U.S. Latinx Art Forum

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U.S. Latinx Art Forum The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is an advocacy organization dedicated to the art and art history of the United States Latinx communities.

LinkTree:https://linktr.ee/USLatinxArtForum Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) emerges partly from the two-part scholarly session “Imagining a U.S. Latina/o Art History,” which was held at the 2015 Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York. Central among the issues raised at the session was the ongoing marginalization of U.S. Latinx art within art institutions and the fields of “American” and “Latin American” art history. USLAF formed as a concerted effort to advocate for the field of Latinx art, foster equity and growth, and support its practitioners. While USLAF recognizes the importance of resisting categories, we affirm the value of creating a forum to support scholarship, writing, and historical inquiry about U.S. Latinx visual art and culture. We also maintain the importance of creating a network for mentorship and professional development to ensure the continued progress and vitality of Latinx art practitioners within academia, exhibition spaces, and beyond. We invite you to join USLAF as a member and become part of our growing community of Latinx art advocates. To join, please email [email protected] with the following information.

- Position and Institution (or indicate Independent Scholar/Curator/Artist):
- Preferred Mailing Address:
- Email Address:


In lieu of required membership dues, we currently operate on voluntary financial contributions. Beyond supporting USLAF’s continued operation, your voluntary “dues” contributions will help us to expand our offerings and cultivate new resources for our member network. DONATE TO USLAF: https://pages.donately.com/uslatinxartforum/donate

🥂 Celebrating our first year as Executive Director and Deputy Director! Thank you all for building community with us. To...
01/10/2026

🥂 Celebrating our first year as Executive Director and Deputy Director! Thank you all for building community with us. To many more years of Latinx art! Love, Josh and Mary 💖🥂

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
30/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Pepón Osorio’s “Convalescence”: Reimagining the Teaching Hospital
✍️ Written by Megan Voeller

Megan Voeller is an educator, curator, and writer based in Philadelphia. As Director of Humanities at Thomas Jefferson University, they lead medical humanities curricula along with an artist-in-residence program and the Helix Gallery. They are a PhD candidate in art history at Tyler School of Art & Architecture, Temple University.

📖 “Convalescence” (2024) is an immersive installation by artist Pepón Osorio that highlights the stories of five Philadelphians with life-threatening conditions navigating the United States healthcare system. Staged at an academic medical center, “Convalescence” reconfigures the hospital as a site of critical learning, centering the patients’ lived experience and community-based forms of care in tension with institutional medical authority. Voeller discusses how “Convalescence” reimagines the teaching hospital by incorporating medical student reflections on engaging with the installation and its impact on their understanding of being a good doctor. Emphasizing the installation’s educational capacity, the author demonstrates how such projects can contribute to medical training through critical engagement with art.

Image: Pepón Osorio, “Convalescence,” (2024). Installation view. Thomas Jefferson University, Center City Campus, Philadelphia, September 3–November 1, 2024. Photograph by Constance Mensh. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
29/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Outlaw Paper: Sandy Rodriguez’s "Resistance Map of Gulf of Mexico"
✍️ Written by Veronica Pesantes Vallejo

Veronica Pesantes Vallejo is a Miami-based, Ecuadorian-born curator, writer, and educator with thirty years of expertise in Latinx arts and culture. A University of Chicago doctoral scholar, she has managed programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, curated the first-ever Quito Design Week, and currently writes for "The Art Newspaper" and "ARTnews," among others.

📖 Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez’s “Resistance Map of Gulf of Mexico” (2025) reimagines a contested region in the Americas, challenging the authority to name, map, and give meaning to a place. Created for her solo exhibition at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, the work layers the colonial history of Florida, Indigenous notions of time, and contemporary contests over knowledge, history, and political power across the geography of the Gulf Coast, collapsing past and present into a single, urgent visual field. With wit, historical inquiry, and ancestral knowledge, she transforms the map into a tool of critical pedagogy, one that connects Florida’s colonial past to our fraught political present.

