Meet 15 visual artists making their mark on the art world! As part of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum's Latinx Artist Fellowship, this cohort of groundbreaking artists will be awarded unrestricted $50,000 awards!
In its third year, the Latinx Artist Fellowship annually recognizes 15 of the most compelling Latinx visual artists working in the United States today and aims to address a systemic lack of support, visibility, and patronage of Latinx visual artists—individuals of Latin American or Caribbean descent, born or long-living in the United States.
The 2023 Latinx Art Fellowship class was chosen to reflect the the Latinx community’s diversity, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and nonbinary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Chicanx and El Salvadoran to Dominican-American, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous-identified. The cohort includes artists working in locations such as Tempe, Arizona; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Hato Rey, Puerto Rico; and Houston, Texas, while the the cohort’s artistic practices span ceramics, painting, printmaking, photography, installation art, sound art, social practice, and performance, as well as site responsive architectural interventions. Deliberately intergenerational, it is equally divided between emerging, midcareer, and established artists.
Founded in 2015, USLAF is the only national organization exclusively dedicated to Latinx visual art and art history. The Fellowship, and the greater Latinx Art Visibility Initiative, is a long overdue opportunity to lift up Latinx artists and to provide financial support to expand and secure their place within American art and art history.
1. Felipe Baeza
Felipe Baeza's (he/they; b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico) practice is equal parts confrontation of violent pasts and a tribute to people whose sense of personhood is constantly litigated and defined by those in power. His figures created over densely layered paintings appear in different states of becoming and at times are even abstracted to the point of invisibility.
2. Diógenes Ballester
Diógenes Ballester (he/him; b. 1956, Ponce, Puerto Rico) is a renowned visual artist, self- described an Arteologist, writer and educator who has lived in New York, (El Barrio of Hispanic Harlem) for 42 years. In his work, Ballester uncovers ancestral knowledge and cosmology through the act of researching cultural objects and symbols. He appropriates and repurposes those symbols and objects into his multimedia work, which comprises sketches, paintings, assemblages, drawings, prints and electronic media, reflecting on what these have to offer our current and future world.
3. Margarita Cabrera
Margarita Cabrera’s (b. Mexico City, Mexico) work centers on social-political community issues including cultural identity, migration, violence, inclusivity, labor, and empowerment. She has worked on a number of collaborative projects at the intersection of contemporary art practices, indigenous Mexican folk art and craft traditions, and US-Mexico relations. In addition to studying and preserving endangered cultural and craft traditions, these projects have served as active investigations into the creation of fair and safe working conditions and the protection of immigrant rights.
4. Beatriz Cortez
Beatriz Cortez (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, and imaginaries of the future. About her practice, she says: "Through my work I imagine moving through space and time, becoming other, desiring other, fragmenting our identities, disappearing, imagining a moment when we are no longer ourselves, a rigid identity that defines us, but rather, when we become part of the cosmos, fragmented multiplicities with all of the potential to move freely at light speed, crossing the time and space barrier, having untimely experiences."
5. Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Sofía Gallisá Muriente (she/her) is a visual artist and cultural organizer whose practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives and contests dominant visual culture through multiple approaches to documentation. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.
6. Verónica Gaona
Verónica Gaona (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from Brownsville, Texas, a city along the South Texas-Mexico border landscape, living and working in Houston. Informed by her transnational identity and the sociopolitical climate, Gaona investigates notions of architecture, migration, and death. As a first-generation Mexican American from a family of migrants who have frequently relocated to search for employment, Gaona investigates migrants’ decision to live and work in the North, their building aspirations in the homeland, and end-of-life planning.
7. Ester Hernandez
Ester Hernandez (she/her) was born in California’s San Joaquin Valley to a Mexican farm worker family. The UC Berkeley graduate is an internationally acclaimed San Francisco-based visual artist. She is best known for her depiction of Latina/Native women through her pastels, prints and installations. Her work reflects social, political, ecological and spiritual themes.
8. Joiri Minaya
Joiri Minaya (she/her; b. 1990, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates binaries in search of in-betweenness, investigating the female body within constructions of identity, multicultural social spaces and hierarchies. Recent works focus on questioning historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical identity from a decolonial stance.
9. Raphael Montañez Ortiz
Raphael Montañez Ortiz (he/him; b. New York, 1934) is a central figure in U.S. Post-war art, whose pioneering practice began with trail-blazing experimental film works in 1957. Ortiz’s ground-breaking art practice has expressed itself through performance, film, digital media, paintings, collages, ready-mades, destruction concerts, and deconstructed objects. In 1969, Ortiz founded El Museo del Barrio, the first Latino art museum in the US.
10. Postcommodity
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary art collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (he/him/his; Mestizo), and Kade L. Twist (he/him; Cherokee). Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multi-ethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence.
11. Daisy Quezada Ureña
Daisy Quezada Ureña (she/her) is multidisciplinary artist, faculty and studio arts department chair at the Institution of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Within her practice she creates ceramic works, installations, and artist’s books that thematically connect to ideas around identity and place in relation to social structures that cross imposed borders.
12. Diana Solís
Diana Solís (she/they) is a Mexican-born photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and educator whose work practice includes painting, illustration, public murals and installation. She is inspired by Mexican and Chicano culture, memory, cautionary tales, oral and personal histories, queer identities and narratives. Her work examines notions of place, identity, and belonging. As a documentary photographer, Solís has created a vast and ongoing visual archive of LGBTQ+, Latinx and feminist communities and movements from Chicago to Mexico City.
13. Edra Soto
Edra Soto (she/her) is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space, The Franklin. Soto instigate meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Growing up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago community, Soto’s work has evolved to raise questions about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism.
14. Maria Cristina (Tina) Tavera
Maria Cristina (Tina) Tavera (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines signifiers determined by our society on how people define themselves and their cultures in everyday life. The work focuses on the Latinidad within the U.S. via numerous mediums including printing, sculpture, installation, public art. Since 2019, she has served as the founding executive director of Serpentina Arts, an arts collaborative dedicated to promoting the professional and creative development of Minnesota Latinx visual artists.
15. Mario Ybarra Jr.
Mario Ybarra Jr. (he/him; b.1973) Mexican-American, a conceptual artist born and raised in Los Angeles. His artwork operates as examinations of excluded social norms, often examining complete environments, histories, and narratives. About his works, he says, "My artworks, when successful, try to expand the field of traditional portraiture, landscape and self-portraiture by creating time-based works and immersive installations."
