Carlos and Fernando Estrada-Lopez, social workers in Los Angeles, are depicted as haloed saints locked in an embrace in Gabriel García Román’s Queer Icons series. Surrounding them are floating messages in both Spanish and English, including phrases like “Raised on frijoles and family,” “Bicultural,” and “Puro Pinche Queer!” (“Pure Fucking Queer”).
Selections from Román’s Queer Icons photogravure series will be featured alongside zines, posters, and art books from over 30 Latinx artists and scholars at the inaugural La Feria print media art fair. This event, organized by The Latinx Project at New York University (NYU), will take place this Saturday, September 21.
Arlene Dávila, the founding director of The Latinx Project, explained to Hyperallergic that the one-day event aims to “help shift the fair ecosystem toward greater accessibility for artists everywhere.” Dávila, who published a book on Latinx art, markets, and politics in 2020, noted that “Latinx artists are rarely represented in a system dominated by galleries, which are prohibitively expensive and not open to unsolicited artist submissions.” She added that the fair “helps address the gap in opportunities for artists to sell their work.”
The exclusion of Latinos in art spaces extends beyond New York City’s art fair season. Latinx curators and artists continue to grapple with historical marginalization, decades after the Smithsonian Institution’s 1994 report acknowledged it had “willfully neglected” Latinos in “almost every aspect of its operations.” More recently, the American Alliance of Museums stated that Latinos remain “woefully underrepresented in museum collections, exhibitions, staff, and boards.” Organizations like The Latinx Project, founded in 2018, are dedicated to addressing this ongoing inequity.
While this is the first art-specific fair under The Latinx Project name, NYU hosted an annual Latin American Book Fair in the late 1980s and early ’90s, featuring hundreds of distributors from Spain, Latin America, and the United States.
La Feria’s participating artists were selected from an open call, attracting photographers, painters, zine makers, small independent presses, and other artists to sell their works without a participation fee. Gabriel Magraner, Associate Director of The Latinx Project, told Hyperallergic that La Feria’s operating expenses are low because they utilize campus space at no cost, allowing for free public admission and exposure for artists.
Culture Crush, founded by Debra Scherer, is one of the presses participating in the event, showcasing photography by South Bronx Puerto Rican photographer Ricky Flores and Chicano photographer Destiny Mata, who documents the punk scene in New York City.
At another booth, Panamanian-American curandero and visual artist Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown will display their work, including a black print with the message “I learned how to love and heal in my abuelita’s kitchen” in all capital white letters.
In addition to art publications and works on paper, the fair will feature dozens of recently published scholarly titles on Latinx culture, history, and politics, covering themes such as race, border militarization, and queer identity. Notable titles include Elizabeth Ferrer’s Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021), Regina Marie Mills’s Invisibility & Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades (2024), Juana María Rodríguez’s Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (2023), and Michelle Castañeda’s Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law (2023).
“This type of book showcase is quite rare outside of an academic conference,” Magraner said, adding that the display will put Latinx scholarship “in conversation with arts and culture.”
Sayart / Amia Nguyen, amyngwyen13@gmail.com