Image: Sandy Rodriguez, "Resistance Map of Gulf of Mexico," (2025). Watercolor on amate paper, 47 × 94 ½ inches. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. © Sandy Rodriguez.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
28/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Bearing Her to the Present: Yelaine Rodriguez and the Un-Ghosting of Afro-Dominican Identity
✍️ Written by María Elena Ortiz

María Elena Ortiz is a curator and writer at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, specializing in Caribbean, Latin American, Latinx and Black diasporic contemporary art. Previously, as a curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, she founded the Caribbean Cultural Institute. Her exhibitions and writing challenge traditional historical narratives by centering diasporic experiences and global perspectives.

📖 This essay explores the work of contemporary artist and scholar Yelaine Rodriguez through scholar Dixa Ramírez’s theoretical lens of “ghosting.” Focusing on Rodriguez’s video installation, “Babalú-Ayé y La Negra del Hospital” (2022), it examines how her multi-layered and interdisciplinary methodology functions as a transformative art practice that revitalizes Caribbean history and cultural memory. By framing the work through the concept of “ghosting,” this study presents how an artistic practice can enrich our understanding of the past and the present.

Image: Yelaine Rodriguez, "Babalú-Ayé y La Negra del Hospital," (2022). Three-channel video installation, dimensions variable. Installation view of "A Billion, Brilliant Points of Unity" at Fridman Gallery, New York, June 21–August 10, 2024. Photograph by Bernardo Almonte. Courtesy of Fridman Gallery.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
24/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

The Investigator’s Folder: Curriculum as Form in Lizania Cruz’s "The Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary"
✍️ Written by Alex Feliciano Mejía

Alex Feliciano Mejía is a writer, filmmaker, and educator focused on archives, displacement, and cultural memory. His projects involve cataloging, digitizing, and preserving film archives in Guatemala, and interrogating archival tensions through poetry and filmmaking. He teaches courses on multilingual and media arts pedagogies at San Francisco State University.

📖 This essay argues that Lizania Cruz’s participatory practice reconceives curriculum as a formal element of the artwork rather than a secondary, educational supplement. Drawing on her ongoing “The Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary” and the 2021 exhibition “Gathering Evidence: Santo Domingo and New York City,” it examines how Cruz, performing the role of an investigator, composes curricular forms such as prepared interview questions, screen-printed recruitment posters, and diagrammatic prints, to engage in pedagogical encounters with Dominican participants on the streets of New York City and the Dominican Republic.

Image: Lizania Cruz, "Gathering Evidence: Santo Domingo and New York City" (detail), (2021). Installation and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Adam Reich. © Lizania Cruz.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
23/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Ongoing Contestations: Kathy Vargas’s “My Alamo”
✍️ Written by Deanna Ledezma

Deanna Ledezma is a Tejanx scholar specializing in the history and theory of photography and contemporary Latinx art. She is the Writing Lab Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago and a co-founder of the Place as Practice Research Collective.

📖 Born in San Antonio in 1950, Chicana-Tejana artist and photographer Kathy Vargas has spent decades examining the contentious legacy of the Alamo. This critical lens is exemplified in her photographic series, “My Alamo” (1995), commissioned for the exhibition “From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography.” To situate Vargas’s series within our present-day political landscape, this essay begins and ends with observations made during a research visit to the Alamo Plaza Historic District in December 2025, when the Alamo Visitor Center and Museum were undergoing reconstruction and the Executive Director of the Alamo Trust, had been ousted from her leadership role. The incident underscored how the “battle” of the Alamo is not merely a historical event but an ongoing struggle to control a settler-colonial narrative—as Vargas has long known and demonstrated in her artwork.

