This one-day conference will take place virtually and feature panel presentations addressing the dearth of critical scholarship on Nuyorican and DiaspoRican visual art through a decolonial and inclusive lens, in anticipation of a forthcoming collection of essays to be published in 2023.
Click here to download a PDF of the full conference program.
If you have any accessibility needs for this event, please email us at latinxproject@nyu.edu.
Participants
Arlene Dávila, PhD is a Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University, and a recognized public intellectual focusing on questions of cultural equity, Latinx and critical race studies. She is the author of multiple books focusing on Latinx cultural politics spanning the media, urban politics, museums and contemporary art markets. Her latest book: Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke Press 2020) was selected as one of the best art books of 2020 by the New York Times and ARTnews, and a favorite book by Smithsonian scholars and Artnet News. She is also the founding director of The Latinx Project, an interdisciplinary space focusing on Latinx art and culture and hosting artists and curatorial projects at NYU.
Yasmin Ramirez, PhD is an art worker, curator, and writer based in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY. 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. Attracted to street art and hip hop, she became acquainted with emerging artists and writers, many of whom are now icons of the 1980s. Currently an independent curator, Dr. Ramirez has collaborated on curatorial projects with The Bronx Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, The Loisaida Center, The New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Franklin Furnace, and Taller Boricua. Her critically acclaimed exhibitions and panels include: Pasado y Present: Art after the Young Lords, 1969-2019 (2019); Home, Memory, and Future (2016); Martin Wong: Human Instamatic (2015); ¡Presente!: The Young Lords in New York (2015); The Puerto Rican Art Workers and the Construction of the Nuyorican Art Movement (2014); Re-Membering Loisaida: On Archiving and the Lure of the Retro Lens (2009); “Esto A Veces Tiene Nombre": Latin@ Art Collectives in a Post-Movement Millennium (2008); The Boricua in Basquiat (2005); Voices From Our Communities: Perspectives on a Decade of Collecting at El Museo del Barrio (2000); Pressing the Point: Parallel Expressions in the Graphic Arts of the Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements (1999).
Néstor David Pastor is a writer, editor, cultural worker, and translator born and raised in Queens, NY. He is the founding editor of Huellas, a bilingual magazine of longform writing by emerging writers with roots in Abya Yala. He holds a BA from SUNY Binghamton in English and Hispanic Literature and an MA from CUNY Queens College in Spanish Language and Literature. Currently, he is the editor of Intervenxions, a digital publication of The Latinx Project focusing on Latinx arts, culture, and politics. His writing has been published in NACLA, OkayAfrica, Remezcla, Latino USA, Radio Ambulante, The Nation, and Feet in 2 Worlds, among others. His translation work includes the book Political Solidarity Economy by Jorge Santiago and a host of clients, including NPR’s Storycorps. Past collaborations include work with the Afro-Latino Festival of New York City, the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, and the Loisaida Festival.
About the Authors
Joseph Cáceres is a queer Puerto Rican writer from the South Bronx whose work has been published in Slice magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, CURA, and Emerge: 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Joseph is also the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts’ Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant for Fiction, and LAMBDA Literary Writers Residency for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. As a second-year student in the English PhD program at the CUNY Graduate Center, Joseph studies queer American artists of African and Caribbean descent. He is the recipient of CUNY’s Lost & Found Archival Research Grant, and is currently working with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project on several projects revolving around the Cafe's queer founders.
Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé is professor of Spanish and comparative literature and associate director of the Institute of Latin American and Latinx Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave, 2007), a book about the testimonial genre and the relationship between the queer high art of Keith Haring and the popular Latinx street art of graffiti writers in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s. He is editor of the short stories of New York Puerto Rican queer writer Manuel Ramos Otero: Cuentos (casi) completos (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2019), and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (NYU, 2002). His essays on New York Latinx literature and art have appeared in anthologies such as Entiendes? Queer Readings/Hispanic Writings (Duke UP, 1995), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (NYU, 1997), and Queer Representations (NYU, 1997), and in journals such as Small Axe, GLQ, e-misférica, Revista Iberoamericana, ARTMargins, differences, Revista de Crítica Cultural, Cuban Studies, and Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. He has been visiting professor at Harvard, the recipient of the NEH and the Ford Foundation fellowships, and a former member of the Board of Directors of Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of CUNY’s Graduate Center and Fordham University Press. He is on the Editorial Board of Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. He recently curated, with Gregory de Silva, The Magic of Everyday Life: The Queer Translocal Photography of Luis Carle at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Galleries in Newark, New Jersey.
Kerry Doran is a writer and curator, and a regular contributor to exhibition catalogs, artist books, and independent publications. Her curatorial projects have been featured in Artforum, ARTnews, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Rhizome, and The Village Voice, among others. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently an PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Elizabeth Ferrer is a curator and writer specializing in Latino and Mexican art and photography. She is also the chief curator of contemporary art at BRIC. Ferrer has curated major exhibitions of modern and contemporary art for numerous venues in the United States and Mexico, and has written and lectured extensively on topics related to her fields of interest. Exhibitions she has curated have appeared at such venues as BRIC House, the Americas Society, the UBS Art Gallery, and the Aperture Foundation Gallery, all in New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; the Snite Museum, Notre Dame University; and MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico. Other major exhibition projects include traveling retrospectives of such historic Mexican figures as Mariana Yampolsky, Lola Alvarez Bravo, and María Izquierdo, and the establishment of the BRIC Biennial in 2014.
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, PhD is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar. She is Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University and the author of the award-winning Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern 2020). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, and SX Salon. She is a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR and the digital/material project Taller Electric Marronage. Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a Duke University Mellon Mays SITPA Fellow and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is currently a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University and was recently awarded a $2M Mellon Foundation Higher Learning grant for the collaborative project “Diasporas Solidarities Lab.”
Natalia Gulick de Torres researches architectural and urban development at Archivos del Caribe, a collective dedicated to reconceptualizing archives of the Antillean Caribbean. She is currently a Master in Design Studies candidate at Harvard University and holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. She has practiced architecture and has published work throughout the United States and Latin America.
Al Hoyos-Twomey is a PhD student in Art History at Newcastle University in the UK, where his research explores Latinx art and activist spaces in New York's Lower East Side in the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on the work of CHARAS and El Bohío.
Karen Jaime, PhD is Assistant Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. Currently a Mellon/HIDVL Scholar in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU, Karen is also a former Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow (*formerly the Woodrow Wilson), a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow and Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Karen’s monograph, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021) argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Her critical writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, e-Misférica, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, ASAP/J, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and in Performance Matters. Karen is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2003-2005). As a published poet, her writing is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians,” and in the anthology Latinas: Struggles and Protest in 21st Century USA.
Johana Londoño, PhD is Assistant Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Abstract Barrios The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (Duke University Press).
Nic López-Rodriguez is a nonbinary, Florida raised, Philly based Boricua. They are a poet, DJ, educator, and brujx practicing the lucumí religion. Over the last decade they have served the community as a social justice organizer and researcher. A former Leeway Foundation Arts & Change grant recipient, their writing has been featured in The Gordian Review, Philadelphia Inquirer and N.A.S.W. Journal. Nic holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University and is currently working as a writing arts professor at Thomas Jefferson University. They are a co-editor in the forthcoming anthology Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain & Radical Visions for Healing & Justice, set to make publication in winter 2022.
Urayoán Noel, PhD is the author or translator of a dozen books, including Transversal (University of Arizona Press), a New York Public Library Book of the Year, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award, and Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s forthcoming islas adyacentes/adjacent islands (Ugly Duckling Presse). Noel’s books have been named finalists or semifinalists for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Modern Language Association book prizes. His international performances include Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and his work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and teaches at New York University as well as at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas, and he serves on the board of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center.
