Spring Exhibitions: Closing & Open House
Join us for a final open house marking the close of our spring exhibitions Re-collections and Histories We Carry. Light refreshments and sweets will be provided.
Supporters
Re-collections and Histories We Carry are made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the New York University Office of the Provost.
Re-collections: Artist Panel (Virtual)
Save the date for a virtual artist panel on May 2, 2024, with featured artists and the curator of the exhibition Re-collections. Featuring works by nine artists, the exhibition asks questions about museum collections, cultural extraction, Eurocentric archaeology, biased museology, and anthropology. It is on view from February 9 through May 10, 2024 at 20 Cooper Square, 4th floor.
Event Recap
Supporters
Re-collections is made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the New York University Office of the Provost.
Deadline: Public Humanities and Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship
The deadline for these spring opportunities is Tuesday, April 30th, 2024. Learn more here.
Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship
The Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship supports post-doctoral candidates and junior scholars whose research advances the study of Afro-Latinx communities in the U.S. Applications open March 14th, 2024. Click here to access fellowship details.
Public Humanities Fellowship
TLP’s Public Humanities Fellowship will offer up to 10 graduate students at NYU and the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium the opportunity to gain career-building experience with local arts and culture organizations. Applications open March 16th, 2024. Click here to access fellowship details.
Latinx Voters and the 2024 Presidential Election
Join the Latinx Politics Working Group for an in-person panel with Latinx politics experts to discuss the importance of the 2024 presidential election for Latinx communities and the role of Latinx voters in the election.
Presenters include Yalidy Matos (Rutgers University), Yamil Velez (Columbia University), and Cristina Beltrán (NYU) organized and moderated by Domingo Morel (NYU Wagner)
About the Participants
Yalidy Matos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She earned her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and her B.A. degree from Connecticut College in New London, CT. Originally from Dominican Republic, Yalidy is a 1.5 generation immigrant and first-generation scholar. Matos’ scholarly work examines the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender and public opinion and political behavior. By drawing on theoretical frameworks from various disciplines, she uses a mixed methods approach to understand the racialized nature of U.S. immigration policies as well as other politically consequential public and social policies. Professor Matos examines the political behavior of different racial and ethnic groups in relation to identity politics.
Yamil Velez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at Stony Brook University and holds B.A.s in Political Science and Psychology from Florida State University. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection between racial and ethnic politics, political psychology, and political geography, with a focus on immigration. Prior to coming to Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at George Washington University and Wesleyan University.
Cristina Beltrán is an Associate Professor in the department of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. A political theorist by training, her research focuses on modern and contemporary political theory, Latino and U.S. ethnic/racial politics, and feminist and queer theory. She is author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Along with Libby Anker, she is also co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.
Domingo Morel is an Associate Professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and holds a joint appointment in NYU's Wilf Family Department of Politics. His research focuses on racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, education politics and public policy. He is the author of Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (2018, Oxford University Press), which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award. He is also co-editor of Latino Mayors: Power and Political Change in the Postindustrial City (2018, Temple University Press).
Deadline: Open Call for Artists
Artist in Residence
The Open Call for the 2024-2025 Artist in Residence will open in March 2024. The deadline is Monday, April 15, 2024. Pictured above is our fall 2023 artist-in-residence exhibition Allow Me to Gather Myself featuring works by Mildred Beltré. Click here to access AIR details.
Curatorial Open Call
Pitches for Curatorial Projects are welcomed on a rolling basis. Please email a one page description of your idea, along with your CV to: latinxproject@nyu.edu with the heading: “Curatorial pitch” .
Pictured above is our fall 2023 artist-in-residence exhibition Allow Me to Gather Myself featuring works by Mildred Beltré.
Image Credit: Argenis Apolinario
“At the Edge of Each Other's Battles”: Puerto Rican, Palestinian, Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures
Join the virtual symposium, “At the Edge of Each Other's Battles”: Puerto Rican, Palestinian, Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures hosted by the Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute, Palestinian Feminist Collective, Diaspora Solidarities Lab, The Latinx Project, and CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.
This symposium uses the words of poet Audre Lorde to bring together scholars, experts, and community activists to examine the impact of colonization, displacement, and oppression while seeking to foster deeper understanding, empathy, and solidarity on a collective journey towards liberation.
