Join us for a book talk and conversation with Darren Walker and Teresita Fernández, plus additional insights with art historians, curators and artists, including E. Carmen Ramos, Juan Sánchez and Margarita Cabrera.
A Handbook of Latinx Art is the first anthology to explore the rich, deep, and often overlooked contributions that Latinx artists have made to art in the United States. Drawn from wide-ranging sources, this volume includes texts by artists, critics, and scholars from the 1960s to the present, reflecting the diversity of the Latinx experience across the nation.
The anthology features writings by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Central American artists to highlight how diverse immigrant groups negotiate participation and belonging, material, style, and community in their own voices. These intersectional essays cut across region, gender, race, and class to lay out a complex emerging field that reckons with different histories, geographies, and political engagements and, ultimately, underscores the importance of Latinx artists to the history of American art.
Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond to stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19. Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at The Rockefeller Foundation. Previously, he was COO of Harlem’s Abyssinian Development Corporation.
Darren co-founded both the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy. He serves on many boards, including the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, the High Line, the Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Teresita Fernández is an artist who expansively rethinks what constitutes landscape, challenging ideas of visibility, power, colonial history and the poetic intimacies between humans and matter. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a: Guggenheim Fellowship; Creative Capital Award; Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award; American Academy of Rome Fellowship; and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant. Her works have been shown nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art, NY ; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; The Menil Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, among others.
In 2011, she was appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the first Latina to serve on the 100 yr old federal panel. In 2016, she conceived and directed the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium with Ford Foundation.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Ph.D. is an art historian and curator focused on modern and contemporary US Latinx, Caribbean and African-American art. She is also a Senior Program Officer in Creativity and Free Expression at Ford Foundation. Previously, she was Curator at El Museo del Barrio where she organized the museum’s 45th anniversary exhibition, Museum Starter Kit, and two versions of The S-Files/La Bienal, El Museo’s biennial exhibition of emerging artists (now La Trienal), PRESENTE! The Young Lords in New York (2015), and Antonio Lopez: Future, Funk Fashion (2016), among many others.
At Jersey City Museum, she organized solo retrospectives of significant New Jersey artists including Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Unmaking (2006), and Chakaia Booker, Jersey Ride (2005). She has taught at the City College of New York, in the MA program at Hunter College and at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her writing has appeared in various publications including catalog essays for several museums.
Margarita Cabrera received an MFA from Hunter College, City University of NY. She is an associate professor at the Arizona State University. Some of her most recent solo museum exhibitions include the FAC Colorado Springs College, Co; McNayArt Museum, San Antonio; Dallas Contemporary; Art League Houston. Cabrera’s work has been featured at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Barbican Center, London; Denver Museum of Art, Co; Phoenix ArtMuseum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; LACMA; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; The Ford Foundation; Seattle Art Museum; El Museo del Barrio; El Museu Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City.
Cabrera exhibited in “The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place,Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft & Folk Art Museum and SITE LINES: much wider than a line in Santa Fe, NM. Cabrera was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Cabrera was awarded a 2023 Latinx Artist Fellowship.
Deborah Cullen-Morales, Ph.D. is a curator and art historian focused on modern and contemporary Latinx, Caribbean, and African American art and artists. She has served at the Mellon Foundation; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University; El Museo del Barrio; and Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Cullen began working with Blackburn in 1985 and remains involved with EFA RBPMW today.
She wrote her 2002 dissertation on Blackburn; curated the retrospective, Robert Blackburn: Passages (Driskell Center, UMD-College Park 2014) and Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking (SITES, 2020-2022), among others.She founded the Uptown Triennial at Columbia University (2017) and co-founded the S-Files/Bienal (now Trienal) at El Museo del Barrio (1999). She curated Interruption: The 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, 2013) and was chief curator of El Panal/The Hive: The Third Polygraphic Trienal of San Juan (2012).
E. Carmen Ramos, Ph.D. is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Previously, Ramos was acting Chief Curator and Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). During her tenure at SAAM, Ramos expanded the museum's collection of Latinx art, challenging the exclusion of Latinx art from US art history and capturing the broad aesthetic and regional range of the field. She curated major exhibitions, including Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography (2017), and Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013).
Ramos's latest exhibition, ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (2021), considers the remarkable history of Chicano graphics. Ramos holds a PhD and MA in art history from the University of Chicago (Illinois) and a BA in art history and psychology from New York University (New York).
Juan Sánchez is one of the most significant Nuyorican artists of our time. Born in Brooklyn, Sánchez has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America, and North Africa. Sánchez showed with alternative artist collectives including Group Material, Fashion Moda, and ABC No Rio. His work is in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery; El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico; El Centro Wilfredo Lam in Havana, Cuba. Sánchez received the 2022 Artist Legacy Foundation Award and 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship.
In 2020, he was honored with the CUAA Augustus Saint Gauden Achievement in Visual Art award. He has received awards and fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the NEA. Juan Sánchez is Professor of Art at Hunter College. A forthcoming survey of the artist’s work will be shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, 2027.
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