Situating the Networks of Latinx Art
Our Working Group defines Latinx visual art as multiple, diverse, and cross-regional. We aim to overcome the site-specific confines that have come to define Latinx art, focusing instead on situating networks of exchange across geographies, identities, and placehood throughout the United States. Through a study of space, (non)-sites, displacement, and belonging, our work demonstrates that placehood, solidarities, and identities across U.S. landscapes shape and depend on one another. We argue that Latinx art cannot be understood without weaving cross-regional U.S. spaces and placehood with race, ethnicity, and gender across various affinities, networks, and solidarities.
Goals
To significantly expand the research on Latinx art history, which, until now, has cornered artists into specific regions and largely eschewed discussions of Blackness and Indigeneity.
To draw a range of students, scholars, artists, and museum professionals whose cutting- edge research rethinks Latinx creative production as an intervention, collectively re-shaping debates on race, ethnicity, gender, place, and art in Latinx Studies
To situate the cross-regional networks of Latinx art; center Blackness, Indigeneity, and feminism; create innovative scholarship through collaboration
To organize a major symposium and a significant publication; and share our methodologies with colleagues in different disciplines who will, in turn, be able to employ them
To locate our nascent field prominently in the context of Latinx Humanities through in-depth research and transdisciplinary collaborations. shift the perspective not only of Latinx art history, but also of Latinx Humanities.
Research Questions
Exploring the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and feminist praxes in Latinx art from the 1960s to today, we ask:
How do artists address race, ethnicity, and gender from the different US geographies in which they reside?
How do artists in the Southwest, with roots and proximity to Mexico and Central America, materialize Indigeneity in art in comparison to artists in the East Coast with roots and proximity to the Caribbean and an attention to the consequences of racism and slavery?
How can a conversation between Maya, Taíno, and Yoruba heritages in Latinx Art expand a conversation on critical Latinx Indigeneity and Blackness?
How do dialogues between feminist artists working within the Young Lords in the 1960s and US Central American artists working against US Intervention in the 1980s reshape feminist Latinx art?
How do objects and their articulation in different places, institutions, and socio-political processes help us model new forms of inquiry that decolonize Humanities scholarship?
Principal Investigators
Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Assistant Professor, Art History, University of California, Irvine
Anna Indych-Lopez, Professor, Art History, CUNY Graduate Center
Kency Cornejo, Associate Professor of Art History, University of New Mexico
Fellows
Lidia Hernández-Tapia, Crossing Latinidades Research Fellow, 2022-2023, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Karla Larrañaga, Crossing Latinidades Research Fellow, 2022-2023, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jeannette Martinez, Crossing Latinidades Research Fellow, 2022-2023, Art History, University of New Mexico
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