Attendance is free and will include simultaneous translation.
Queer and Trans Afro-Latinx Voices (Virtual)
Join us for an online panel celebrating the publication of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer & Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent. The volume centers on the writing, visual, and graphic art of 44 contemporary writers across Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. Joining us are five NYC-based Afro-Latinx contributors: Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera, Irene Vázquez, Armando Alleyne, Edgie Amisial, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. They'll be accompanied by editor, Alan Pelaez Lopez, a 2022-2023 Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow.
Please RSVP here
About the Book
When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community. Learn more here.
Event Recap
Panelists
Armando Alleyne is an artist and a poet. He grew up in Lower Manhattan and graduated from the City College of New York with a BA in education and fine arts in 1983. Alleyne’s painted and collaged renditions of jazz musicians, Afro-Latin singers, boxers, and also family members and friends have a rhythm all their own. Parallel to his practice of painting portraits of Black icons, he allows elements of his lived experience to take form in his work. Never shying away from the seminal, the sensual, or the political, Alleyne’s lifetime of paintings tell a story of how we are subject to our city and how in it we can search for the tools to heal. In 2021, Alleyne’s first monograph, A Few of My Favorites, was published by Edition Patrick Frey. Alleyne lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Edgie Amisial is a queer Haitian American writer and visual artist. She was born in Florida, United States, and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Growing up, storytelling helped her navigate her questions about her identity, her ancestry, and her world. She often wrote stories inspired by people she encountered in her daily life—people who she believed deserved to be remembered. After moving from Haiti to the United States at the age of eleven, she used painting and writing as tools to heal from intergenerational trauma, release fears of not belonging, and to embrace her repressed sexuality.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American performer and writer and the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern Press, 2021). He is the recipient of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poem “Praise Song for My Mutilated World” won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. His writing has been published in English, Spanish, and French in literary journals, anthologies, and other books worldwide and online. He also writes for the stage and screen. Most of his writing centers on love, family, race, immigration, and joy. He works as a college professor in New York City.
Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera is a Dominican American writer and educator based in Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from the HUES Foundation and Sundress Academy for the Arts, and was the inaugural writer in residence at Velvet Park Media. A Tin House and VONA alum, her words can be found online at Barrelhouse, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Liminal Transit Review. Her chapbook Little, Little, Little, Big, Big, Big is available from the Hellebore Press, and she is hard at work on her novel.
Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, translator, and editor, originally from Houston, Texas, the unceded territory of the Karankawa and Ishak peoples. They write at the intersection of Black cultural work, placemaking, and the environment. Irene's debut chapbook, Take Me To the Water, was released by Bloof Books in 2022. Irene is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer, whose work can be found in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. When not writing, Irene likes drinking coffee, watching the WNBA, and reminding folks that the South has something to say.
Spring Celebration & Fundraiser + Auction
Join us for our Spring Celebration & Fundraiser to celebrate and advance our work uplifting Latinx art, culture, and creativity on April 3, 2024 from 6:00-9:00pm at Taj Lounge (48 W 21st Street). Now that we're a provostial center, our next key goal is securing our distinguishing programs to ensure their sustainability into the future.
6:00pm Cocktail Reception
7:00pm Honoree Ceremony & Dancing
Festive Attire
Celebrating Honorees Juana Valdés & Tomás Ybarra-Frausto
Music by DJ Dada Cozmic, Poetry by Denice Frohman, Awards designed by Danielle De Jesus
Host Committee
Dulcina Abreu, Elia Alba, Nicole Calderón, Cecilia Jurado Chueca, Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Gisela Colón, Elizabeth Méndez Berry, Carmen Rita Wong, Patricia Ruiz-Healy, Edra Soto, & Karen Vidangos
Friends & Patrons
Anonymous, Elia Alba, Gisela Colón, Francisco Esteva, Marysol Nieves, Ouathek Ouerfelli, Carmen Rita Wong, Gladys Rodriguez & Gabriel Magraner, Patricia Ruiz-Healy & Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation at NYU
Tickets
Artists, Cultural Workers & Students: $75
General Admission: $150
Sponsorship Opportunities
Support our arts programs by registering for this event through a tax-deductible contribution at the Friend ($500) or Patron ($1000+) level.
