U.S. Latinx Art Forum

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U.S. Latinx Art Forum The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is an advocacy organization dedicated to the art and art history of the United States Latinx communities.

LinkTree:https://linktr.ee/USLatinxArtForum Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) emerges partly from the two-part scholarly session “Imagining a U.S. Latina/o Art History,” which was held at the 2015 Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York. Central among the issues raised at the session was the ongoing marginalization of U.S. Latinx art within art institutions and the fields of “American

” and “Latin American” art history. USLAF formed as a concerted effort to advocate for the field of Latinx art, foster equity and growth, and support its practitioners. While USLAF recognizes the importance of resisting categories, we affirm the value of creating a forum to support scholarship, writing, and historical inquiry about U.S. Latinx visual art and culture. We also maintain the importance of creating a network for mentorship and professional development to ensure the continued progress and vitality of Latinx art practitioners within academia, exhibition spaces, and beyond. We invite you to join USLAF as a member and become part of our growing community of Latinx art advocates. To join, please email [email protected] with the following information.

- Position and Institution (or indicate Independent Scholar/Curator/Artist):
- Preferred Mailing Address:
- Email Address:


In lieu of required membership dues, we currently operate on voluntary financial contributions. Beyond supporting USLAF’s continued operation, your voluntary “dues” contributions will help us to expand our offerings and cultivate new resources for our member network. DONATE TO USLAF: https://pages.donately.com/uslatinxartforum/donate

09/07/2026

☀️Celebrating our New Mexico Latinx Artist Fellows, hanging with friends old and new, and living out our mission:

“The US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is dedicated to art by US inhabitants of Latinx descent and their communities. We intentionally use the “x” in Latinx to create an expansive and convivial space that fosters relationships within and beyond hemispheric American art. Hanging out in this space generates new exhibitions, scholarship, programs and collaborations that advance the field into a dynamic future.”

Playback Now Available for X as Intersection: Lines of Descent!Lines of Descent brought Santa Barraza, Marcus X. Chormic...
18/06/2026

Playback Now Available for X as Intersection: Lines of Descent!

Lines of Descent brought Santa Barraza, Marcus X. Chormicle, and Shizu Saldamando in conversation to explore how they examine questions of lineage within their creative practices.

In case you missed the live program, or want to rewatch it, you can find the recording here: https://youtu.be/cut-MNkLSpA

For those who were able to join us at the National Museum of Mexican Art or virtually, thank you so much for attending!

This program was organized in partnership with the National Museum of Mexican Art as part of X as Intersection.

X as Intersection is a five-part public program series featuring conversations with fellows from the fifth cohort of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, an initiative of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum.

Learn more here: https://uslaf.org/x-as-intersection/

Photography by Manuel Velasco.

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection...
11/06/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

New Choreographies with/in the Land: On Spider Woman’s Embrace
✍️ Written by Xavier Robles Armas

Xavier Robles Armas is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar and curator with a focus on itinerant performance practices, public space, photography, and how migration shapes architecture and subject-hood in the U.S. He is currently the Events and Arts Manager at The Latinx Project, where he curated Tinkuy: Converging Ecologies (2023), co-curated Escenas (2025) and RicanVisions (2025). A recent Independent Curators International Curatorial Seminar graduate and NALAC Leadership Institute Fellow (2024), Xavier has also been part of the inaugural cohort of Latinx curators in the A&L Berg Foundation’s Early Stage Arts Professionals program. Independently he has collaborated on curatorial projects with EnFoco Inc., Pregones/PRTT, ProArts Oakland and Heaven Gallery Chicago. He has held fellowships at the Queens Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Xavier is pursuing an MA in Performance Studies at NYU, holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Architectural Studies from Hampshire College. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Xavier lives in Queens, New York—by way of Santa Ana, California.

