Juana Valdés and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto selected as 2024 Honorees of TLP's Spring Celebration
Juana Valdés
Image still of Tomás Ybarra-Frausto from “Nuestras Historias: Tomás Ybarra-Frausto” produced by NALAC in 2020 with TÁPI Story.
The Latinx Project: Interdisciplinary Center for Arts and Culture announces the selection of artist Juana Valdés and scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as Honorees. Valdés and Ybarra-Frausto will be recognized at The Latinx Project’s Spring Celebration on April 3, 2024 in New York City. The celebration and fundraiser is open to the public and supports the sustainability of The Latinx Project’s programs in arts and culture. Tickets are available through this link.
Born in Cuba and working between Amherst, Miami, and New York City, Juana Valdés is a multidisciplinary Afro Latinx artist whose thirty-year career explores experiences of migration and issues of race, gender and labor. Her retrospective exhibition Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories is on view through February 11, 2024 at the Sarasota Museum of Art and showcases works in both traditional and non-traditional media, including ceramics and new media. Valdés is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Art. She received a 2022 Latinx Artist Fellowship administered by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum in collaboration with the New York Foundation of the Arts.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is a scholar and curator in Chicanx art history based in San Antonio, Texas. Ybarra-Frausto is known for his foundational essay Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility which theorized the incorporation of popular cultural expressions in Chicano art and culture. His research materials from 1965-2004 are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Ybarra-Frausto was an associate director for creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City and previously served as a faculty member at Stanford University, UC San Diego and the University of Washington. A portrait of Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and his late partner Dudley Brooks, taken by photographer Al Rendon, was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 2020.
Valdés and Ybarra-Frausto will be presented with awards designed by artist Danielle De Jesus. A painter and photographer, Bushwick-born De Jesus’ work centers the neighborhood residents she grew up with and the impacts of gentrification and displacement in her community.
This year’s honorees join the inaugural cohort selected as part of The Latinx Project’s fifth-year anniversary. In 2023, the center recognized the Black Latinas Know Collective, Lorgia Garcia Peña, Shellyne Rodriguez, Amalia Mesa Bains, and E. Carmen Ramos. Last year’s awards were designed by artists Yvette Mayorga and Wanda Raimundi.
Click here to learn more and register for The Latinx Project’s Spring Celebration and Fundraiser.