Melissa M. Ramos Borges is an art historian with a predilection for the (re)vision of the art historical narrative in Puerto Rico. She obtained her doctorate from the Programa de Estudios Artísticos, Literarios y Culturales with a specialty in Art History at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, where she presented the first comprehensive study of avant-garde art produced between 1960-1980 in Puerto Rico. She is a professor in the Art History and Theory programs at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez and Río Piedras Campus. In addition, she is an independent researcher and curator who has published and presented her exhibitions and articles in various international platforms. She curated SUZI FERRER, the first retrospective exhibition of the groundbreaking Puerto Rican feminist avant-garde artist.
Raquel Reichard is an Orlando-based award-winning journalist and editor with an editorial objective to engage, educate and empower. As a writer, she centers her reporting on body politics and Puerto Rican culture. Currently, she's the Deputy Director at Somos, Refinery29's multi-platform sub-brand by and for Latines. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Central Florida and a master's degree in Latine media studies from New York University. A proud Nuyoflorican, Raquel was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, spent her childhood in her parents' enchanting homeland of Puerto Rico and was raised in Orlando.
Rojo Robles, PhD is a writer, filmmaker, cultural critic, and professor born and raised in Puerto Rico. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras with a B.A. in Theater, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He completed his M. Phil and Ph.D. Degrees in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Having taught at various CUNY colleges, he is now an Assistant Professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College, CUNY, where his research and courses are particularly focused on Latin American, Latina/o/x, and Afro-diasporic literature, film, and intermedial cultures with an emphasis on Puerto Rico. Along with teaching, researching, and writing, Dr. Robles has substantial work as a fiction writer, playwright, and filmmaker. He is currently at work on a book project about Boricua intermedial poetics in the US that emphasizes how audiovisual performance, visual arts, audio recordings, textual representation of the sonic, and unfaithful translation imply poetic overflows that disrupt linguistic, disciplinary, racial, and imperial borders.
Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos (Santurce, PR — 1984) is a PhD student in the Program of Artistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Researches the effects that the nationalist ideological agenda has had on the official narratives of the history of art in Puerto Rico and how this has in turn influenced the development and visibility that the work of Puerto Rican abstract artists has received inside and outside the island. He is graduated cum laude in Fine Arts from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de San Juan (2008), has a Master’s Degree in Cultural Management and Administration from the University of Puerto Rico (2013) and a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has directed the Visual Arts Program of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and the 4th edition of the Poly/Graphic Triennial of San Juan, Latin America and the Caribbean. He currently collaborates with the programming of Espacio CóMPLICES, a collective cultural work platform located in the Lavapiés neighborhood in Madrid. In 2019 he co-founded Sin Norte, an independent publication focused on the dissemination of migrant chronicles in Europe. In 2021 he curated '[...] entreformas' an exhibition for the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, which brings together the work of several generations of Puerto Rican abstract artists and is based on the content of his doctoral research.
Serda Ariyel Yalkin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. A native New Yorker, she holds an MA in the Arts of the Americas from the University of New Mexico and a BA in Art History from Bard College. She is currently researching and writing her dissertation, “Diasporic Visions: Nuyorican Photography in the 1970s and 1980s,” which foregrounds the camera’s role in Nuyorican worldmaking during the period. Excavating the medium as a diasporic practice, the project unveils the centrality of the Nuyorican photography to the project of Latinx art, the visual terrain of postwar urbanism, alternative vanguard movements and community building in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s and extended-Caribbean processes of creolization. This corrective to the history of “American” photography does not just signal an absence to be unquestionably absorbed into the U.S. story through the discourse of inclusivism. Rather, it claims the Puerto Rican experience of coloniality as endemic to twentieth-century American art and visuality. Yalkin was recently named a 2022 LUCE/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art, and prior to starting the PhD, she was the Curatorial Assistant for the Arts of the Americas and European collections at the Brooklyn Museum.