¡PRESENTE! Disability Justice and U.S. Latinx Art
Carryover (Blue tarp in Vega Alta), 2019. Digital impression / C-print 20 x 30 in. Image courtesy of the artist
“I seek to evoke empathy and compassion for the life on this planet.”
“I aspire for a community with more empathy and more care.”
These commitments, made by artists Navild Acosta and Kevin Quiles Bonilla, are central to the work of U.S. Latinx visual artists whose historiography we could describe as “disability justice art history.” While some make work that reflects the lived experience of people with disabilities, others reflect more generally on the lived experiences of those from their various communities, disabled or not. Ahead of The Latinx Project’s “Demystifying Disability: Creatives and the Making/Musings of Latinx” event, I offer a brief overview of a handful of artists who have been working for decades to recognize the contributions of disabled people across various fields of work. This tiny survey is by no means comprehensive, but represents some of the artists I have come across in working to acknowledge U.S. Latinx artists as contributing to the larger history of American art. I hope you will find their work as inspiring as I have.
Navild Acosta
When artist Elia Alba and I started organizing a biennial of contemporary Latinx art for El Museo del Barrio in 2015, one of the artists she most wanted me to meet was Navild Acosta. We met at a coffee shop to learn about their work, and later I took my mother to see their incredible, genre-shifting work “Discotropic” at PS 122 in 2018. This work explored the relationship between science fiction, Afrofuturism, disco, astrophysics and the Black experience. It was a celebration of bodies and movement, underscored through sound, light and flow; a unique experience in which audience members didn’t sit, but rather moved around according to where the action was taking place.
Navild Acosta, “DISCOTROPIC 3rd I SIDE.” Photo: Tanz im August
Seeing the experience of the immigrant as one filled with universal meanings and implications, Navild began sharing these thoughts through their multidisciplinary stories. Focusing on research released by the CDC about the “sleep-gap” between white and Black people in the United States, Navild worked with Fannie Sosa to create the Black Power Naps/Siestas Negras project, one also steeped in Navild’s belief that the body is a site for deep transformation, a path for “transcending our colonial inheritance,” and white supremacy. A healing project, Black Power Naps offers beautiful beds for Black bodies to rest and regain the strength to face the inherited trauma that is a part of Black life in this country.
Hector Machado
I met Hector Machado when I was organizing a meeting focusing on US Latinx artists in Miami. Hector is a survivor and an artist, born and raised in Miami. He earned a BA in Theater from Florida A&M University, and went on to complete an MFA in Theater with a specialization in Production Stage Management from California Institute of the Arts. The multifaceted artist is an inaugural fellow of the Maven Leadership Collective, an institute for queer and trans people of color and their allies. Hector has worked as a production manager and a stage manager for a number of projects in both theater and dance, including Marissa Chibas’s Siete Cuentos at Plaza de la Raza, Bob Cucuzza’s Cattywampus at Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT); and Cucuzza’s Mother Tongue at Son of Semele Ensemble.
Hector Machado, center, in wheelchair, with other artists from Pioneer Winter Collective. Work in progress. Photo: Mitchell Zachs and Simon Soong.
As a dancer, trained in tap and step, and theater producer, Hector has continued to perform in many capacities. He joined Pioneer Winter Collective in 2017, as both performer and production and accessibility coordinator. Speaking about Hector, Pioneer Winter says, he is “the member of the cast who in real life has the least amount of privilege among us. He is a black gay man who two years ago had both of his legs amputated when he went into a diabetic coma, so he’s now disabled, black, gay.” In his performance role, Hector is given agency over other performers. “There are scenes where he is using a megaphone,” says Winter, “and he’s walking the cast through an anatomical or physiological instruction on how to comply, or how to be perceived as compliant by someone in a position of authority like a police officer.”
Elle Pérez
I first saw the work of Elle Pérez on the side of a bus shelter along the Grand Concourse in the South Bronx. I was struck by the simplicity of the work, imagery that was focused on the artists’ friends, family, and neighbors, those that formed them over the years as they were growing up in the Bronx. Since earning their MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2015, Elle has depicted a variety of scenes, including intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and sometimes has focused on the most deeply rooted details of their subjects.
