and the Pill will show in Premise.

In a statement, Art Basel Paris director Clément Delépine said, “the impressive list of exhibitors participating in our 2024 show highlights the fair’s leading role as a dynamic platform for galleries, as well as Paris’ position as cornerstone of the global art market, bolstered by the city’s unparalleled offerings across the broader cultural field. Galleries are evidently prepared to bring exceptional works to the fair, and we look forward to creating the best possible environment for them, their clients, and our visitors.”

Galeries

Emergence

Premise

As part of the representation deal, Pace Gallery will work with Takamatsu’s current dealers, Yumiko Chiba Associates in Tokyo and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London and New York.

Takamatsu (1936–1998) was known for an expansive practice that ranged from painting and sculpture to photography and performance. He represented Japan at the 1968 Venice Biennale.

He was closely associated with the mid-1960s movement Mono-Ha (School of Things), an artistic reaction to Japan’s fast-paced industrialization in the years prior. It was during this time that Takamatsu produced his “Shadow” series, in which eerie silhouettes are set against white and off-white backgrounds. (A work from that series will show be in Pace’s Art Basel booth.)

Earlier in his career, in 1963, Takamatsu founded the politically minded collective Hi-Red Center, with fellow artists Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, with the aim to make what they called at the time a “descent into the everyday.” Among their most famous actions was Model 1000-Yen Note (1963), in which they created their own version of the namesake currency bill; the artists were tried and found guilty of counterfeiting money.

Though Takamatsu is well-respected in Japan as both an artist and a teacher (he taught at Tama Art University in Tokyo from 1968 to 1972), his international profile has only recently begun to grow. The Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo mounted a survey for Takamatsu in 2014, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka presented a major retrospective for him the following year. He had a solo show at the Royal Society of Sculptors in London in 2019.

In a statement, Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said, “the significance of Takamatsu’s legacy for Minimalism and Conceptual Art, both in the Japanese art world and beyond, cannot be overstated. His contemplative, philosophical approach resonates with the concerns of artists who have been foundational to our program, such as Agnes Martin and Robert Irwin.”

Lee will continue to be represented by Tina Kim Gallery in New York and Antenna Space in Shanghai. She is currently featured in Sprüth Magers’s group exhibition “territory,” which opened during Berlin Gallery Weekend.

Based between Berlin and Seoul, where she was born, Lee has recently established herself as one of her generation’s most closely watched sculptors, making uncanny installations about the body and its viscera. She had institutional solo shows at the MMK Frankfurt in 2022 and the New Museum in New York in 2023, and was included in the 2022 editions of the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Busan Biennale.

Her 2021 exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon, a two-person outing with late Swiss artist H. R. Giger, was a breakout for the artist, raising her profile outside her home country.

“With the recent works,” Lee told Art in America of her work in the show, “I was very interested in the vore fetish. Vore is when you want to be devoured by someone or vice versa. It’s subcultural, almost, but I see it as a universal metaphor. It’s a desire so strong that you want to unite with another being. Vore is also something you can never realize. The core quality of vore, for me, its impossibility.”

Gallery cofounder Philomene Magers first saw Lee’s work in person at the Schinkel Pavillon show, having already kept tabs on the artist’s career. Lee’s emphasis on pushing the boundaries of sculpture was among the many reasons why Magers was drawn to the work.

“What Mire is talking about exists on many different levels,” Magers told ARTnews in a phone interview. “On the one hand, it deals with the body and has a specific physicality and some kind of fluidity. You feel like you might encounter a new species with every work. On the other hand, there is this strong interest in poetry and literature, and a strong feminist aspect in the work that I find tremendously interesting.”

Lee joins a roster that includes a range of artists Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Martine Syms, Anne Imhof, Nora Turato, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Gretchen Bender, Sylvie Fleury, Cindy Sherman, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Kara Walker.

“Our program brings together a lot of artists who are asking very specific questions in the time they’re living in—or the time they have been living in, with we regard to the estates we represent—and they’re finding a formulation for artistic expression for contemporary life,” Magers said.

She added, “We’re looking for pioneers in their field, and Mire is definitely one of them.”  

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

But visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Every day I walk outside is a leap of Faith (Walking with Alok), which shows the artist in a black bra, staring in the mirror as she shaves her upper lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in one corner Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. In the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comedian who has been a mentor to Gomez during her transition. The two are surrounded by leering construction workers and signs reading ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s tension in this scene: like the overlooked laborers in their high visibility orange, Gomez and Alok appear both hyper-visible, and yet invisible, too.

That painting is untethered to any real space: instead, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez uses purples often, perhaps referencing the swirling together of the colors of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), or even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise at the site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a condition Gomez has; a bruise that refers to the violence that trans women of color often face, whether from lovers, from johns, or even from catcalling construction workers.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has installed a chain-link fence covered by a green tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgeries painted onto the surface. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the ultimate symbol of transformation. A sign on the floor warns: “WERK ZONE.” Nearby, Gomez has dedicated a poem to her friend Winter Camilla Rose—also depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no guide / with no end.”

