A decade ago, Latinx art within the US didn’t have as much visibility as it has now. One of the key organizations advocating for this increased prominence in mainstream institutions is the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), founded in 2015 by a group of scholars who wanted to ensure that Latinx artists would not gain not just recognition but canonization too.
Now, USLAF is charting its next steps. At the end of last year, the organization appointed artist, archivist, and curator Josh T. Franco as its next executive director. Franco succeeds founding director, art historian and Tufts University professor Adriana Zavala.
In his role as director, Franco thinks it’s important to take USLAF in a slightly new direction, and he’s already made an important change to the organization, tweaking its mission statement with Mary Thomas, who was promoted to deputy director at the same time as his hiring.
Instead of solely aiming to “advance the vitality of Latinx art through an intergenerational network,” Franco and Thomas are now working on “creat[ing] an expansive and convivial space that fosters relationships” by simply “hanging out in this space,” as their mission statement says. This will lead to “new exhibitions, scholarship, programs and collaborations that advance the field into a dynamic future.” To start, it has begun organizing intimate dinners in cities like New York, San Juan, Chicago, and San Antonio, to connect artists with other USLAF members and potential supporters.
“The new mission statement emphasizes and makes central the idea of hanging out,” Franco said. “The idea is that if USLAF creates spaces—tending to space and place and groupings of people carefully—things will happen organically. It’s grown out of what we’ve seen ourselves.”
A USLAF-organized walkthrough of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always To Return” (2024–25), which Franco cocurated.
Courtesy USLAF
A Decade of Growth
USLAF formed in 2015 shortly after a panel at the annual conference of the College Art Association titled “Imagining a U.S. Latina/o Art History.” It was a lively conversation, Franco told ARTnews in a recent interview, adding, “We were responding to what we heard, primarily about not being visible to one another and not having representation in museums’ permanent collections and exhibitions.”
In the 11 years since its founding, USLAF has published research papers with data it gathered that shows this lack of representation; created a directory for its growing membership, now numbering around 600 individuals; and launched different programs to bring the community together.
Its most visible work, however, might be the Latinx Artist Fellowship program, which ran from 2021 to 2025 and awarded 75 emerging, mid-career, and established artists $50,000 each. The funds came from a $5 million grant from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, which also earmarked money for the publication of scholarly essays on each artist and the appointment of a full-time staff member: Thomas, the current deputy director.
Franco said that the fellowship’s impact has been twofold. Not only has it given visibility to the winning artists, but it has also raised the profile of the field in general through the accompanying writing initiative, “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art.” The essays, organized into 10 different themes like “Unmasking Coloniality” and “Materiality of Memory,” are commissioned via an open call.
“Every year, we see more and more names we don’t recognize,” Franco said. “Ten years ago, we would have recognized everybody who submitted. Now about 90 percent of the names are new to us, so I’d like to think we had a big part in creating that interest.”
Once “X as Intersection” publishes its final collection, USLAF will turn its attention to organizing an ambitious exhibition, featuring the work of all 75 fellows at Tufts University. The organization is also hoping to secure additional venues so that it can tour the country and even internationally.
USLAF’s “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art” presents writing on its 75 artist fellows, organized into different themes, like “Colonial Racial Capitalism.”
Plotting the Next Decade
Franco said he is also working to ensure USLAF’s financial stability, which is often a challenge for most nonprofits, especially small ones like USLAF, which has an annual operating budget of $250,000 (on average over the past decade). To do this, Franco will form USLAF’s first board of directors who will be tasked, in part, with shoring up its reserve funds. In the past, USLAF has had an advisory board whose main focus has been on helping shape its strategic vision.
But under Franco, USLAF is also asking for donations in a somewhat untraditional way.
“I’ve talked with and worked with a lot of executives at big arts funders over the last 10 years in other capacities, and I know that they, like me, are tired of the idea of deliverables,” Franco said, “where you say, here are the bullet points of the things that will happen in three years if you give us X amount of money. It’s stifling—and then it just sets everybody up for disappointment. Great things will happen anyway, but there’s this delusion that if it doesn’t match that bullet-point list you wrote years before, it’s some kind of failure.”
The only deliverable he sees as relevant here is to build a sustained community, which USLAF now has built in via the 75 artists it was given funds to and the 75 scholars, curators, and critics it has commissioned to write about their work.
“I don’t want to be an organization that gives you something one time and then doesn’t help you anymore,” Franco said. “The last five years have made this really beautiful community with direct ties to the organization, and now we can think about how to support within that community and to their own large communities.”
Though the Latinx Artist Fellowship has ended, Franco said USLAF is thinking through new ways to continue to grow its 150-strong community via different funding models, which will be more modest in scale than the $3.75 million it was able to give directly to artists. “We’re not closing the door,” he added.