📖 In this essay, Robles Armas focuses on a close visual reading of one of the images in Koyoltzintli’s photographic "MEDA" series titled “Spider Woman Embrace” (2019). In the image, Robles Armas argues that Koyoltzintli creates a space for knowledge exchange that stretches across time, constituting a vital act of transfer between the living forms that come into contact with one another. Robles Armas asks, how might Koyoltzintli’s practice help viewers retrieve their own ancestral wisdom?

Image: Koyoltzintli Mirandarivadeneira, “Spider Woman Embrace,” (2019). Archival pigment print from a large format paper negative, 24 × 30 inches. Edition of 7 plus 2 artist’s proofs. Series: MEDA.

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection...
11/06/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

Against Ruination: Building Sacred Futurities
rafa esparza’s "building: a simulacrum of power" (2014)
✍️ Written by Abeyami Ortega Dominguez

Abeyami Ortega Dominguez (she/they) is an anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work on media, visual culture, and contemporary global art histories addresses racialization, gender, sexuality, and social inequalities in Majority World/Global South contexts, particularly, Latin America. She is Honorary Research Associate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and has taught at the University of Cambridge, the University of Salamanca, Spain, UNAM, the National School of Anthropology in Mexico, and other institutions. She was awarded the Catedra SLAS by the UK Society for Latin American Studies to teach on Latin American art activism and is co-editor of the volumes Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice (UCL Press, 2026) and Comics and Race in Latin America (UCL Press, forthcoming 2027). Her work has also been published in Feminist Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Agenda Empowering Women for Gender Equity, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions (2025), and The University of Texas Press, among others.

📖 In this essay, Ortega Dominguez’s reading of rafa esparza’s “building: a simulacrum of power” (2014) invites the question: what does building mean when a fixed structure is both encountered and countered through human movements over time—through friction, traction, and contact?

Image: rafa esparza, “building: a simulacrum of power.” With Ramon, Lupe, Beto, Fernando, Eric, Manuela & Hermila esparza, Gabriel Banuelos, Jorge Ríos, and Michael Parker. Rebeca Hernandez. Hosted by Clockshop and California State Parks. The Bowtie, 2014.

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection...
10/06/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

Sacred Migrations: Gestating the Border
✍️ Written by Erika Hirugami

Erika Hirugami, MA. MAAB. MPhil., is a first-generation Japanese Mexican immigrant, formerly undocumented of Otomí and P’urhépecha ancestry. Founder of CuratorLove and co-founder of UNDOC+Collective, ED at AHSC, and Professor at SMC and LAVC. Hirugami holds an MAAB from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and an MA, MPhil, and BAs from UCLA in Art History, Chicano Studies, and Mexican Studies where she is currently a teaching fellow and doctoral candidate. Her dissertation epistemologically braids the aesthetics of undocumentedness to challenge immigration policy and politics via contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions across the globe, and her written work has been published internationally.

📖 In this essay, Hirugami’s analysis explores how fronteriza artist Tanya Aguiñiga’s work, “Metabolizing the Border,” emphasizes her corporeal experience as part of the undocumented diaspora to heal from her intangible connection to the border and how it is also an embodied prayer that consecrates the site.

Image: Tanya Aguiñiga, “Metabolizing the Border,” (2020). Photo by Gina Clyne.

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection...
10/06/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

Songs of steel and current. Deep listening to Beatriz Cortez’s Speculative Archive of Earth and Migration
✍️ Written by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes

Paulina Ascencio Fuentes is a researcher, curator, and a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at New York University. Her research on “Terror verde/Green Terror” engages feminist ethics of care and collaborative methodologies to address fire practices, ecological violence, and Indigenous territorial struggles on the P’urhépecha Plateau, in Michoacán, Mexico.

📖 This essay offers a speculative and dialogic reading of “Ilopango, the Volcano That Left” (2023), a sculptural installation by artist Beatriz Cortez which was transported through the Hudson River, in Upstate New York. Framed as a conversation between a migrating volcano and the river Muhheakantuck, the text practices “deep listening” as a method for engaging with more-than-human histories of earth, water, and cycles of displacement.