Since June 2022, LAXART has been closed amid preparations to move from its longtime home at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to 518 North Western Avenue, just south of Melrose Hill, a neighborhood now home to galleries such as David Zwirner, Southern Guild, James Fuentes, and Morán Morán. The Brick’s new space, with around 5,000 square feet, will more than double the institution’s footprint in the city.  

“Our new home and new name speak to the evolution and growth of the organization,” Hamza Walker, the Brick’s executive director, said in a statement. “Purchasing our building secures our future, and is in turn a commitment to the cultural communities of Los Angeles. Of the name’s many associations, the idea of a building block that is part of a larger whole is paramount.”

Shortly after it announced its plans to move to a new home, the Brick received a donation of $1 million from LA philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn, who have ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list several times. The Brick’s exhibition space and courtyard will be named in the couple’s honor. (They also endowed the $100,000 Mohn Award that goes to an artist participating in each edition of the Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum.)

At the time, the Mohns said in a statement, “We want to recognize the important role that LAXART has and will play in inspiring and shaping the future of arts inLos Angeles. We hope this gift will move LAXART into a new era and serve as a catalyst for further progress.”

When it was founded in 2005 by Lauri Firstenberg, LAXART quickly made a name for itself in the city by showing local talents and under-recognized artists. Early exhibitions included solos for Mark Bradford, Leslie Hewitt, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Charles Gaines, Anna Sew Hoy, and others. In 2012, it also co-organized the first edition of the Made in L.A. biennial with the Hammer Museum and produced the performance festival that accompanied the inaugural iteration of the Getty Foundation’s PST Art. Walker joined the organization as director in 2016, succeeding Firstenberg.

In deciding on its new name, the organization drew from the new building’s exposed red brick, which runs throughout the interior space, according to a release. The mission, however, remains the same: being “dedicated to understanding key issues of our time through contemporary art,” per that release.

Before its transformation by John Frane of HGA Architects, the building, which dates back to 1952, was a furniture showroom. The transformed gallery, with 4,000 square feet of exhibition space, has an open floor plan and is column-free.  

The Brick will be inaugurated by three events: two performances by saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell on Sunday, June 16 and Monday, June 17, and a community party on June 23. The latter event will also see the launch of a week-long garage sale of the home library (and other items) of artist Allan Sekula and art historian Sally Stein.

The first exhibition at the Brick’s new location will be a solo outing of new work by Gregg Bordowitz. A mural dedicated to Pope.L, who died in December, will soon adorn its exterior façade.

In the fall, the Brick will open a group show titled “Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism” as part of PST Art: Art & Science Collide. The organization’s long-awaited “Monuments” exhibition is scheduled for fall 2025.

In a statement, Brick board chair Margaret Morgan said, “The stability of a permanent home allows us to do what we do best: present artists, exhibitions and projects that engage the issues of our times with bravery, brilliance — and even beauty. A home of our own has been a dream long envisioned. Now that it’s realized, our board, leadership, artists, and staff can’t wait to show you what’s to come.”

As part of the deal, White Cube will represent Pindell in Europe and Asia, and her longtime representative, Garth Greenan Gallery, will continue to do so in the US. The two galleries will each mount related solo shows for the artist in November, with Greenan’s in New York and White Cube’s in Hong Kong, marking the artist’s first solo in Asia. Pindell will no longer be represented by Victoria Miro, which has shown her since 2018.

“I am very excited to be joining White Cube, and I especially look forward to having my work shown in Asia this fall,” Pindell told ARTnews in an email.

Pindell, who received her MFA from Yale University in 1967, has made an expansive body of work for more than six decades, spanning painting, video, collage, and drawing. Among her most well-known works are abstractions made by affixing thousands of hole-punched circles of variously colored paper to unstretched canvas. She received her first solo show in 1971 at Spelman College’s Rockefeller Memorial Galleries.

Another major work is her 1980 video Free, White, and 21, in which Pindell recounts moments of racism she has experienced, to which a white woman (played by Pindell in makeup and a blonde wig) responds by invalidating her lived experience.   

In the 1960s and ’70s, Pindell worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 12 years; she was among the first Black curators to be hired by the institution. She also was a co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery, the influential women’s co-operative arts space. She once joked, in a 2018 ARTnews profile, that her “résumé is over 100 pages long, and I need to update it.”

Though Pindell has been producing important work for the past half century, it was only recently that she had received long-overdue recognition by the mainstream art world. She received her first retrospective in 2018, which was co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Other important institutional exhibitions have followed, including at the Shed in New York (in 2020) and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2021).

Recent group exhibitions include “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” at MoMA (2022), “Women in Abstraction” at the Centre Pompidou (2021), “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum (2021), “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2019), “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2018), “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963–1983” at Tate Modern (2017), and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum (2017).

In an email to ARTnews, White Cube’s global artistic director Susan May said, “It’s a great honour to work with Howardena, whose influence as an artist and curator is evident of her commitment to a radical and pioneering practice. It’s an exciting time to show her work throughout Europe and Asia and continue to broaden its recognition in these regions.”