The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is excited to announce the launch of our new digital publishing initiative, “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art.” This collaboratively curated project will commission and present 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.
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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Colonial Racial Capitalism, curated by Kency Cornejo, will invite essays on Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carolina Caycedo, Verónica Gaona, Joiri Minaya, Jay Lynn Gomez, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Las Nietas de Nonó. Writers will be asked to consider artistic practices that link colonialism, racism, capitalism, and various extractive modes of occupation and resource control that fuel forced migration. Collectively, the selected artists reveal how dispossession functions not only through racialization, enslavement, extraction, criminalization, and incarceration of bodies, but equally through the exploitation and extractivism of land, environment, kinship, and Black/Indigenous/feminist epistemes. 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. The proposal deadline is February 7, 2025. Please see the linked CFP for the full submission instructions.
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, USLAF Executive Director and Mary M. Thomas, USLAF Director of Programs, who have convened an editorial team comprised of Kency Cornejo, Karen Mary Davalos, Elizabeth Ferrer, Tatiana Flores, and Josh T. Franco, 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.