Anthony Torres

The Question is Known: (W)here is Latin American/Latino Art? aims to interrogate the significance of “Latin American and Latino Art” by problematizing, reformulating, and re-presenting “Latin American/Latino Art” as an ideological construct that has subsumed the complexity and diversity of art practices by a range of artists.

The exhibition is concerned with making what should be a simple and obvious statement—that Latino artists and art practices are diverse—as a means of countering characterizations that “essentialize” a range of practices being done by Latino artists.

Through the works in the exhibition, The Question is Known explores the significance of Latin American/Latino art as not “natural” or given, but rather, as a hybrid of cultural creations that are fluid and mobile, established by contact, conflict, experience, sympathetic issue identification, and fantasy constructions, often constituted as living sources of inspiration, articulated through iconography, formal vocabularies, and personal associations.

To this end, the exhibition presents the works as historical microcosms specific to particular artists, and which evidence linkages between artists’ aesthetic choices and the diverse histories and intellectual discourses that inform them.

The exhibition will thus be concerned with positing "Latino art" as an ambiguous area of inquiry that raises issues, poses questions, and interrogates curatorial perspectives and institutional politics, in order to facilitate greater cross-cultural communication and a more inclusive and expanded redefinition of "American" art in an interconnected global dialogue.

Anthony Torres, Curator