Image: Beatriz Cortez, “Ilopango, The Volcano That Left,” Hudson River journey, 2023. Courtesy of artist and EMPAC at RPI. Image: Kyle Van Sandt.

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection...
09/06/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

The Border as Sacred Entity in the Work of Celia Álvarez Muñoz
✍️ Written by Itayecxi Álvarez

Itayecxi Álvarez is a multidisciplinary artist and museum professional based in Washington, DC, with an MA in Museum Studies. Born and raised on the El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Mexico border, she draws inspiration from the cultural richness of the southwest and the stories of fronteriza communities. Passionate about storytelling and the representation of Latinx art and culture in the United States, her work spans research, writing, curatorial practice, and collaborative art projects.

📖 This essay examines Celia Álvarez Muñoz’s “Petrocuatl” (1988) and “El Río Habla” (2002) as interwoven artistic interventions into the cultural, spiritual, and material realities of the U.S.–México borderlands. Both works engage with the Rio Grande as a sacred, liminal site where dualities – indigeneity and colonialism, labor and land, life and death, memory and erasure – converge.

Image: Celia Álvarez Muñoz, “El Río Habla/The River Speaks,” (2002). One of six landings designed by the artist for the Historic Civic Center River Link Project, San Antonio, Texas. Courtesy of the artist.

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.To vie...
09/06/2026

To celebrate the launch of “Sacred Futurities,” we are highlighting the authors who contributed to the collection.

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

Enter Sacred Futurities
✍️ Written by Lineadeluz

Lineadeluz is a Mexican American media-expansive artist, educator, and researcher exploring digital embodiment, ritual, and technologies of the self through AI, video, performance, and mixed media. They are the founder of The Selfie Institute for Selfie Studies (SISS), an independent artist-led platform researching how digital platforms shape identity, visibility, memory, and self-exploration online. Their work has been presented at The Wrong Biennale, Zona Maco, NFTNYC, and The Feminist Art Museum, and featured through The Latinx Project at NYU and The International Journal of Information, Diversity & Inclusion.

📖 Lineadeluz’s dynamic introduction to the collection invites viewers on an interactive exploration of each essay’s themes that cross, tangle, and intersect across the works discussed.

Image by Lineadeluz.

09/06/2026

A few weeks ago, we joined with National Museum of Mexican Art to present “X as Intersection: Lines of Descent,” a conversation with Latinx Artist Fellows Santa Barraza, Marcus X. Chormicle, and Shizu Saldamando. …and then we had another rowdy dinner. 😉

⬇️

X as Intersection is a five-part public program series featuring conversations with fellows from the fifth cohort of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, an initiative of the US Latinx Art Forum. Each program brings together artists and curators in dialogue across mediums, geographies, and generations with opportunities for live exchange and Q&A. Recordings are available on USLAF’s YouTube channel.

⬇️

The US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is dedicated to art by US inhabitants of Latinx descent and their communities. We intentionally use the “x” in Latinx to create an expansive and convivial space that fosters relationships within and beyond hemispheric American art. Hanging out in this space generates new exhibitions, scholarship, programs and collaborations that advance the field into a dynamic future.

The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is excited to announce that “Sacred Futurities,” the seventh collection of essays in c...
08/06/2026

The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) is excited to announce that “Sacred Futurities,” the seventh collection of essays in conjunction with “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art,” is now live!

“Sacred Futurities,” edited by Josh T Franco, brings together the following writers and artists:

- A dynamic introduction to the collection by Lineadeluz
- Itayecxi Álvarez on Celia Álvarez Muñoz
- Paulina Ascencio Fuentes on Beatriz Cortez
- Erika Hirugami on Tanya Aguiñiga
- Abeyami Ortega Dominguez on rafa esparza
- Xavier Robles Armas on Koyoltzintli

To view the full collection and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/sacred-futurities/

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