The Latinx Project at NYU Opens 5th-Anniversary Exhibitions
#Wild Wild Web3:The Musical, 2022-23 by Michael Menchaca. Image courtesy of the artist.
January 11, 2023
The Latinx Project at NYU will present two exhibitions celebrating its 5th anniversary, Behind the Cloud: Interrogating Digital Technologies and Tinkuy: Converging Ecologies, February 8-May 12 (285 Mercer St., betw. Waverly Pl. and Washington Pl.).
Behind the Cloud curated by Marissa Del Toro and Alex Santana, features 10 multidisciplinary artists: Dennis Delgado, Steffi Faircloth, Liliana Farber, Adán De La Garza, Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez, Bahareh Khoshooee, Michael Menchaca, Dan Paz, Aviva Avnisan, and RaFia Santana. Their works collectively explore our relationships with digital technologies, questioning the role of digital technologies as they permeate our lives. Artificial intelligence, surveillance mechanisms, and communications infrastructures contour the essence of our world and how we experience daily life. Often made invisible, as if they were always naturalized aspects of our existence, these technologies inevitably inform the way we present ourselves, engage with others, and view the world beyond our immediate vicinity. All 10 artists exemplify these notions of technology and encourage us to become agents in action in exploring how relationships to technology are formed and shape how we see and navigate interpersonal interactions with the world and each other.
“This exhibition is an opportunity for all of us to recognize how ubiquitous and pervasive digital technologies have become in our collective and individual lives,” note Del Toro and Santana. “Included artists highlight this relationship but also encourage us to develop responses through varying acts and languages.”
Tinkuy: Converging Ecologies highlights the works of Pachi Muruchu, the Latinx Project’s Artist-in-Residence. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings and collages that converge relationships between the artist’s Kichwa ancestral histories and New York City’s urban and natural ecologies. Each painting is informed by the artist’s connection to plants, people, and political movements, all orienting us toward a more just and action-oriented world. The exhibition, curated by Xavier Robles Armas, provides a bold statement of indigenous urban worldmaking in action.
“Art represents the living subjectivity of a people,” Muruchu observes. “It is meant to guide our interactions with the material world. Cultural objects are our inheritance of the knowledge and relationships our ancestors intimately held. Today it is passed on to us with hands soaked in the soil and grime of our urbanized landscape.”
Both exhibitions are open at 285 Mercer Street, Ground Floor, Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. NYU faculty, students, and administrators may access the exhibition with a valid NYU ID and Violet Go pass. For the general public, please contact the Latinx Project at latinxproject@nyu.edu to reserve access.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Marissa Del Toro is assistant director of exhibitions and programs at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. Since 2021, Del Toro has also worked with Museums Moving Forward as co-director of research and director of communications. Previously, she served as 2021-2022 Curatorial Fellow at NXTHVN and as the 2018-2020 Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative (DAMLI) Curatorial Fellow at Phoenix Art Museum. She holds her MA in Art History from the University of Texas at San Antonio and is originally from Southern California, where she received her BA in Art History from the University of California, Riverside.
Alex Santana is a writer and curator with an interest in conceptual art, political intervention, and public participation. Currently based in New York, she has held research positions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Newcomb Art Museum, and Mana Contemporary. Her interviews and essays have been published by CUE Art Foundation, the Brooklyn Rail, Precog Magazine, Artsy, and the Latinx Project.
Xavier Robles Armas manages the communications, events, and arts programs at the Latinx Project. He is an artist and curator, based in Brooklyn by way of Santa Ana, Calif., with a background in architectural studies and MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research connects notions of migration, culturally specific leisurely practices, affect theory, philosophies of becoming, and Mexican-American literature. He is specifically interested in the role of the cultural institution as a place for porous learning and experimentation in uplifting new narratives in art. He has previously held roles at the Queens Museum, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Southern Exposure.
ABOUT THE LATINX PROJECT AT NYU
The Latinx Project at New York University explores and promotes U.S. Latinx art, culture and scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform to foster critical public programming and for hosting artists and scholars. The Latinx Project is especially committed to examining and highlighting the multitude of Latinx identities as central to developing a more inclusive and equitable vision of Latinx Studies. For more, please visit its website.
For more information, please email: Latinxproject@nyu.edu. Selected images of the artists and of exhibition images are available on Google Drive; for high-resolution images, please contact Xavier Robles Armas at xr2078@nyu.edu.