Friend and Patron benefits include two tickets to the celebration and a behind-the-scenes tour and reception of our upcoming spring exhibitions. Patrons and Friends will be acknowledged in the program and promotional materials.
All contributions directly support our arts and culture programs:
Artist in Residence program invites artists to participate in the NYU community and receive support to create a solo exhibition
Curatorial Open Call for exhibitions that explore issues of relevance to our evolving community
The Miriam Jiménez Román Afro Latinx Fellowship for scholars whose research advances the study of Afro-Latinx communities
Public Humanities Fellowship offers NYC-area graduate students the opportunity to gain career-building experience with local arts and culture organizations
Intervenxions, an online publication featuring original writings, criticism, and interviews
To learn more about opportunities for sponsorship or major gifts, please email latinxproject@nyu.edu.
Calling to the Ancestors: Garifuna Women as Embodied Archives
In honor of Garifuna Heritage Month (March 11-April 12), join us for an afternoon with Garifuna Scholar and Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow Dr. Daisy E. Guzman Nunez, Luz F. Soliz Ramos and Catherine Ochun. Together, through performance, conversation, and food, they recreate the Garifuna interior as an intergenerational, matrilineal space that calls to the ancestors.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Please RSVP here
Participants
Daisy E. Guzman Nunez is a Garifuna American from the South Bronx. Her work centers on the migratory experience of Garifuna-Guatemalan women from Livingston, Guatemala, to the South Bronx. Through a Black Feminist Ethnographic lens, she bears witness to ancestral praxis and ancestral knowledge embedded in the cultural performativity of Garifuna women and their matrilineal networks. Her research praxis and pedagogy lean on the Intellectual contributions of Black women such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Mayra Santos, and M. Jacqui Alexander to discuss the connection between the body, land, and the ancestors in everyday theory and intellectualism. There is an intimacy in creating cultural spaces in the urban landscape. The Garifuna hub in the South Bronx is not a novelty but an extension of the Caribbean Space to include the Afro-Indigenous experience. Her interdisciplinary work centers women's voices to challenge how we articulate Blackness and Indigeneity in Black Studies, Anthropology, and Latinx Studies. When she is not working on her research, she is a board member of La Fuerza Garifuna and a curriculum consultant with a community-engaged focus.
Luz Soliz-Ramos is the founder of the Bronx-based Garifuna Heritage Center for the Arts and Culture and Co-Choreographer & Artistic Director of the Wabafu Garifuna Dance Theater, which was established as the Hamalali Wayunagu Garifuna Dance Company in 1992. She was inspired by her teachers, including Lee Aca Thompson and Lavinia WilliamsYarborough, and her friend, Manuela Sabio, founder of the Wanichigu Garifuna Dance Company. Soliz-Ramos studied dance and drama at Bard College and now teaches at Boricua College. She has also taught for over a decade in New York City public schools. She holds a Master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also the author of a language book, Learn Garifuna Now! For information on Wabafu Garifuna Dance Theater, visit: facebook.com/wabafudance.
Catherine Ochún Soliz-Rey is assistant director of Wabafu Garifuna Dance Theater. When she is not fulfilling her mission as a women empowerment thought leader in her business, she is choreographing and dancing for the dance company as well as creatively directing educational cultural events and experiences. Soliz-Rey has a wide background in dance, having learned with Lee Aca Thompson, Forces of Nature Dance Academy, Creative Outlet Dance Intensive, and of course her mother, Luz Soliz-Ramos. Born and raised in the Bronx, NY, Soliz-Rey has made the extra effort to stay sharp in her culture and pass on that passion to others. Soliz-Rey has a B.S. degree in Marketing from St. John’s University and infuses her knowledge for business and the arts to further awareness of the culture.
Event Recap
Latinx Film Showcase
The Latinx Project at NYU and Cinema Tropical are partnering to present an exclusive one-day film series celebrating the work of US Latinx filmmakers. The Latinx Film Showcase will screen three recent films, all of which were nominated at the 14th edition of the Cinema Tropical Awards. The event will also include talkback sessions with some of the featured directors. The film selection includes You Were My First Boyfriend by acclaimed director Cecilia Aldarondo (Landfall); El Equipo, the latest documentary by two-time Emmy-nominated director Bernardo Ruiz; and Aristotle Torres’ powerful debut feature Story Ave, winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best US Latinx Film of the Year, starring the exceptional Puerto Rican actor Luis Guzmán.
