The Intergenerational X – Reflections on Latino Art Now! 2019
Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, “Untitled” from the series Excuse me, sir. 2016–present (ongoing). Archival pigment prints. Courtesy of the artist.
Over the course of Latino Art Now! 2019 in Houston, opinions on the -x in Latinx (and Chicanx) were plentiful, which inspired me to reflect upon the ways in which the split between those who embrace the term and those who do not runs, in some cases, along generational lines. In his remarks during the LAN! plenary session, Chicano art scholar Dr. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto lauded what he called the “Latinx generation” of emerging artists, while simultaneously urging us to practice three core tenets in addressing the ever-evolving conversation on Latinx art: confianza, conocimiento, and convivencia. As a Ph.D. student focusing on Latinx and Chicanx art from the 1960s–80s, I was both struck by this denomination of “Latinx” as a generation and galvanized by the possibilities afforded by Ybarra-Frausto’s trifecta of guiding principles, which I suggest can inform increased intergenerational and cross-geographical dialogue.
A panel that exemplified the fruitfulness of such dialogue was one entitled “Latinx Art is American Art,” organized by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum. It was chaired by Dr. Adriana Zavala (Tufts University) and Dr. Rocío Aranda-Alvarado (Ford Foundation), whose introductions addressed both the capacious potential of “Latinx” as a term and the ways in which Latinx art’s erasure persists in the American art-world mainstream. Their big-picture framing was followed by presentations by two artists whose backgrounds vary considerably: Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, is a Salvadoran American artist hailing from Prince George’s County, Maryland; and Juan Sánchez, a Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist with a decades-long career in New York City. Generationally, the two also diverge—thirty years separate Sánchez (b. 1954) from Ramírez (b. 1984). Yet the work that each showcased in the panel revealed unexpected points of both contiguity and complementarity.
Ramírez opened with an overview of her background: the daughter of a single mother who emigrated to the U.S. from El Salvador in the early 1980s, she served in the U.S. Navy before completing a bachelor’s degree in Norfolk, Virginia. She subsequently moved to Austin, Texas, for an M.F.A., and now lives and works in Houston. Ramírez candidly recalled being encouraged to spend time in Texas’s Latinx neighborhoods, with the assumption being that she would integrate seamlessly into the predominantly Mexican American communities. The reality was not so simple, and Ramírez’s spare photographs of windows, facades, and bus stops communicate the estrangement and dislocation provoked by the new location and society’s uncritical presumptions of Latinx homogeneity. The conspicuous absence of a father figure served as the catalyst for her series Excuse Me, Sir (ongoing 2016–present). In it, she sought to symbolically locate her father by photographing men who resembled him physically, often from behind. Though she later began to balance this outsider vantage with more direct engagement with her subjects, the sense of unresolved distance persists.
Juan Sánchez, San Ernesto de la Higuera, 2001. Oil and mixed media collage on wood. Courtesy of the artist.
Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, “Untitled” from the series Excuse me, sir. 2016–present (ongoing). Archival pigment prints. Courtesy of artist.
At first glance, Sánchez’s densely layered and brilliantly hued assemblage compositions, which liberally mix painting and printmaking techniques with photography, collaged elements, hand coloring, laser printing, and text, seem at odds with Ramírez’s haunting images of everyday life. Sánchez, an influential Brooklyn-based artist rooted in the Nuyorican art movement, deploys strategies of juxtaposition and superimposition to comment the contradictions of the Puerto Rican and Latinx experience. As an Afro-Puerto Rican whose work is deeply informed by historical and contemporary radical activism in Puerto Rico, the U.S., and worldwide, Sánchez’s works mobilize multivalent visual codes, giving voice to the complexities of Puerto Rican, Black, and Latinx identity through montages of historical and pop cultural figures, Catholic and African religious iconography, Taíno petroglyphs, and intimate references to family. Sánchez concluded his LAN! presentation with a screening of the video collage Unknown Boricua Streaming: A Nuyorican State of Mind (2010).
Here, accompanied by a dramatic soundscape of musical recordings and speeches, a rapid-fire collage of appropriated archival and pop cultural imagery streams kaleidoscopically across a shifting background of gridded Puerto Rican flags. Though ostensibly “about” the Puerto Rican experience, the sheer volume and heterogeneity of the imagery and its frenetic movement attest to a statement Sánchez made in a 2015 interview: “The more Puerto Rican I became, the more of an internationalist I became,” a reminder that even as Latinx art is American art, American artists draw from society’s perpetual array of sources that transcend national or ethnic borders. Through their divergent strategies—visual juxtaposition and the proliferation of signifiers for Sánchez, pictorial estrangement and the absented gaze in the case of Ramírez—we can nevertheless find common threads. Both attest to the need to remain both inclusive and specific, guided by the confianza, conocimiento, and convivencia that can emerge when we place Latinx art spanning regional and temporal boundaries into conversation.
Sonja Elena Gandert is a Ph.D. student in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she researches postwar Chicanx, Latinx, and Latin American art.