SITUATING THE NETWORKS
Of Latinx art
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ABOUT
“Situating the Networks of Latinx Art” working group is a cross-institutional, cross-regional, cross-generational, and interdisciplinary group of scholars (professors and graduate students) who have come together over the span of two years to discuss and research Latinx art networks.
Our varied specialties–encompassing the Central American diaspora, the Mexican American and Chicanx experience, and Caribbean Americanness—complement one another and allow us to expand place-based understandings of Latinx art by putting each other in conversation. Yet geography does not delimit our research interests or our understandings of Latinx art. Our research is guided by issues of migration, movement, belonging, racial and ethnic formation, gender, labor, the construction of space, materiality, and showcasing the direct or indirect exchanges threaded through Latinx art histories.
We believe recognizing various modes of solidarity, collaboration, activism, and community-making across geographies, generations, and identities reveals overlooked sites, moments, and narratives central to Latinx art histories. Specifically, we seek to center the practices of feminist, Black, Indigenous, and Queer creatives in the struggle for social justice, often overlooked in grand narratives.
In the spirit of ‘networks of solidarity,’ we are convening this event to think and learn collectively—as artists, activists, students, and professors—to identify ongoing and new ways of cross-regional and cross-generational solidarity and collaboration in times of social unrest, and to recognize these practices as essential to unfolding Latinx art histories and artistic practices. We are calling this an “anti-symposium” because we aim to decenter the traditional, academic, and formalist practice of institutional knowledge-making and sharing, and instead center “charlas” as work-in progress dialogues, encounters, and creative community-building.
The symposium takes place in collaboration with University of California, Irvine, which is the home base of our working group, as well as University of New Mexico and City University of New York.
Sponsored by:
Project and event is supported by the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative based at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Crossing Latinidades is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Guest Bios
Caleb Duarte
born 1977, migrated with his family from Northern Mexico to the farm working communities of the Central Valley in California. He began to paint at an early age and continued his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a master's degree in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Duarte is best known for creating temporary installations using construction type frameworks such as beds of dirt, cement, and objects suggesting basic shelter. His installations within institutional settings become sights for performance as interpretations of his community collaborations. He has exhibited and created public works and community performances at the World Social Forum in Mumbai India, Cuba, Honduras, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and throughout Mexico and the United States.
His work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Art LTD magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, SPARK public television, and many others. He has collaborated with autonomous indigenous Zapatista collectives, communities in movement, and working children and refugees. Duarte has lectured on his work at the Deyoung Museum, THe Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA night of ideas in San Francisco, as well as at the University of New Mexico, Creative Time in New York, the Black Panther 50th anniversary in Oakland and Seattle and amongst others. Duarte is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee where he is establishing nomadic art studios with the project “Walking the Beast”.
Duarte is co-founder, along with artist MIa Eve Rollow, of EDELO, a Spanish acronym for (Where the United Nations Used To BE). EDELO was a house of art in movement and an international artist residency of diverse practices in San Cristobal De Las Casas, Chiapas, México. The project challenged the traditional artist residency and art spaces in that it placed residents alongside rural autonomous communities that have been using performance, theater, poetry, and a rich visual culture to demand drastic social, political, and economic change. The space invited collaborators to live and create within a period of time. Residents were from PHDs to jugglers, contemporary artists, activists, educators, rural farmers, and autonomous community members.
He is lead organizer of the ZAPANTERA NEGRA project, in collaboration with Rigo 23, Mia Eve Rollow, Saul Jack, Lorena Rodriguez, and artist and once Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party Emory Douglas. Zapantera Negra united Zapatistas (EZLN) with Black Panther Party esthetics to investigate the use of the body and visual culture in both distinct political and artistic movements by facilitating encounters, workshops, mural events, and residencies in Zapatista territories. THe Zapantera project has been traveling to Monteral Canada, Sao Paolo Brazil, Viena Astira, Havana Cuba, Madrid Spain, Berkeley CA, Uruguay, and is currently on view in Santiago de CHile in El Museo De la Memoria.
In 2023, Duarte was appointed to serve as a California Arts Council member by Governor Newsum. He is professor of sculpture at Fresno City College where he has his studio and is currently artist in residence at UC Santa Cruz Institute for Art and science Visualising Abolition.
Celea Guevara
is a talented artist- born and raised in Honduras. She emigrated from her native country in 2006, after which her dedication and love for the arts became a priority. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Houston, 2017 and her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Houston Baptist University in 2019. Her work is inspired by the human condition and the continued whisperings of her Garifuna heritage, the essence of which she strives to capture through life size drawings, paintings and printmaking. Most recently, in 2022, Guevara's work was included in the New York Latin American Art Triennial exhibition, "ABYA YALA".
Dulcina Abreu
is a Dominican-born independent curator, artist, and museum advocate focused on Latinx and Latin-American art and queer aesthetics. She explores movement as a/the medium. Her expertise is in research-based art and contemporary photography. Abreu investigates diasporic experience and its ever-evolving vast imagination. She has worked for National Museum of the American Latino (2022) and The National Museum of American History (2021). Additionally, she is a curatorial open call award winner and curator in residence for the Latinx Project at NYU.