Additional sponsorship for this event is provided by the Center for Research & Study at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Schedule & RSVP
Please RSVP for each film individually by clicking the links below. Seating is first-come, first-served.
12:00pm | Film: You Were My First Boyfriend
2:30pm | Film: El Equipo, followed by Q&A with director Bernardo Ruiz
4:30pm | Film: Story Ave, followed by Q&A with director Aristotle Torres
About the Films
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(Cecilia Aldarondo, USA, 2023, 97 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
What if you could rewrite your adolescence? In this high school reunion movie turned inside out, filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo embarks on a fantastical quest to reconcile her tortured teen years. She ‘goes back’ in more ways than one, tracking down old foes and friends while also reenacting visceral memories of youthful humiliation and desire. Oscillating between present and past, hallucination and reality, You Were My First Boyfriend is a hybrid documentary that explores the power of adolescent fantasy, the subtle violence of cultural assimilation, and the fun house mirror of time’s passage. Perhaps we will all learn something about growing older and making peace with what haunts us.
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(Bernardo Ruiz, USA, 2023, 80 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
Working with a trove of archival materials spanning four decades and unfolding as part procedural, part true crime thriller, El Equipo chronicles the history-making collaboration between Dr. Clyde Snow, a legendary forensic scientist originally from Texas, and a group of Argentine university students, who were dubbed “unlikely forensic sleuths” by The New York Times. With an unprecedented access to the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and its archives, the fifth feature film by two-time Emmy nominated director Bernardo Ruiz offers a welcome twist to the traditional true crime film by focusing on systemic political and human rights abuses rather than on one-off tales of murder or lone serial killers, and deftly creates a direct link between state atrocities from the past and present.
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(Aristotle Torres, USA, 2023, 106 min. In English)
South Bronx teen Kadir is a gifted visual artist who loses his way following the death of his younger brother. Overcome with grief and struggling with the pressures of school and family, he escapes into the thrilling yet dangerous world of graffiti gangs, seeking an outlet for the creative force threatening to explode out of him. To prove himself and join his neighborhood’s ruling gang, Kadir tries to rob no-nonsense MTA conductor Luis on the Story Ave subway platform. He is caught off guard when Luis agrees to give Kadir the cash if he’ll sit down to a meal with him. Following their conversation and the delicate, transformative friendship that grows out of it, Kadir sees for the first time how his artistic talent could lead to a better life.
Winner of Cinema Tropical Award for Best US Latinx Film and the Best Cinematography prize at SXSW, this moving and authentic portrait of the South Bronx announces an exciting new cinematic voice in Aristotle Torres and offers a welcome showcase for beloved character actor Guzman and rising star Blackk, alongside a supporting cast of up-and-comers including Alex R. Hibbert, Cassandra Freeman, Coral Peña, and Melvin Gregg.
“Not One Without the Other:” A Reading and Conversation on Creativity and Community
How can the work writers do contribute to building sustainable and inclusive futures for our communities? How can the work of leading community organizations contribute to creative work? And how can the arts serve as a tool of empowerment, liberation, and solidarity? Literary organizations like Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Kundiman, Indigenous Nations Poets, Fire & Ink, Mizna, and Radius of Arab American Writers, were convened with the goal of creating spaces for marginalized writers to develop their craft and find community and connection with one another. On the occasion of Kundiman’s 20th anniversary, join us for this reading and conversation hosted by Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, featuring George Abraham (executive editor of Mizna and Kundiman Fellow), Samiya Bashir (founding organizer of Fire & Ink and Cave Canem Fellow), Kim Blaeser (founding executive director of Indigenous Nations Poets), Cathy Linh Che (executive director of Kundiman), Deborah Paredez (co-founder of CantoMundo), and Glenn Shaheen (president and executive director of the Radius of Arab American Writers) as they read from their work and discuss what it means to lead, create, and write, centering the idea “not one without the other.”
