Forging New Paths in Nonprofit and Independent Curation
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 for our State of the Field series.
Installation shot, Allegories of Inertia exhibition at the Charlotte Street Foundation. Artists’ works pictured: Shawn Bitters and Yulie Urano. Photo by E.G. Schempf
Raised in Atlanta and of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, Afro-Latine independent curator and lens-based artist Yashi Davalos’s work draws a connection between the U.S. South and Latin America, while reexamining Western narratives. The 2023–2025 curatorial fellow at The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Davalos curated Allegories of Inertia; Past, Present, and Afro Futurism; and Miss/They Camaraderie 2024.
Here’s what Davalos had to say about working as both a nonprofit and independent curator, the kind of future she envisions, and the art scenes in Atlanta, Kansas City, and New Orleans.
Intervenxions staff edited this interview for clarity and concision.
What are some salient currents you are witnessing in contemporary art today?
Right now I'm witnessing a lot of sculptural installation. I was previously based in the Gulf South before taking this fellowship in Kansas City, Missouri. I'm also from Atlanta, so I'm thinking a lot about Caribbean and Southern heritage merging land art and points of oceanic contact with figurative representation. I’m thinking about these post-apocalyptic, futurisms of ecology taking over. I'm seeing a lot of discourse around that.
Yashi Davalos. Photo by Kayla Boissiere. Courtesy of Yashi Davalos.
Also, the figurative being either kind of merged into the land or being mythos-based creatures that are specific to the Caribbean. Transmigratory resistance is also a big thing because there's the immigrant discourse in my mind, just thinking about what is the connection between Latin America and the South?
Does the work ever feel isolating or do you feel like you're part of an artistic community? And if so, how would you describe that community?
I have primarily worked as a nonprofit curator, so I'm typically positioned as the middleman when it comes to artist development. I think all artistic landscapes are kind of reflective of what's in their ecosystem. Atlanta was very corporate-contemporary. New Orleans was a Caribbean economy. It was very nonprofit but also had fully funded MFAs.
Where I fall is that I'm always the proxy to the institutional design of programming that can help boost those people into museums or other residencies. So in a leadership capacity, I provide a lot of insight to the institution. Something I'm always navigating is this idea of mid-career development, that there come these moments where you have peer versus peer tokenism that people assume that I won't experience because I'm part of an institution.
But if you're developing artists, they're going to have the capacity to also develop programming and do exhibition-making or have the capacity to do a lot of the same things I'm doing. So I feel I'm always having to constantly reset my boundaries in relationships and work more unilaterally. I just believe community is the willingness to give and take at different stages of career. So it's isolating when you're inside an institution to some degree.
“What if there was a project-based design that involved one research institution, one exhibition-making space, several artists, and an independent curator? ”
You’re also an independent worker. How do you establish and maintain links of solidarity with other art workers?
I got my start through The Front, which is a collective-run gallery in New Orleans. That I was more on the independent laborer side of things. And I do also still take contract work.
I have always been interested in these ideas of exchanges not just between the artists and the curator but also between different institutions that have worked with different artists. Those are things that should create solidarity. A lot of those institutions do get things like the Teiger funding, or things that are specifically around DEI artist development.
I think those could be really good things if they're hiring people of color based on those funding initiatives at institutions, but there should be more contract design based on that funding between independent laborers and then co-administrative roles between multiple institutions. What if there was a project-based design that involved one research institution, one exhibition-making space, several artists, and an independent curator? those things would help people navigate institutions better. I also think we would provide value in a unilateral way to the people who work at institutions.
EleveN2wenty2 Choir and Vaughan Harrison in Allegories of Inertia exhibition activation performance at the Charlotte Street Foundation, durated by Yashi Davalos. Photo by Lilah Powlas.
How do the arts intersect with other areas in your city? And how do you like to work with artists, institutions, and the public?
