Join the American Federation of Arts in partnership with The Latinx Project for a unique program with Tamara Santibañez and José Villalobos, artists who both address the body as a tool through which to challenge stereotypical and marginalized constructions of Chicanx identities. Their conversation with curator Marissa Del Toro will focus on their work while more broadly addressing how Chicanx artistic practices can foreground the brown body as a site of political resistance against Western hegemonic canons. The event will shed light on the multiple ways in which Chicanx artists’ self-representation affirms the uniqueness of their identities and claims their distinctive and integral role among contemporary artistic practices.
This conversation is presented in conjunction with Xican-a.o.x. Body, an upcoming AFA exhibition co-curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill with Marissa Del Toro and Gilbert Vicario. Featuring more than 125 works of art by approximately 70 artists and art collectives, the exhibition explores the conceptual and experimental nature of visual practices that focus on the body—both individual and collective—as the site in which imagination and political enunciation are articulated. The traveling exhibition will debut on June 17, 2023 at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA.
The conversation will be held in person and streamed live online; instructions on how to join online will be sent in advance of the talk. For more information, contact events@amfedarts.org.
Participants
Marissa Del Toro (she/her) 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.
Tamara Santibañez (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. Their work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics and the meanings we make from bodily adornment. They approach the body as a site for archiving and accessing personal and collective narratives and view tattooing as a political intervention. As a queer and trans artist, their practice memorializes the language and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build alternative worlds.
José Villalobos (he/him) grew up in El Paso, TX, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His work centers around self-identity as he examines gender roles within the family and dismantles traditional modes of masculinity, demonstrating the battle between the acceptance of being gay and assimilating to both American and Mexican cultural expectations. Villalobos' work has been recognized internationally and he is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant Award and Residency and the Tanne Foundation Award.