speaker: "The fence the razorwire the eagle and the serpent el nopal la mariposa what emerges what is the fusion who will solve the puzzle who will liberate what war lays ahead Tenochtitlán rise again."

♪♪♪ Andrea Alvarez: In 2021 I started thinking about an exhibition that grouped together this population of artists, and I wanted to of course, you know, have a rubric or a framing device that could help us understand and grasp who it is that we're looking at, what it is that we're looking at when we're looking at Latinx art.

I decided to lean on the discipline of painting because the AKG's collection is so strong in painting.

And then to be able to see that body of work from Latinx artists and how they're responding very often to those traditions of European and American painters and the way that their work directly reflects, directly responds to or pushes up against those traditions.

So it's 58 artists, all of whom live and work in the US or the Caribbean.

I really wanted to make this a nice sort of generational range to give visitors a sense of what's happening today, really what's happening right now.

But artists who are working--who have been working in this field for decades and then artists who are very, very fresh.

As I was visiting artist studios, I started to sort of gather together these different, what felt like, shared concerns or shared themes if you will.

And it felt like in some cases, explicit conversations, and in other cases, implicit conversations, between artists who don't even know each other and haven't met but they're making work that touches on similar topics.

That became the organizational structure of the exhibition.

It really sort of was the armature for how artworks get hung in the galleries, how they went into the book.

What's really sort of fun and generative about that is that artists can also--could theoretically move between those because their works could fit into multiple thematic groupings.

It's just a starting point.

It's a way into each artwork if you need an entry point to think about, to sort of understand a work of art, that's one way in.

When you're walking through the galleries or you're flipping through the catalog, you might think of it like you're eavesdropping on these conversations that are happening in the field, right?

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ speaker: This is your life.

This is the first or last piece of the life you said you carried on your back.

Take a step, take another step.

[speaking Spanish].

[speaking Spanish].

Angel Otero: There is a blurriness to that kind of exercise of remembering, right?

And trying to confront by reproducing.

Is it writing?

Is it on a painting?

Is it on any other kind of art motif?

But it's hard, and I noticed at times there's been moments where I feel very confident about the story that happened to me when I was young, and I get inspired by that memory.

But what of what I remember is true and what is not true, what I have developed on myself during years where I'm like, oh yeah, this fire in this house started in the room, I remember and we were running and this happened and passed to the bath--to the bathroom.

You know, someone like my mom would be like, "That's not what happened."

And I'm like, wow, 'cause I could bet that this is how it happened.

And I think there is a human quality to--a human quality to that effect which can be poetically translated into art forms like painting in my case.

We are beings that carry the weight of our history, of our cultural.

Even if we're not stopping to think how we can translate those kind of feelings, I think on myself, I let that kind of filters in the way that that, you know, artistically let it out.

So it's not something that I'm constantly thinking just in the case because I feel that it makes me stop and I like to be someone that is impulsively constantly just reacting and creating and doing and putting things over things.

And eventually when I finish works, I have the exercise of constantly step back and analyze where am I standing in these different points of view.

So I can just also learn about, you know, how is it that I'm responding to all those things.

So it's really a conversation between this object that I'm making in myself and the same time accidents that happen that kind of interrupt what you're--what you're aiming to convey in the imagery.

And those accidents are also part of your present so you're having the present and past kind of collapse, and, you know, sounds poetic but I love accepting it from that point of view.

speaker: The skin only, the skin stays.

Is this who you are?

Is this who we are?

Humanity loses us.

[speaking Spanish].

[speaking Spanish].

Amy Bravo: The thing that I want my audience to take away is this combination of love and anger and also like a feeling of really trying to stake your claim to something that everyone is telling you is not yours.

So whether that's a place, a position of power, a way of moving through the world.

That's what's important to me is that feeling that you can fight for that power in whatever body you're doing it in.

The figure in my work has been--I think of her as my video game avatar self in a way, like the version you make of yourself when you have access to all the sliders and you can make her like super buff or maybe this time she has two heads.

I think growing up I've always been a very small person, and I grew up around a lot of men and had a very--like a very distinct experience of how I moved through the world in comparison to the men around me and what ways we got to employ our strength and anger.

And my figure is really a vessel for all of that, she's kind of blank in the sense that I don't want her to seem like she's really alive.

I think the world of the work is kind of happening in a place beyond life.

And so over time, I think she's become less distinctive, she's more like a cartoon the more I work with her.

I originally started trying to make my work using like old family photos, and it felt a little dishonest to me, and I got really hung up on the idea of like what if you could regrow your family and have like a new version of your family that you would totally get along with, and you'd all be aligned together?

And I was like, that would just be an army of little clones of yourself, and so that's kind of the figure in the work.

I was like let's be honest about that because that's what you want.

Like you don't want your family back in a--in a different way.

You want--you want to have enough power yourself to like take down--I don't know, to storm the Bastille if you need to.

