Panel: Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art

Celebrating the release of , The Latinx Project hosts a special panel on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 20 Cooper Square featuring artists Candida Alvarez, David Antonio Cruz and Maria Dominguez with moderator Adriana Zavala. Book editors Yasmin Ramirez and Arlene Dávila will offer an introduction.

The book is available for purchase at the event ($34.95 + tax) or online from Duke University Press ($24.95 with 30% off code E25NYRCN).
“Making an important contribution to the fields of art history and cultural studies, this volume constitutes a groundbreaking study of the varied and wide-ranging visual art and aesthetics of Nuyorican and Diasporican communities. This unique and much-needed book challenges the elitism and racism that continues to characterize the art world and demonstrates that art-historical accounts of American and contemporary art that ignore or obscure the contributions of Nuyorican/Diasporican artists are incomplete and uninformed.” - Adriana Zavala
This program is co-sponsored by CENTRO.

About the artists:

Candida Alvarez is widely regarded as one of her generation’s most highly innovative and experimental painters. Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, among others. She has been granted the Trellis Art Fund Award, Arts and Letters Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Grant. Alvarez is an alum of Yale School of Art, and held the F.H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now Professor Emerit. In Fall 2024 Alvarez was the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at The Cooper Union. In 2025, Alvarez will present a major solo exhibition entitled at El Museo del Barrio. Alvarez is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery.

David Antonio Cruz explores the intersectionality of queerness and race through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and gender-fluid communities of color, Cruz examines the violence perpetrated against their members, conveying his subjects both as specific individuals and as monumental signifiers for large and urgent systemic concerns. A recent series explores the notion of "chosen family," the nonbiological bonds between queer people based on mutual support and love. Each painting depicts the likeness of the artist’s community, and at the same time, the portraits strive to capture much more than the physical representation of the figures; they venerate the overall structure of queer relationships, captured through intimate moments of touch, strength, support, and celebration.

Maria Dominguez, born in Puerto Rico migrated as a child and has been a lifelong resident of New York since. Her work is influenced by her environment as well as her cultural and community experiences. She received a BFA from School of Visual Arts and soon after established herself as a muralist after an internship awarded by CITYarts.org. In 2002 her public art trajectory led to a commission by The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City a permanent glass installation “El –Views” for the Chauncey Street station in Brooklyn, NYC. The following year it received an award by NY Municipal Society. In 2023 on the 23rd anniversary of “El Views,” the 16 original paintings of the work were acquired by the Museum of the City of New York and entered their permanent collection. Her latest “Sendero Verde” mural in East Harlem was installed and celebrated in 2024. Her work has been recognized by The National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Currently, El Centro at Hunter College is surveying her early murals and professional documents as well as produced “Dasporican Art in Motion” a short film documentation of her work to be viewed in 2025.

Adriana Zavala (Moderator) is Professor of contemporary Latinx and modern Mexican art in the department of History of Art and Architecture, and affiliated faculty in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora studies at Tufts University. Her most recent book Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City, co-authored with Delia Cosentino, was published by the University of Texas Press (2023). Zavala is the founding Executive Director of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (uslaf.org), a non-profit that champions artists by recognizing their work through the Latinx Artist Fellowship. USLAF’s newest initiative “Writing on Latinx Art,” an online free publication initiative, commissions original short-form essays on the Latinx Artist Fellows and their work.

About the book:

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. 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
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

Edited by Arlene Dávila and Yasmin Ramirez with Néstor David Pastor, Gabriel Magraner, and Nikki Myers

Host or Publisher The Latinx Project