I've noticed that in cities with more of a corporate presence, there’s a lot of social practice that goes into brand campaigns or brand partnerships for social practice. I see it a lot through performances or dialogues. I'm really interested in that because in Atlanta, it's a lot easier to do event production and get a $5,000 budget from a company than to write a grant.
And I'm interested in residencies being interdisciplinary. A lot of residencies tend to be very temporal. For the ones that are local and international within their cohort, you could see more projects that are done with the cohort, merging performing and visual art. I think those are things that I see here in Kansas City a little more. But I would like to see other places that have more institutional resources, start just like letting the artists merge those things together.
What kind of artwork inspires you lately?
I'm really interested in objects and sculptural installations being merged with performances—either with musicians playing in response to the work or with movement-based artists.
I also have a deep love for photo and archival manipulation. I really love what photo manipulation how photo can be an object or it can be an installation that talks about place. Photos making up the exterior of a building that means something to you. I really love creating that third space with photos.
And again, I'm really into those folkloric representations of the Afro-Indigenous Latina diaspora.
In terms of artists, I really like Firelei Báez and Bony Ramirez. I just like those things being a proxy to transcend gender within Latin America. Even just with those forms that are mythical to some degree, there’s a conversation there about how to transcend gender from this point of contact where our bodies are already exotified. Finding a way to visualize that and push it forward, I really like that as well.
What does representation mean to you? Do you feel represented in the work that you do and where it is circulated?
My curatorial research has been very well represented in my exhibition-making. In my writing, I feel the most seen in the relationships I build with artists between different regions. But I don't necessarily feel represented by the spaces I work in.
I hope to return home to Atlanta and work in a capacity where I can bring the things that I've learned from having to navigate the social gaps or just any dissonance or development gaps in institutions and bring the expertise back to the place that I started. I think I'd rather be in a place where I grew up. Because I know fully how artists are being groomed throughout their careers.
I want to be in a place where I can just tackle it head-on at a point in my career where I'm fully prepared to bring those skills to the table. I think it's easy to feel seen in different moments. But your day-to-day can feel—or at least mine—very unseen because I'm always the nontraditional hire. I really want to work at an arts nonprofit in Atlanta in the future.
Installation shot, Allegories of Inertia exhibition at the Charlotte Street Foundation. Artists’ works pictured: Alexis Borth, Shawn Bitters, and Kandy G Lopez. Photo by E.G. Schempf.
How often are your curatorial decisions influenced by organizational or financial pressure?
When you're sort of a rookie in the game, you can feel like the institutional capacity for you is really limited. I think that navigating that really pushed me to build more relationships with people who could be partners. That also challenged me in how to navigate authority, but in learning how to navigate that, it’s giving me access to other funding, giving me access to other administrators, other galleries, other collectors that have helped provide leverage.
It really confirms that I do need to be independent to some degree or always have the capacity to do something independent. Because institutional access is based on rapport, it can be just at a different cadence than what you're ready for.
I've learned a lot from being limited at institutions because I am often subjected to the mystery that's around, like, “Well, what can she do to my advantage?” I have created more access in my time, as I've completed more projects. But it would be nice, though, if you could come into an institution, either fully based on merit or fully based on what you propose for your research. In reality, it's just really subject to your institution's capacity and then the rapport they really have with you. It is important to know how to navigate being in it—in the institution—and being outside of it.
“I think I deserve to be someone’s mentee just as much as I deserve to be someone’s mentor. ”
What does the future look like for you?
I really want to live in the world that I'm trying to build. I don't want my successes to be in vain. I want, in the future, to not be the only successful person in the room with my focus. And that's what keeps me going. I want to be based in Atlanta, but I do still want to work nationally and internationally. At this point in my career, it’s about finding those common threads between landscapes and figuring out how to center those things in my practice, because I feel like I’ve carved my own lane by fire.
I want to let the work that I'm doing right now in this fellowship lead to me working at a stronger point—not being someone who's starting from the ground floor but someone who fully trusts their network.
I think I deserve to be someone's mentee just as much as I deserve to be someone's mentor.