Curating Accessible Art Experiences
If anyone has a pulse on what’s next for Latinx art, it’s curators. To learn more about the trends they’re seeing and what they find themselves drawn to, we interviewed several Latinx curators to learn more about their perspectives.
Installation view, Into the Valley of Despair, Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NY, 2022. Curated by Carina Martinez, featuring artists Anna Witt, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Julian Louis Phillips, Florian Aschka & Larissa Knopp, Kim Kielhofner, and Mia Raadik.
In McAllen, Texas, Carina Martinez felt there was a lack of exhibition spaces, especially those that felt welcoming to her community. The curator, writer, and researcher now works at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where accessibility is top of mind.
Intervenxions recently spoke to Martinez to learn more about her journey as a curator and how translation and expansive categorizations are inspiring her work.
Intervenxions staff edited this interview for clarity and concision.
What are some salient currents you are witnessing in contemporary art today?
Carina Martinez. Photo by Caroline Taylor Shehan.
I’ve been paying attention to the curating of group shows, especially by Latinx-championing institutions. Most recently, there was La Trienial 2024 at El Museo del Barrio and Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney. These shows are taking on the group exhibition model and thinking about cultural borders and boundaries in a more fluid way. The show at El Museo is called Flow States, and it's a very central theme of the show, thinking about Latinidad more expansively, specifically through the legacies of Spanish and U.S. imperialism and the power structures that are very much baked into not just the history but the fate of those affected nations.
And it’s not just Latin America. I find it very interesting that artists from the Philippines, Haiti, and Native American nations were included in the conversation. These geographies are often not considered within a Latinx context. I think there can be a lot of putting artists in boxes or distinguishing Latinx art versus art period, which oftentimes just reinforces the problem of categorizing or canonizing itself. So I like this more creative balance or fluidity with which curators are approaching the field lately.
At Americas Society, there's also a show right now of works by Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza that takes a hands-off approach to exhibition-making and curating; they left it to the artists themselves. They are old-time friends, so the show is also about the influence their work had on one another. This approach made the show feel more experimental and alive and was a cool example of how to use an exhibition to generate new models in a collaborative way.
And finally, I've noticed an emphasis on materiality. People are shifting back focus to the materials the artists are using and translating those visual languages to the exhibition space, whether it's fiber arts or painting.
Does the work ever feel isolating? Or do you feel like you're part of an artistic community? If so, how would you describe that community?
Being a young arts worker and how that translates under capitalism, you know, living in an expensive place, it was very isolating at first, especially coming out of my graduate program in 2022. I was in a cohort of very supportive peers, all of us having similar interests, putting on exhibitions, encouraging one another, recommending artists who were exploring the same concepts. I went from that energy into the competitive workforce where it was very difficult to find curatorial work—or work period. I ended up working at a gallery after almost a year of applying to places and not landing those opportunities.
It felt like this for a long time, and I was still very much applying to open calls up until the end of 2024 when I got the opportunity at the Whitney. In a way, to now be able to do meaningful work with major financial and institutional backing felt like winning the lottery. But from that first sense of support that I began to foster in graduate school—not just from my peers but from the artists I got to work with on those shows—that is where I have found my community. We're all just kind of young and trying to build platforms to share our artistic or curatorial voices.
I just started this fellowship, so I'm curious to see how things change. But up until very recently, it's been a lot of scrapping and self-initiating.
Installation view, From Aqui, from Alla, MACP Project Space, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, 2021. Curated by Carina Martinez, featuring artists Albany Andaluz, Estelle Maisonett, and Aida Lizalde.
How do the arts intersect with other areas in your city? How do you like to work with other artists, institutions, and the public?
The first show I ever curated was a virtual exhibition during the pandemic. Despite it not being in person, I got to get to know the artists in and around the Rio Grande Valley. But from that point on, I haven't done much with Vallery artists because I've been living here.
Growing up in McAllen, I remember we had more of an artisanal, arts and craft community that would sell their works at local art walks and that sort of thing. But we didn't really have any exhibition spaces; we had a small arts and science museum that was more geared toward kids. I grew up feeling like we didn't have access to the right resources to experience the sort of important arts and cultural work that the local community craved. I felt like I had to go to Houston, Austin, or San Antonio to see exhibitions. I’m proud that RGV-based artists have founded places like ENTRE and Tropicasa and are doing exciting things to keep developing that.
From that experience growing up in the Valley, feeling that way, and then going to other cities that had these infrastructures made me feel like an outsider. Accessibility became a big deal for me, whether when you read a wall label or even when you walk into a space. Often, this is the case with the white-cube galleries or museums that can feel like maybe you're not smart enough or you're not the intended audience for it, like you lack a necessary background in art history to feel like you belong there. To me, art is about welcoming an experience, an exchange. With that said, when I engage with artists, with audiences, colleagues and institutions, accessibility is always at the forefront of my mind.
And that, you know, not only entails language but also thinking in an empathic way about exhibition-making. If I were a random person who was curious enough to come into a space, what could I leave with? It's not necessarily about explaining everything. It could also just be creating a mood, a vibe that you don't need expertise to feel and make it a memorable experience for people.
Installation view, Into the Valley of Despair, Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NY, 2022. Curated by Carina Martinez, featuring artists Anna Witt, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Julian Louis Phillips, Florian Aschka & Larissa Knopp, Kim Kielhofner, and Mia Raadik.
What kind of artworks or artists are inspiring you lately?
I've been really into art that deals with translation and language. I always end up back there in one way or another because I, myself, like, a lot of Latinx people, spoke Spanish early in their life as a first language and then lost it. And then I relearned it. I think about language very formulaically, and I just am endlessly fascinated with how artists think about it and expand what language can be and can feel like in the body.
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola is someone who I've been really kind of stuck on or like; I have to do a project with her. She runs a publication in Mexico City and is an incredible artist who draws inspiration from the natural world to create sound sculptures, installations, performances, and poems that treat language as something interdimensional. Some works present speculative alphabets for a future nonhuman society; others translate the surfaces of archeological sites into written scores; some perform the sound of gravity. There’s something otherworldly and almost mystical about her work, like portals into another time or substance.
What does the future look like to you?
I hope it continues expanding in the same direction—thinking more fluidly of what it means to be Latinx and what the scope of such a term can mean. I hope the future holds not taking any one thing or one area of focus for granted, that we constantly question and consider different lenses when telling our collective and individual stories. For curators and artists, it's important to keep pushing and questioning and philosophizing about what that can look like.
And for me, personally, I'll be at the Whitney for at least the next two years. I'm just really excited to help shape the biennial and other projects to come.