It seems as though everywhere one looks in New York City, Latinx artists are making their mark. In April, El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, established in 1969 as a neighbourhood museum by and for the Puerto Rican community, opened a major retrospective devoted to the work of its founder, Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Venture to the Brooklyn Museum and you’ll find a solo show of Guadalupe Maravilla, who fled El Salvador’s civil war as a child and whose mesmerising sculptures and sound art channel healing. At the Whitney Biennial, the works of Coco Fusco and Guadalupe Rosales — to name just two Latinx artists in the exhibition — resonate with poignant immediacy. They’re making an impact on the city’s commercial side too. In Frieze New York, François Ghebaly will show a painting by Danielle De Jesus of the working-class inhabitants of her native Bushwick in Brooklyn, rendered through the prism of her experience as a Puerto Rican in the diaspora. It is a monument to the residents of a community fragmented by gentrification and displacement.
De Jesus’s work will be one of several at the fair by artists who identify as Latinx — a gender-neutral term for individuals of Latin American descent who live in the US. Alexander Gray Associates will show a piece by Ecuadorean-born, Bronx-based artist Ronny Quevedo, whose visual language melds cartography and pre-Colombian references in meditations on labour and heritage; Galeria Luisa Strina is bringing work by Clarissa Tossin, who grew up in Brazil and lives in Los Angeles. Raving about the ubiquitous presence of Latinx artists in New York’s art world as a phenomenon risks concealing the truth, which is that they’ve always been here — and too often sidelined, subsumed under the broader “Latin American art” label or defined solely by identity, not aesthetic, social and intellectual interests. But now they’re starting to move beyond these tight confines into a place of prominence.
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