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman
(b. 1993, New York) received her BA in Studio Art from Bard College and her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art. Through a practice of thematic diversity free from any material dependency, Bermúdez-Silverman has crafted exhibitions at the Californian African American Museum, the University of Texas at Austin and Project Row Houses in Houston that explore the pillars of identity and history, singling her out as one of the most dynamic artists of her generation. She has a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes assemblage, sculpture and videography to interrogate economic, racial, religious and gendered systems of power. Her relationship to materials is born from an involved and expansive research process, articulating the narrative history of contributing components both organic and synthetic. While much of her work draws on personal experiences, her objects also gesture more broadly to ideas of mutability and decay, gathering a myriad of associations to pose identity as a multifaceted, fluid notion.
Tahnee Udero
Tahnee is a multimedia artist and experimental music performer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With a diverse background in radio, event organizing, and sound art, Tahnee's artistic journey is a progression of creative pursuits. Her creations weave elements of noise, curanderismo, and cultural activism, garnering critical acclaim, including features in The Wire Magazine, The Village Voice, and Magnet Magazine.
Beyond her musical endeavors, her vision expands to writing, archiving, and engaging in interdisciplinary arts. Tahnee's artistry focuses on experimentalism and innovation with secondhand materials. Her work not only invites audiences to explore new sonic landscapes and perspectives but also empowers others to push the boundaries of their own creativity.
Tanya Desdunes
a Haitian-American and African- American living in Miami, Florida since 2014, has worked with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. since 2018 in multiple capacities. Desdunes holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in History from St. John’s University. She joined DVCAI as the Executive Director in July 2021 and is excited to uphold artistic representation and cultural preservation of the Caribbean and Latin Diaspora arts community in South Florida.
Tatiana Reinoza
is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame and a past member of the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She is a recognized specialist within the field of Latinx art. Her work centers on reproductive technologies, such as printmaking and photography, and how these are deployed to create self-representational narratives. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. Her writing has appeared in the Archives of American Art Journal, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as edited volumes and exhibition catalogues such as ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. Her first book, Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory (2023) was published by the University of Texas Press and was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award (CAA) in 2024. Along with Karen Mary Davalos, she co-edited the University of California Press anthology Self Help Graphics at Fifty (2023) which commemorates the golden anniversary of this East LA arts institution. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and earned awards from the Association of Print Scholars, the College Art Association, and the Latin American Studies Association. She is currently at work on a new book project titled Retorno: Art & Kinship in the Making of a Central American Diaspora.
Yreina D. Cervántez
a Chicana artist, was born in 1952 in Garden City, Kansas, but grew up near San Diego, CA. She is an American painter, printmaker, muralist, and teacher. Yreina received her B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and later went on to earn her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989. She is also currently the multicultural coordinator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Yreina’s other areas of main interest are visual arts, Chicana/o Art, and Xicana feminist art and aesthetics. She is particularly known for her various self-portraits of Chicana identity, as well as murals that depict struggles within the Chicano/a movement. Some of her most favorite artwork includes La Ofrenda, Homenaje a Frida Kahlo, and her 1995 Nepantla lithograph triptych. Yreina Cervantez has also been featured in art exhibitions, such as From El Corazon de East L.A , Just Another Poster?: Chicano Graphic Arts in California, and 30 Years of Chicano Printmaking & Social Justice. Cervantez is currently an Associate Professor of Chicano/a Studies at the California State University, Northridge.
Situating The Networks of
Latinx Art
working Group
Bios
Abigail Lapin Dardashti (PI)
Abigail Lapin Dardashti’s research examines modern and contemporary Latin American, Latina/o/x, and African Diasporic art with a focus on international exchange, migration, racial formation, and activism. Broadly, her work unpacks the impact of migration and movement on diasporic artistic productions in the Americas during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current book project, “Itinerant Modernism: Politics and the Rise of Afro-Brazilian Art,” examines Afro-Brazilian art and international exchange during the period of the military dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1980s, focusing on state-sponsored exhibitions as well as activist art in the United States, Nigeria, Senegal, and Brazil. A second book project will examine the plans and buildings of Brazilian architects in West and Central Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. Her curatorial work has focused on Caribbean and Caribbean American art. She has curated exhibitions at BRIC, Brooklyn, and Taller Puertorriqueño, Philadelphia, and has served as curatorial fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, exhibition catalogues, and edited volumes in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, France, and the United States. She has organized and participated in numerous panels, symposia, and conferences throughout the Americas. In 2022–24, she will participate in the Getty Foundation/Harvard University Traveling Research Seminar on Afro-Latin American Art in Washington, D.C., Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Bogotá.