So now, especially right now I think in the current moment, I'm thinking a lot about collective power, and collective power for small--anyone who feels in the scope of the world, small.

So I certainly feel in the scope of the world, small.

speaker: When I walk with my mother in the flowery dress and her hair braided with stars and blossoms, this is when I know who I am and who she is and what is, what is.

[speaking Spanish].

[speaking Spanish].

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.

: My work is informed by my life.

Father's a signed painter, painted graffiti, grew up in a certain part of LA, like all these sorts of things like really informed my work.

And even just like working, painting the ads and being on these rooftops, you know, I'd be on a lot of these like--these locations in downtown LA or Hollywood or like even New York or things like that where like I always had a different perspective because of like the unique situation I was in.

And so I guess I just sort of developed this thing of like obsessively documenting primarily Southern California, Los Angeles, and primarily like my part, my perspective of LA.

A lot of the materials I use are still from when I was painting these walls.

We had a lot of leftover paint.

We would consolidate paint from the job site.

We would like have to clean the shop, so I would take the paint.

That's what a lot of this stuff is.

It gives it like a very specific look, very specific colors.

I use colors straight out of the can, but also like the approach to the work.

You know, so the way some of these like very experienced artists and painters taught me was--is you paint bright.

You know, we use--it's like a lot of these ads are meant to be seen from a distance.

I really simplify things, I add things, I take things out, just approach it through my--yeah, through my filter, through my--through my lens through--you know, these ways that--I sort of like combine all these ways of working and like I think humor plays a big role.

Laughing and making fun of something or just like something being so ridiculous that it's like, how are we just pretending like this is like normal, you know?

Like these weird advertisement tactics or these like weird like architectures to prevent someone from like skateboarding or sleeping or these things that it's like damn, like we're like actually like changing the landscape.

And then like now, this place looks different because of it, right?

So I think that's like what I'm thinking about in the work.

speaker: It is good to lean on the edge of reality, changing its colors and destinations for you, for me.

[speaking Spanish].

[speaking Spanish].

Candida Alvarez: But I think this idea of abstraction is a very living thing.

It's not just something that falls into art history.

For me, it occupies this very present space and so it allows me a way of working where I can capture photographs in real time, you know, make photographs in real time and hold images that I can later use to describe a space.

And so my work really comes from being present in my moment, right?

My living moment.

I've never known where the camera is gonna pull me into.

I have this iPhone now.

I used to--I--when I was little, I did save up money to buy a 35 millimeter camera, which I loved, and I always thought I'd be a photographer, but I think that it allows me to have an encyclopedic relationship to pic--to the picture, right, I mean that I created.

It's not just the pictures that I find that--by others, but there are pictures that I take that I can use as well, right?

So that's really--that's important.

So my work is not something that's just sourced from the history books, right?

Or this idea that it's--there's a limitation to it or there's this idea that, you know--I mean 'cause picture making, you know, there's so many threads, and I mean, of course, there's always been the historical one, right?

Which is--which is always--could be a question mark because it depends on whose history you're looking at.

Who's being--who's being part of the conversation, right?

There's so many people that were left out of that, right?

So there are histories, but with the camera, you're constantly making history, right?

You're constantly taking or receiving impulses, right, to click.

And what--how does that happen, right?

And so I think that that idea of light needing shadow is--always been very intriguing to me.

speaker: The sun retreats.

All there is, our voice, our looking at all.

[speaking Spanish].

Yvette Mayorga: I mean I've always been really fascinated with the color.

All of the sort of consumer culture of my childhood was very much focused on the color pink, and so there's like this natural drive to the color.

But from my perspective now, I--I'm really interested in using pink as a material, just like the paint and the process of labor that I'm referencing and the way that I'm applying paint, that's a material in itself.

And pink is also a material where there's a lot of associations with what pink can do.

And the sort of idea is that pink can only do so much and pink can only, you know, capture so much sort of, you know, layers and like the sort of profoundness that can be associated with the color.

And I'm trying to expand on that because I see a connection with also the stories that I'm trying to tell, like my family's history, my perspective as a Latinx first-generation Mexican-American woman.

It's sort of all of these kind of points of views from like the underdog that I'm pulling in together to kind of create a really like powerful punch with this color pink, with the--these narratives, and then inserting them within Rococo art history, which has also, you know, really been seen as like a frivolous moment.

But I think combining them all together, it creates for a really powerful tool in my work to be able to tell the stories that I wanna tell and to offer an alternative narrative.

Yeah, I include a lot of references to technology.

It's sort of like jokester playful side of the work as well where on top of, you know, like the images of the reference in the phone or in the laptop of the actual painting that I'm, you know, recreating in my own language, I'm also including memes, like contemporary memes or like moments of joy or like doomscrolling, and it's all very much like reflective of the time that we're currently in and, you know, moments of like awareness and researching for expansion, but it's the doomscrolling part is also kind of like posing a question of our sort of obsession with these things.

speaker: Let us go to sleep together.

