Q&A with Rocío Aranda-Alvarado and Deborah Cullen-Morales, editors of “A Handbook of Latinx Art”
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 that reflect the diversity of the Latinx experience across the nation, from the West Coast and the Mexican border to New York, Miami, and the Midwest.
The anthology features essential writings by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Central American artists to highlight how visionaries of diverse immigrant groups negotiate issues of 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.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is an art historian and curator focused on contemporary US Latinx and modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and African American art. She is Senior Program Officer for arts and culture at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice.
Deborah Cullen-Morales is an art historian and curator focused on modern and contemporary Latinx, Caribbean, and African American art. She is Program Officer for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities.
Why did you want to gather these texts and create A Handbook of Latinx Art?
There is no other anthology like this one, focusing on the overall field of US Latinx art. Some of these texts can be found in various formats: in exhibition catalogs, specialty journals, other readers, and online sources, but putting them together and offering some framing chronology and geography makes them into a useful teaching tool. The book also acts as a general overview of this field of art history at the end of the 20th century for the non-academic reader. We decided to focus on the formation of the field, as well as the artists’ voices that shaped it. That being said, there are many more venues to explore and many more voices in the field. We look forward to how other voices will bring forward additional aspects of these histories. This is why we called it a handbook—this is just one way to approach the field.
What were some of the challenges associated with putting these texts together?
The biggest challenge was making the final selection of texts and then editing them to adhere to the final word count. Even though such an anthology did not exist prior, we easily could have included three or four times the number of texts! We saw this as an opportunity to focus on what we consider to be key texts. We saw our role as making space for artists’ voices to be heard in the company of some of the most important scholars and curators in our field.
What were some of the joys of this project?
Gathering and reviewing all the preliminary texts was a tremendous joy. It reminds us of those whose work we are indebted to and whose work we hope to build on. It reminds us of the solid foundations laid primarily by artists: they founded the spaces, they did the curatorial work, and they framed and laid out the arguments, both visually and verbally. It was a joy to collaborate and discuss the work and then to reach out to our esteemed colleagues to ask for their participation. Nearly everyone was tremendously supportive. It was a joy to realize that while Latinx art is a burgeoning field, it is also a very tightly knit one.
What are some of the highlights of the book?
During the process of rereading these texts to edit them, we were once again amazed by the brilliance of these artists in describing their contexts, underscoring their priorities, and offering insights that shape the history of art in the US. The poetry and humor within many of the texts, even while illuminating difficult subject matter, buoy all of us.
Can you tell us about the image selection?
We started with noting works by contributing authors and with works that were discussed in the text. We wanted to include a chronological, geographic, and formal range, and we wanted also to include works from significant collections of Latinx art.
What does this project mean for the field?
Although there is this richness of discourse we can point to, the field is, in many ways, quite nascent. Despite the long presence of Latinx populations in the US from its founding and the long history of US Latinx artists working alongside Indigenous, Anglo, and African American counterparts for centuries, their contributions have remained stubbornly under explored in academic settings. While there is a wide array of courses in modern Mexican or Latin American art, there are few courses focused entirely on the artistic production of US Latinxs. We hope this anthology will make teaching this work more urgent for educators and students. We also hope it provides an accessible overview for a broader general audience interested in learning about US Latinx art.