This program is co-presented by Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Kundiman. Additional sponsorship is provided by The Latinx Project. Curated by Cathy Linh Che.
RSVP & learn more: https://apa.nyu.edu/event/not-one-without-the-other-a-reading-and-conversation-on-creativity-and-community/
Curls, Coils, and Waves: The Afro-Latina Experience
Hosted by the NYU Latinx Alumni Network, join this panel conversation on Afro-Latinindad and an exclusive sizzle reel preview screening of I’m Not My Hair, a documentary by Cynthia Bastidas chronicling the natural hair journey of an Afro-Latina woman, Cristina Garcia de Leon, and the various ways anti-Blackness manifests itself in the everyday life of Afro-descendant women.
The short screening and discussion will be the starting point for a panel discussion with Afro-Latina women professionals, scholars and artists. They will be discussing their work and personal experiences with the topic and their own relationship with their identities. The event will conclude with a reception. This event is co-sponsored by The Latinx Project.
Panelists include:
Tanya K. Hernandez, Professor at Fordham University School of Law, Author of Racial Innocence
Leiry Santos, Assistant Director of the Center for Multicultural Education and Programs at NYU
Sulma Arzu-Brown, Author, Scholastic Mentor, Owner of Sulma LLC
Griselle Baret (Moderator), Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection
Please RSVP here
About the NYU Latinx Alumni Network
NYU LAN connects alumni, who identify within the Latin American and Hispanic communities, to both NYU and one another through various social, cultural, educational, and community service events in the New York City area and beyond.
Histories We Carry: Diasporican Artists in Conversation
Join us for a conversation between artist-in-residence Estelle Maisonett and artists Juan Sánchez and Shellyne Rodriguez. This conversation will be moderated by the exhibition’s curator Johanna Fernández. The panel will be followed by a reception.
Please RSVP Here
About the Participants:
Estelle Maisonett is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in the Bronx, New York. Her work is an investigation of how personal and socio-cultural relationships to objects and materials inform preconceived notions of identity. With a practice comprising photography, printmaking, sculpture painting, installation and video, Maisonett’s life-size collages explore how Latinx identity has historically been composited by fragments of cultures locally and abroad. Maisonett received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 2023 and her BFA from SUNY Purchase College in 2013.
Born to working-class Puerto Rican immigrants in Brooklyn, NY, Juan Sánchez is an influential American visual artist, and one of the most important Nuyorican cultural figures of the latter 20th century. Maintaining an activist stance for over forty-five years, his art is an arena of creative and political inquiry that encompasses the individual, family, the communities with which he engages, and the world at large. Sánchez has produced an extensive body of work that consistently addresses issues that are as relevant now as they were in the 1980s – race and class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. He emerged as a central figure in a generation of artists using diverse media to explore ethnic, racial, national identity and social justice in 1980s and ’90s. Sánchez exhibited and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.
Johanna Fernández is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, February 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. She teaches 20th Century US history and the history of social movements. Dr. Fernández’s recent research and litigation has unearthed an arsenal of primary documents now available to scholars and members of the public. She directed and co-curated ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three NYC museums cited by the New York Times as one of the year’s Top 10, Best In Art.
Supporters
The Spring 2024 Artist-in-Residence exhibition is made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the New York University Office of the Provost.
Event Recap
Spring Exhibitions: Opening Reception
UPDATE: Tickets on Eventbrite are sold out. Limited entry will be available at the door pending venue capacity.
The Latinx Project is thrilled to announce the opening and reception for our two spring 2024 exhibitions on Friday, February 9 from 6:00-8:00pm at 20 Cooper Square: Re-collections and Histories We Carry.
The first-floor gallery will host Re-collections curated by Caracas-born and Miami-based curator Daniel Arturo Almeida: the exhibition addresses cultural extraction, Eurocentric archaeology, and anthropology. Learn more about the exhibition in our interview with the curator.
The fourth-floor gallery will host Histories We Carry by artist-in-residence Estelle Maisonett curated by Johanna Fernandez. The Bronx-born artist’s life-size collages explore New York City, architecture, nonverbal and body language. Learn more about Maisonett in our Q&A.
Supporters
These exhibitions are made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the New York University Office of the Provost.