In Museums and Alternative Spaces
Latinx artists featured in several museum group shows as well as solo shows surveying their artistic output, showing that institutions across the country increasingly continue to embrace the work of Latinx artists.
A trio of mid-career artists had high-profile outings this year. The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston mounted a stunning exhibition for Firelei Báez, looking at the breadth of her practice, from mesmerizing paintings to immersive installations. At the Dallas Contemporary, Patrick Martinez presented recent works alongside ones made specifically for the show, like his seven-part cityscape, Fleeting Bougainvillea Landscape, that takes his singular use of materials—a combination of neon lights with stucco and acrylic paint which represent the worn atmosphere of LA—to new heights. In Central Park, Edra Soto installed one of her well-known “Graft” sculptures as part of a Public Art Fund commission; on view through August 2025, the sculpture has already been activated by important programming, like two episodes of Domino Table Talks, a playful gathering–cum–oral history project that is part of the Clemente Center’s “Historias” initiative.
Further afield, Ryan Preciado, one of the standout artists from the last edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, offered a moving portrait to Manuel Sandoval, a nearly forgotten 20th-century Nicaraguan American carpenter who created several furniture sets for iconic architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and R.M. Schindler. In a touching tribute, Preciado re-created several of Sandoval’s lost designs and paired his work with that of Sandoval’s, blurring the boundaries of authorship, as well as the lines between fine art and design. noé olivas, a cofounder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, had a powerful solo show at the independent art space. Titled “Gilded Dreams,” the show explored issues of labor as it relates to Mexican American communities on this side of the border—the perils that come with arriving here and the broken promises of the so-called American Dream that never seem to manifest as one thought they would.
Three thematic museum exhibitions in which Latinx artists stole the show stand out. The first, “On the Edge” at the Laguna Art Museum, showcased the collection of Joan Agajanian Quinn and her late husband Jack Quinn. The Quinns have been a centrifugal force of the LA art scene for decades, their Beverly Hills homes serving as a salon that saw the likes of Warhol, Hockney, Ruscha, and more spend countless evenings there. The Quinns were also major collectors of work by artists of color in an era where most Westside collectors wouldn’t deign to do so. Among those they have collected include Carlos Almaraz, Elsa Flores Almaraz, Joey Terrill, John Valadez, and Yolanda Gonzalez, who created a new portrait of Joan in the museum’s galleries. In giving their works pride of place in the exhibition, the museum and Quinn show just how important Latinx artists have been and continue to be to LA’s art scene.
Installation view of “Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard,” 2024, at ICA Philadelphia.
Photo: Constance Mensh
By contrast, “Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard” at the ICA Philadelphia, curated by Josh T. Franco, takes two of Chicanx art’s founding aesthetic analyses—rasquachismo and domesticana—and places them in the wider context of Yard Art. For me, this is a natural development and speaks to a wider embrace of Latinx art. While the focus here isn’t necessarily on Latinx artists, the show is grounded in Franco’s experience as a Chicano artist and art historian from West Texas. In the opening wall text, Franco writes that the yard art of his late grandfather, Hipolito “Polé” Hernandez, was the “unexpected training grounds for my earliest exercises in close observation … My grandfather’s yard is where I learned to look.” Franco opens the show with one of his own mixed-media works that includes a video that introduces the concepts of rasquachismo and domesticana. In front of the video is a re-created yard altar from the Sanchez family—neighbors to Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas. Elsewhere in the show, we see Hernandez’s work, a small painting of a yard by the underknown Chicano artist Jose Esquivel, and Rubén Ortiz Torres’s advertisement-cum-video work of a souped-up lawnmower not far from pieces by Beverly Buchanan, John Outterbridge, and Noah Purifoy.
The big fall show at Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles is dedicated to the photorealist movement. Instead of producing an expected exhibition on a popular, late 20th-century -ism, curator Anna Katz turn the movements on its head. Its most famous proponents, like Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Duane Hanson, and Chuck Close, are present but the curators have cast a wider net. Katz gives the spotlight to artists like Jesse Treviño, John Valadez, Shizu Saldamando, Sayre Gomez, and Vincent Valdez who have previously not been as closely associated with the movement. It’s a sharp curatorial thesis that is supported by excellent work.
