Join us for a conversation celebrating the publication of A Handbook of Latinx Art, a curated selection of key texts and artists’ voices exploring US Latinx art and art history from the 1960s to the present. Co-editors Rocio Aranda-Alvardo and Deborah Cullen-Morales along with contributors and Joiri Minaya, Chon Noriega, and Yasmin Ramirez will discuss the book’s intervention into the diverse field of Latinx art and its relationship to the history of art in the United States
This program is presented in partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art and will be hosted at the museum.
Location:
Hess Theater
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014
About the Book
A Handbook of Latinx Art is a curated selection of key texts and artists’ voices exploring US Latinx art and art history from the 1960s to the present.
It is the first anthology to explore the rich, deep, and often overlooked contributions that Latinx artists have made to art in the United States. Drawn from wide-ranging sources, this volume includes texts by artists, critics, and scholars from the 1960s to the present that reflect the diversity of the Latinx experience across the nation, from the West Coast and the Mexican border to New York, Miami, and the Midwest.
The anthology features essential writings by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Central American artists to highlight how visionaries of diverse immigrant groups negotiate issues of participation and belonging, material, style, and community in their own voices. These intersectional essays cut across region, gender, race, and class to lay out a complex emerging field that reckons with different histories, geographies, and political engagements and, ultimately, underscores the importance of Latinx artists to the history of American art.
Panelists
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is part of the Creativity and Free Expression team at the Ford Foundation. She joined the foundation in 2018 after serving as curator at El Museo del Barrio for nearly a decade. Concurrent to her work in museums, Aranda-Alvarado taught as an adjunct professor; consulted and curated independently on Latinx and Latin American art and culture; and published and advised, in both scholarly and curatorial capacities, at several arts organizations.
Deborah Cullen-Morales is a senior program officer for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation. Prior to joining the foundation, Cullen-Morales was executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has also held leadership positions at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, El Museo del Barrio, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. She focuses on Latinx, Caribbean, and African American modern and contemporary art and has curated or stewarded numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally.
Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, ISCP, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, New Wave, Silver Art Projects and Fountainhead. Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Santo Domingo Museo de Arte Moderno, the Centro León Jiménes, the Kemper Museum, El Museo del Barrio and several private collections.
Chon Noriega is Distinguished Professor and Interim Dean, School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. His work explores Chicano/Latino arts and media through their aesthetic, social and institutional histories. In conjunction with his scholarship, he has actively archived the works and papers of individual filmmakers and artists, art groups, and community-based arts institutions, as well as curated and co-curated numerous research-based exhibitions. As Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) for 19 years, he advanced multi-year research projects on archival preservation and access, arts and culture, economic security, educational access, LGBTQ and gender equity, immigration rights, public health, voting rights, and urban poverty.
Yasmin Ramirez is an art worker and adjunct professor of art at the City University of New York. Born in Brooklyn, Ramirez was active in the downtown art scene of the early 1980s as a club kid and art critic for the East Village Eye. Currently an independent curator, Ramirez has collaborated on curatorial projects with the Bronx Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the New Museum, the Loisaida Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Franklin Furnace, and Taller Boricua. Her recent critically acclaimed exhibitions include Pasado y Presente: Art after the Young Lords, 1969–2019 (2019); Home, Memory, and Future (2016); Martin Wong: Human Instamatic (2015); and ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York (2015). She holds a PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY.