Latinx Art Book Fair Launches at New York University

Carlos and Fernando Estrada-Lopez are social workers in Los Angeles, but in Gabriel García Román’s Queer Icons, they are a pair of haloed saints locked in an embrace, surrounded by floating messages in mixed Spanish and English that partially read “Raised on frijoles and family,” “Bicultural,” and “Puro Pinche Queer!” (“Pure Fucking Queer”).

Selections from Roman’s Queer Icons photogravure series will join zines, posters, and art books of over 30 Latinx artists and scholars at the inaugural La Feria print media art fair, organized by The Latinx Project at New York University (NYU) this Saturday, September 21.

Arlene Dávila, founding director of The Latinx Project, told Hyperallergic that the one-day event is intended to “help shift the fair ecosystem toward greater accessibility for artists everywhere.” Dávila published a book on Latinx art, markets, and politics in 2020. “Latinx artists are rarely represented in a system dominated by galleries, which are prohibitively expensive and not open to unsolicited artist submissions,” she said, adding that the fair “helps address the gap in opportunities for artists to sell their work.”

The exclusion of Latinos in art spaces runs beyond just New York City art fair season. Latinx curators and artists are still grappling with the legacy of historical marginalization decades after the Smithsonian Institution released a 1994 report acknowledging it had “willfully neglected” Latinos in “almost every aspect of its operations.” More recently, the American Alliance of Museums said Latinos were still “woefully underrepresented in museum collections, exhibitions, staff, and boards.” Organizations like The Latinx Project, founded in 2018, are dedicated to redressing this ongoing inequity.