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In Latinx Art Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.

In Mavericks of Style, Uri McMillan tells the story of New York City’s downtown art and fashion scene of the 1970s through the lives and careers of experimental Black and Brown artists. McMillan focuses on model and musician Grace Jones, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, fashion designer Stephen Burrows, and their orbit of friends, showing how they restlessly moved across genres and disciplines, transgressing boundaries between the commercial and the avant-garde. Bypassing the exclusive art world and cultivating uniquely personal styles, these artists thrived on friendship and collaboration in their experimental use of bold color, gold lamé, and Instamatic photography. McMillan transports readers to the spaces Jones, Lopez, and Burrows frequented and worked in, from hair salons, nondescript artist studios, and buzzy boutiques to funky discos and high fashion runways. By foregrounding their impact on the decade’s aesthetics, McMillan complicates and expands the understanding of these artists, offering a new vision of New York’s art world in sultry, bombastic color.

Although Puerto Rican artists have always been central figures in contemporary American and international art worlds, they have largely gone unrecognized and been excluded from art history canons. Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art provides a critical survey of Puerto Rican art production in the United States from the 1960s to the present. The contributors assert the importance and contemporaneity of the Nuyorican art movement by tracing its emergence alongside other American vanguardist movements, highlighting its innovations, and exploring it as an expression of Puerto Rican culture beyond New York to include cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Orlando. They also foreground the contributions and radical aesthetics of female, Black, and queer Puerto Rican artists. Following the expansion and decentralization of the Puerto Rican diaspora and its artistic output, this volume is a call to action for scholars, curators, and artists to address the historical inequalities that have marginalized Diasporican artists and reassess the presence of Puerto Rican artists.

With: Néstor David Pastor, Gabriel Magraner, and Nikki Myers

Contributors. Joseph Anthony Cáceres, Taína Caragol, Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé, Deborah Cullen-Morales, Arlene Dávila, Kerry Doran, Elizabeth Ferrer, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, Al Hoyos-Twomey, Teréz Iacovino, Johnny Irizarry, Johana Londoño, Urayoán Noel, Néstor David Pastor, Yasmin Ramirez, Melissa M. Ramos Borges, Raquel Reichard, Rojo Robles, Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, Wilson Valentín-Escobar

An in-depth look at how Latina/x artists transform art into activism and reclaim space in the Twin Cities

In Place-Keepers, Jessica Lopez Lyman examines how Latina/x artists in the Twin Cities navigate and challenge the region’s deep-seated racial injustices. Using “Inter-Latina movidas”—subtle yet strategic actions through which Latina/x artists forge solidarities, mobilize for justice, and reclaim space—these artists respond to systemic oppression through public performances and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the state, nonprofits, and other institutions.

Centering Latina/x women and gender nonconforming artists from Chicana/Mexicana, U.S. Central American, and Caribbean backgrounds, Place-Keepers confronts reductionist theories of Latinidad that flatten ethnic and racial identities. It demonstrates how the creative and activist practices of these cultural organizers address urgent social struggles from resisting gentrification and environmental destruction to opposing police violence. Lopez Lyman situates these efforts within the broader history of racial justice organizing in Minnesota, tracing a lineage of resistance that long precedes the 2020 Minneapolis uprising following the murder of George Floyd.

Through firsthand accounts and revealing case studies, Place-Keepers charts how these artists harness aesthetics as a tool for movement-building, strategically redistributing resources and transforming policy. Expanding the foundational concept of “movidas” in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x studies by highlighting maneuvers of infiltration, improvisation, individual ritual, and interdependence, Lopez Lyman establishes a crucial framework for understanding art as activism.

In Transplanetary Americas, Robb Hernández launches a propulsive pathway for Latinx cultural studies by exploring how the modern space race has driven artists to look upward and attune to expressions derived from the solar system and beyond. By advancing a theoretical and methodological framework he calls transplanetary relationality, Hernández shows how artists’ ascendant attentions unhinge Latinidades from their terrestrial bindings in an aerial pursuit of being with Earth and with other planets. Speculation, science, and technology fuel creative activities referencing the cosmos, taking Latinx art history into unexpected territory. Science fiction B-movie aesthetics empowers political statements of the third kind. NASA’s Apollo program sparks muralist imaginings about other planetary vistas. Private aerospace companies are prompting new generations of artist-activists to defend both land and sky. By showcasing visionaries who frustrate categories of time and place, Hernández’s investigation transcends the typical limits of border studies via a vertical scale, proving that the color of space is not only black but brown.

Visualizing Latinx elevates the stories of contemporary Latinx creators working in fashion, independent filmmaking, and public art who confront the systemic erasure of Latinx creativity. Arlene Dávila documents how these creatives strive to visualize their communities as a means of transforming society and asserting inclusion on their own terms. She highlights how these artists approach their work with purpose, intention, style, and ingenuity to showcase the value, joy, and complexity of Latinx identities. Looking to the academic sector as a sanctioning and uplifting force, Dávila also explores academia’s role in making Latinx histories and creative communities visible. By focusing on the inventive, transformative, and decolonial practices of Latinx artists and creatives, she argues that seeing and appreciating Latinx culture through visual media can be revolutionary in creating a more equitable and vibrant society for all.