Image: Kathy Vargas, "My Alamo," (1995). Hand-colored silver gelatin print, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
22/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

A Pedagogy of Hope: Pagán and Pietri in Nitza Tufiño’s “Tenderete”
✍️ Written by Teréz Iacovino

Teréz Iacovino is an artist, curator, and educator, who now serves as director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota. Her practice is continually shaped by the artists she works with, the students she mentors, and her experience as a Latina and first-generation graduate working in academia. She is co-editor of “Vaiven: 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora” (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and a contributor to “Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology” (Duke University Press, 2025).

📖 Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s 1992 book, “Pedagogy of Hope,” argues for our ontological need of both hope and struggle to make real our desired futures. Drawing from Freire’s text, this essay discusses artist, activist, and educator Nitza Tufiño’s longest running series, “Tenderete” (1974–present) and how this work offers an education in hope through diasporic aesthetics and materials tied to her Mexi-Rican heritage.

Image: Nitza Tufiño, Selections from “Tenderete,” (1974–present). Archival inkjet prints with mixed media, sewn to cotton fabric with thread, dimensions variable. Installation view of “Vaivén: 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora” on view at Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, September 9–December 6, 2025. Photograph by Easton Green. Courtesy of the artist and Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
21/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Between Punchline and Praxis: Chris E. Vargas’s "Consciousness Razing"
✍️ Written by Stamatina Gregory

Stamatina Gregory is a curator and art historian engaging with q***r and radical pasts, presents, and futures. They are Head Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

📖 Stamatina Gregory gives an in-depth reading of artist Chris E. Vargas’s installation of “Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project” (2018) at the New Museum in New York City. Gregory analyzes the threads of collaboration among Vargas, the invited artists, and viewing publics in the work of interrogating history and memory and centering the legacy of Black trans activists (including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gacy) in the uprisings.

Image: M***A and Chris E. Vargas, "Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project," (2018). Exhibition view. New Museum, New York. Photograph courtesy of Maris Hutchinson and EPW Studio.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
18/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Votive Pedagogy: Activating Historical-Spiritual Worlds in Santa Barraza’s “retablos”
✍️ Written by Sonja Elena Gandert

Sonja Elena Gandert is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the cofounders of USLAF. A scholar of modern and contemporary Latinx and Latin American art, her current book project is a study of Chicana/o artists in New Mexico and Texas from the late 1960s to early 1980s.

📖 This essay examines two “retablos,” or votive paintings, created by the Tejana artist Santa Barraza during the early 1990s, a period following a significant move from her home state of Texas to Pennsylvania to pursue a university teaching career. The essay proposes the notion of “votive pedagogy” as an analytic framework, arguing that Barraza’s employment of the intimate, spiritually inflected retablo form to explore the lives and legacies of underrepresented figures of historical import offers a reparative avenue for redressing narratives of violence, colonialism, and historical erasure.

Image: Santa Barraza, "La Malinche," (1991). Oil on metal, 15 × 14 × 2 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist. © Santa Barraza.

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vi...
17/09/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Radical Pedagogies,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/radical-pedagogies/

Learning in Procession: Charo Oquet and the School of Rará
✍️ Written by Luis Graham Castillo

Luis Graham Castillo is a Dominican curator, communicator, and cultural manager whose work challenges official narratives in the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. He develops programs for independent and interlocal institutions that expand understandings of contemporary visual culture. Based in Santo Domingo, he also teaches at Altos de Chavón.

📖 This essay examines how Dominican artist Charo Oquet transforms Rará/Gagá—an Afro-Caribbean tradition of procession, music, and collective spirituality—into a radical pedagogical practice. Focusing on “Rara: Public Spirituality for Better Days,” it explores how installation, performance, sound, and public participation generate forms of collective learning grounded in movement, ritual, and embodied experience. Through collective action, rhythm, and public spirituality, her work reimagines art as a “school in motion”—a site where historical consciousness, community formation, and political belonging are learned through participation. In doing so, Oquet offers a model of pedagogy rooted in relation, memory, and joy.

Image: Charo Oquet, "Miami Rara," (2018). Processional performance. Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida. Photograph by Javier de Pison.

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