Let us raid with paint and paint each other and each life in ribbon colors so many lives, so many strangers and family eternal, the dreams.

Let us talk.

Let us dream.

Let us fall apart into each other.

[speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] [speaking Spanish] Shizu Saldamando: I really like people.

I feel like something so deep and powerful about the way we all construct ourselves not only with like fashion, tattoos, or whatever these different cultural signifiers might be.

But I feel like people are the embodiment of histories of political struggles, and it shows with how we present ourselves.

I went to undergrad at UCLA in the '90s, and I was constantly going to music shows and concerts, backyard parties, so it started out as me like documenting subculture because I was a part of different subcultures around LA, and they're all predominantly Latinx, Chicano.

And so I just would draw my friends and family, I guess like people in the community that I thought were interesting that kind of shared similar aesthetics, similar taste in music.

Now the practice has become a little more calculated in terms of I'll be like, can I go visit you in your studio perhaps and take some photos of you there and do a portrait?

Sometimes it's more spontaneous.

We'll be at the same party and I'll take a photo of them.

That's why there's a lot of drinking in like some of the portraits because we're at parties, and people are holding a cup or something like that.

So it's by virtue of where I happen to be, which is a lot of art exhibitions nowadays and people's studios, studio visits, that kind of thing.

I kind of view all the portraits as this indexical kind of like slice of life or biography almost because it's like where I kind of traverse or where I live and what I see and who I encounter, so the portraits become a part of like--they'll be named after like a city or something or I'll be like, Carmen, Kat and Downey or I'll do--you know, I'll name the neighborhood that the photo that I took to work off of was.

So I think it's more of just like almost a weird biographical excavation rather than a documentation maybe, yeah.

speaker: Where were you?

Where was I when all we had was a handful of dirt?

[speaking foreign language].

Patrick Martinez: I guess I'm just like interested in like subverting the landscape right?

Or just like landscapes can be very beautiful and they are and I play on a lot of it, I show things that are beautiful.

But here in Los Angeles specifically, I feel that there's a very dark undertone to that, right?

It's like this--one of the most expensive places to be in the United States.

Everyone's, you know, wants to be here and the traffic is, you know, definitely a dead giveaway, so it's a beautiful backdrop that has these kind of, for me, these dark undertones.

And every--you know, even just the violence that happens in that landscape with the ICE kidnappings and the raids and, you know, just past--this past January, the fires in Altadena, talking about Pasadena and the Palisades, like that's all changing the landscape.

The things that are happening in it, the things that are, you know, caused by climate change.

So if you pay--like I'm trying to pay attention enough to like trying to like figure out like yeah I'm capturing this kind of like--this kind of hustle and bustle of the city life in some pockets of LA that aren't looked at, but I'm also thinking about like how those things are being affected and how I feel like this fire--these fires that came into Altadena and the Palisades, that they're the closest that they've been to the city, and they've been--they affected the city directly, like burned, you know, latex paint on walls and obviously burned down buildings and homes.

So, I feel like the distance is getting closer, like all these things that I'm thinking about and that violence or that, you know, that kind of dark undertone is getting closer.

But like I wanna present like this beauty also, right?

Like this--yeah, it is beautiful, but then I don't want to acknowledge-- I don't not want to acknowledge that, you know, and that gets included in the work too.

speaker: "stay we shall walk together and become one" [speaking foreign language].

Andrea: I think for the first time we're going to see so many of the artists all together.

You know, it's very often these exhibitions are set up in categories like geographic categories or thematic categories, so the subsets are smaller.

And this show is just a bigger--it's a bigger subset of artists.

It's still a subset, there are still so many artists that I wish I could have included and couldn't.

But I think that's the joy of it is getting so many voices together and seeing what happens with those sort of new different frictions.

You know, a lot of LA artists alongside a lot of New York artists, a lot of Chicano artists alongside a lot of Caribbean artists.

And what happens when you put those artists in conversation?

What's shared and what's not shared between them?

I think--I'm really interested to see what those answers are, and I don't know even now until I've sat with them, you know, for the six months that the exhibition's on view here.

Andrea: There's no doubt that an exhibition like this is gonna have a different saliency, a different resonance in 2026 than it would have if it opened in 2021 when I started working on it or in other years.

The art these artists have been making work like this and have been developing their practices for much longer than what's happening in our political moment.

And these cultural sort of concerns, the scholarly concerns that we have been sort of writing about and thinking about in the Latinx field, those also predate what's happening in the political moment, in the social moment.

So we have been working on this, the artists have been working in this.

And so it's really the public who's gonna be receiving it in a--perhaps a different light.

And the field, the artists, I think are just ready to be received, ready to be seen by a public that is hopefully ready to accept and to value their contributions.

I think now more than ever, we need to really make the case that these are really important cultural contributions and they need to be seen beyond just those of us who have been in the know for the last, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and people in the wider public need to start seeing what is really the richness of this community.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