“X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art” is a digital publishing initiative that commissions and presents short-form essays focused on the recipients of the Latinx Artist Fellowship and the ideas that animate their practices.
“X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art” springs from the ideas and aesthetic creativity of our fellowship recipients. This project is designed to strengthen creative networks by convening writers and bringing them into conversation with artists to produce and present thematic writing on art in a visually-compelling, free digital format. Co-created by USLAF and an invited team of experts, this initiative serves as a dynamic platform for informed and engaged writing across various genres about some of the country’s most exciting visual artists.
Colonial Racial Capitalism
This collection examines artistic practices that link colonialism, racism, capitalism, and various extractive modes of occupation and resource control that fuel forced migration. Making these connections exposes a regime of accumulation affecting Latinx communities that is both capitalist and settler-colonialist, and thus requires new ways of imagining and creating intersected social action.
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Praxis As Form
Praxis as Form showcases works by a group of artists working with diverse media and visual formats. In varied ways, these artists and their oeuvres complicate conventional narratives within art history. Moreover, these artists work with materials and processes with great intentionality, as means of speaking to the personal, cultural, and political.
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Unmasking Coloniality
This collection considers how artists both render visible and seek to dismantle the colonial power structures that undergird our contemporary reality. Collapsing temporalities; countering patriarchy and heteronormativity; foregrounding race, gender, and sexuality; and shining a light on the military and prison industrial complexes, they activate art in the service of social justice, broadly understood, and embrace a decolonial praxis.
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Materiality of Memory
What tethers material and memory to each other, and how do we contend with the frayed edges of their ruptured connection? This collection examines the resonances and tensions that emerge when memory, whether individual or collective, is made tangible.
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Latinx Unsettling
This collection invites the critical questioning of the silos and borders that seek to exclude, contain or diminish us, including frameworks of center and periphery that fail to acknowledge Latinx aesthetic and conceptual innovations and contributions to the development of art and art history.
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Submissions
For each collection, USLAF will issue a Call for Proposals inviting writers to propose an essay about a single artist within the group selected for a given collection. Writers selected to contribute essays will receive an honorarium and guidance from the editorial team. In addition, each essay will receive one round of editorial review and one round of anonymous review. This review process is designed to support writers at universities, but we welcome proposals from writers working outside of academia and at all career stages.
Editorial Board
The project is led by Adriana Zavala, Executive Editor and Mary M. Thomas, USLAF Deputy Director, who have convened an editorial team comprised of Kency Cornejo, Karen Mary Davalos, Elizabeth Ferrer, Tatiana Flores, Josh T. Franco, Andrea Lepage, Marisa Lerer, and Claudia E. Zapata, who bring expertise in curatorial practice, research and scholarship, archiving and oral history, and art making.
Each member of the team will curate a single thematic collection, selecting and collaborating with writers to develop short-form essays each exploring the work of one artist in a selected group. Within each collection, the essays will illuminate the diverse and complex undercurrents that the artists address in their work.