Anna Indych-López (Pi)
is a Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center and The City College at CUNY where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art among Latin American, U.S., transatlantic, Afro-diasporic, and Latinx networks. She is the author of Judith F. Baca (2018) and Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (2009) and co-author of Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011). A frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art (2020) and The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism: 1910-1950 (2016), she is the recipient of a Stuart Z. Katz Professorship of the Humanities at CCNY and an Alcaly-Bodian CUNY Distinguished Scholar Fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborative at The Graduate Center. In the Spring of 2022 she was the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor of Modern Art at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and in Fall 2022 she was awarded The Graduate Center’s Excellence in Mentorship Award. In 2001, she published one of the first articles on Latinx art to appear in Art Journal, which analyzed Pepón Osorio’s kitsch aesthetic as a form of cultural resistance.
Bianca Morán
is a curator, educator, and writer. A former K-16 educator in Los Angeles, her work is deeply informed by her training in culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy. Her research interests include political theory, critical race theory, foodways, diaspora, the Atlantic world, race and colonialism, critical studies, museum pedagogy, Latin Americand and Latinx visual culture and film. Bianca holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practice and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California, an M.Ed. from UCLA, and a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. She also completed a culinary arts program at Le Cordon Bleu. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Art History at The Graduate Center at The City University of New York. Bianca was born in Los Angeles and raised between the Bay Area and LA. She is also a single mother raising her daughter, Paloma.
Dianna Taylor
is a PhD Student in the Mexican American Studies program at the University of Arizona, K-12 art instructor and artist specializing in painting, relief and letterpress printmaking, collage and digital art. Her research interests explore how contemporary Xicanx art speaks to, is inspired by, and aids in the survival of the still-living Mesoamerican pre-colonial writing systems and knowledges. By participating in the creative process through arts-informed research, her aim is to produce artwork that embodies this knowledge. Past projects include working alongside Dr. Patrisia Gonzales, curating and creating art for a traveling pop-up botanica exhibition that explores enduring Indigenous medicine. Her future dissertation project would examine the murals at El Rio Community Center, a public project born out of the Chicano movement in Tucson, AZ, and create new art within this space that is in dialogue with them.
Jeanette Martinez
is a Ph.D. student in the art history program at The University of New Mexico. Being of the Central American diaspora greatly influenced her interests in contemporary U.S. Latinx art. While this is her area of discipline, her research interests are on migrations, transnationalisms, landscape, memory, feminisms, processes of identity, and decolonial art histories. She researches, writes, and curates on the Central American diaspora by engaging with contemporary artists that navigate it. Her main goal through academia and curatorial practices is to make known the stories of communities that have been marginalized and erased.
Karla Larrañaga
is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the department of Chicana/o Studies. Her dissertation project examines Guadalupana online community formation as well as digital performances of piety as materialized through digital cultural production. This project situates these online religious communities, performances and new rituals as valuable tools for producing knowledge, identity, and virtual sacred space. These virtual sacred spaces become digital altars and an archive of memory that defies borders and boundaries associated with able-bodiedness, location, and citizenship status. This project aims to expand our understanding of Guadalupana religious performance and ritual so that alternative acts of worship are recognized widely.
Karla earned her B.A. in Chicano Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from Loyola Marymount University in 2017. She has also earned an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Cultural Studies from Kansas State University in 2019 and an M.A. in Chicana/o Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2021. Karla is a Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellow (UIC), a Mendell Graduate Fellow for the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life (UCSB), as well as a fellow for the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies.
Kency Cornejo (PI)
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico where she teaches Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art Histories. Her teaching, research, and publications focus on contemporary art of Central America and its US-based diaspora, art and activism in Latin America, and decolonizing methodologies in art. Some of her publications on US/Central American art can be found in the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; and Art and Documentation, among others. She is author of the book Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, forthcoming with Duke University Press (Oct. 2024), which analyzes thirty years of art and decoloniality in the isthmus. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford foundations, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award Grant, among others. She holds a PhD from Duke University, an MA from UT Austin, and BA from UCLA. Kency was born to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California.
Lidia Hernández-Tapia
is a Ph.D. student in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She holds a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY with a concentration in bilingual (Spanish/English) journalism, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Havana. She is a Digital Fellow at the Center for Latin American, the Caribbean and Latino Studies, CLACLS, and a William Randolph Hearst Fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work has been published in Cuba, the United States, and Germany. Her research interests include 20th and 21st-Century Caribbean literature, Cuban-American diasporas, photography, and visual culture.
Maribel Bello
is a writer, transdisciplinary artist and researcher of affectivities, liminal spaces, quotidian life, and subjective violences in vulnerable communities—principally life experiences of emotional migration between Mexico and the U.S. She graduated from UNAM with a degree in Communication Sciences, completed an M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Event Schedule
Friday, 5/31
10am: Welcome and Introduction
10:15: Group Activity
Roundtable 1:
10:30 - 10:50: Lightning round presentations
10:50 -11:30: Conversations
11:30-12: Q&A
12:30-2:00: LUNCH BREAK
Roundtable 2: Coffee served
2pm-2:20pm: Lightning Round presentations
2:20-3:10pm: Conversations
3:10-4pm: Q&A
4-4:45pm Closing Comments and Activity
5:00- 6:00pm Reception
Directions
