US Latinx art is a living history marked by activism and absent of neat art historical boundaries. With stakeholders that comprise the most ethnically and racially diverse demographic in the nation, it is also a contested field—one that arguably began before the establishment of the United States and extends beyond its borders; and one marked by the ongoing legacy of migration between the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This makes the US in front of Latinx a descriptor to be challenged even more than its ending with x, which garners disproportionate criticism that is divisive and distracting. The x in Latinx is a political refusal to be boxed in and a placeholder for our plurality. US Latinx art is necessary and critical to our story as Americans—those with and without citizenship, who are a majority working class, and some of whom remain colonized by the nation-state.
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Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by José Esteban Muñoz
Image Credit: University of Minnesota Press. José Esteban Muñoz was a theorist and writer who centered the art of queers of color. His first book, Disidentifications, examines the sometimes humorous and always poignant critiques against homophobia and racism by such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carmelita Tropicana, Pedro Zamora, and Vaginal Davis, and how they strategically transformed stereotypes and normative identities into strategies for resistance and community formation. Completing Muñoz’s trifecta of monographs are Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009), which explores queerness as “an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world,” and The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020), which argues for an expansive understanding of Brownness—a Brownness that encompasses the Latinx experience and much more. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries, the three books are essential reads that continue to influence and shape both the academic and art worlds.
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Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985
This catalog archives a landmark exhibition of work by more than 180 Chicana/o artists that has become foundational for the field. It also marks the years university faculty, students, and staff spent advocating for the exhibition and the national coalition it took to share the artwork with audiences in 10 US cities. The catalog includes essays by key scholars in the field: Shifra Goldman, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Holly Barnet-Sanchez among others. Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (University of Texas Press, 1998) provides an excellent analysis of the exhibition and its impact.
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Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art edited by E. Carmen Ramos
Image Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum Before earning her role as the chief curatorial and conservation officer for the National Gallery of Art, E. Carmen Ramos began her career in the nation’s capital as the curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where she dramatically expanded the collection. Our America represents Ramos’s exhibition of the collection, which included 72 artists and traveled the nation between 2014 and 2016. Notoriously, Philip Kennicott panned the show, describing Latinx art as a “meaningless category” in a review for the Washington Post.He later debated with artist Alex Rivera, who skillfully took the critic to task for failing to discuss the exhibition of art, and instead “attack[ing] the fundamental gesture” of such a show and dismissing the entire field—a tired cliché seen repeatedly in reviews of minoritarian artists’ works. Our America includes 64 essays about the artists and collectives featured in the exhibition; in chapters by Ramos and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, they contend head-on with the plurality of Latinidad, the historical exclusion of Latinx art from the American art canon, and the assertion that the people and their art are integral to the national context.
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No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria edited by Marcela Guerrero
Image Credit: Whitney Museum of American Art On September 20, 2017, the category 4 storm Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, leading to the deaths of 4,645 people and exacerbating the devastating effects of US colonialism. By 2022, the island continued to experience rolling blackouts, and public services and livelihoods remained decimated not just by the hurricane’s aftermath—but as well by the austerities imposed by the federal law PROMESA, enacted in 2016, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. No existe un mundo poshuracán showcased the work of 20 artists, among them Candida Alvarez, Miguel Luciano, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Gamaliel Rodríguez, and Edra Soto, who responded directly to the impact of these devastating events. The catalog complements the moving and stunning exhibition with essays, remembrances, and poetry by curators, scholars, artists, and activists.
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Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory by Tatiana Reinoza
Image Credit: University of Texas Press In her first monograph, Reinoza examines the printmaking practices of Latinx artists who critically engage the medium’s use in the colonization of the Americas and liberate it for Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant peoples. Closely reading works by Enrique Chagoya, Pepe Coronado, Ricardo Duffy, Sandra Fernández, Scherezade García, and Luanda Lozano, Reinoza examines the disparate pan-ethnic and cross-racial histories, politics, and affiliations that inform the works, including their production, form, and subject matter. Furthermore, she questions claims of decoloniality by exploring the contentious legacy of Latinidad to Indigeneity and Blackness, stating that “the end of external colonialism signaled the beginning of an internal colonialism” that would persist in disempowering those subjects in Latin America and the US. Reclaiming the Americas traces the importance of printmaking within Latinx art and the critical role Latinx artists play in shaping the medium.