The way that Elle describes their work illustrates the strong relationship between the image and the unspoken text it implies. She notes: “I love that space where...something is a photograph but not a word or something that you haven’t put the words to yet. Something can live there, in photography, and not have to be definitive. You can use photography to depict something that you cannot picture.” She characterizes photographs as perfect containers, holding something that doesn’t always get defined and describes form in the most poetic terms, as being related to queerness because “form is undefinable and unbound.” Like other portrait photographers, even those working in the early twentieth century, Elle often collaborates with their sitters, so that the image is formed through dialog and interaction. Perhaps most important is Elle’s vision and interpretation of the complexity of gender identity, supporting the LGBTQIA+ community through their image making. Elle’s solo exhibition, “Diablo,” at MoMA/PS1 in 2019 offered a recreation of the artist’s studio wall, allowing the public a rare view of the photographer’s working process and how various kinds of images become influential in the work. Clippings from magazines along with photos of friends and photocopies of book pages were all displayed together, forming a kind of visual storyboard.
Kevin Quiles Bonilla
Earlier this year, Kevin Quiles Bonilla and I had the opportunity to chat briefly during a studio visit with him while he was an artist in residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Kevin received a BA in Fine Arts with a concentration in photography from the University of Puerto Rico in 2015 and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons in 2018. The artist notes that his interdisciplinary work has focused on his thinking around colonialism and the status of Puerto Rico, particularly in light of the series of devastating crises bound by Hurricane Maria in 2017, the social unrest around the island’s debt and overall inequality in 2019, and the earthquakes and the current COVID-19 pandemic. For the artist, these catalysts have resurfaced the colonial status of Puerto Rico and the federal government’s perpetual inaction.
He explores identity at various sites, both physical and conceptual, such as space, language, history, and politics, even using his own body (to be read as a queer body) as a carrier for the story and struggle that takes place between Puerto Rico and the United States, colony and mainland. He notes that “through photography, video, performance, and installation, I question the amalgamation of outcomes that arise through my lived experience as a Puerto Rican, as a diasporic migrant, as a queer person, and as a person with a disability.”
Reveca Torres
I learned of Reveca Torres’s work after we began working with the arts service organization 3Arts in Chicago, and a colleague mentioned her work to me. Reveca, co-director of ReelAbilities Film Festival Chicago, has curated touring exhibitions that showcase work of people with disabilities and bring awareness to disability rights. She uses painting, illustration, photography, film, movement, and other media as an expressive tool for advocacy and social justice. Reveca completed degrees in Fashion Design and Theatre Arts, and worked as a costume designer while aiding organizations doing disability work in health, advocacy, recreation, and peer support. Understanding the need for support through her own experience, Reveca founded the nonprofit BACKBONES to ensure that others like her, especially those who were newly injured, had access to resources, information, and encouragement.
Reveca Torres and Mariam Paré, “Las Tres Fridas.” Photo by Reveca Torres, Tara Ahern, and Mariam Paré.
Tres Fridas Project is her most significant body of work, and one of the focal points of her disability advocacy, focusing on the legacy of Frida Kahlo and her own representation of her disabled body. For this series, Reveca collaborated with Tara Ahern and artist Mariam Pare, also paralyzed, to recreate Kahlo’s famous Las Dos Fridas (1939) in photography. This work is a powerful reconsideration of the historic reading of Kahlo’s work, which has never focused on her as a model for disability justice, but rather as a feminist icon, and (too) often as suffering in the shadow of her husband. This first work lead to additional images that include recreations of other works of art, such as Da Vinci’s La Gioconda (Mona Lisa) and Last Supper; Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter and Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler’s Mother); Picasso’s Old Guitarist, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and more, all featuring people with disabilities.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is a program officer in Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation. She is an art historian and curator. She joined Ford in 2018 after serving as curator at El Museo del Barrio for nearly a decade. In that role, she presented visual arts exhibitions and programming that reflected the history and culture of El Barrio as well as the greater Latinx and Latin American diaspora, including Antonio Lopez: Future, Funk, Fashion and PRESENTE: The Young Lords in New York. Prior to that, she was the curator at the Jersey City Museum for nearly a decade, where she organized exhibitions such as Tropicalisms: Subversions of Paradise, Industrial Strength: Precisionism and New Jersey and solo exhibitions on the work of Chakaia Booker and Raphael Montanez Ortiz. Concurrent to her work in museums, Rocío taught as an adjunct professor; consulted and curated independently on Latinx and Latin American art and culture; and published and advised, in both a scholarly and curatorial capacity. She earned her PhD in art history from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Rocío taught for several years at The City College of the City University of New York, where she developed a course on US Latinx art history for the Art Department. In her work at the Ford Foundation, Rocío has organized a number of regional meetings focusing on the lack of visibility for US Latinx artists in the broader museum field and in the history of American Art.