75 Latinx Artists to Know

Tanya Aguiñiga

When Tanya Aguiñiga was a young woman growing up in Tijuana, Mexico, she would commute across the US-Mexico border to go to school in San Diego, California. This experience informs her current textile practice and the projects she’s helped launch—particularly AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), which stages “interventions” that use the border wall itself as a mechanism to form connections, much like the game “ring around the rosie.” Using the likes of human hair and beeswax, along with weaving traditions and furniture design studies in her site-specific installations, Aguiñiga considers how porous spaces, borders and such, can elicit tactile feelings of belonging and exclusion. —Paula Mejía

Elia Alba

Born in Brooklyn in 1961 to Dominican parents, Elia Alba makes multimedia works that elude categorization and place. Her intimate soft sculptures, photographs, and videos examine the human body and its ramifications in a racialized world through the lenses of unity and diaspora.

In works from the early 2000s, Alba photographed soft sculptures with photo-transferred images of human faces, assembled like doll heads in various arrangements and scenarios. In Multiplicities (2002), hundreds of doll heads make up the Twin Towers; in Unruhe (2001), they are poetically carried away by ocean tides; and in Doll heads (eyewash) (2001), they are washed in a sink. Many of these sculptures incorporated images of Alba’s own friends and family.

In 2006, to honor the late DJ Larry Levan’s legacy in queer circles of color, Alba created masks of Levan’s face and photographed dancers and DJs wearing them during three nights of parties in Bronx nightclubs. She continued to honor artists of color through her “Supper Club” series (2012–2019), where she hosted dinners and photographed more than 50 of her peers transformed into archetypal figures. Alba’s most recent works revisit soft sculpture, featuring hands of different skin tones that imply varied life experiences. Some of the hands clasp each other, suggesting intimacy through a handshake or an embrace. —A.S.

Carlos Almaraz

A founding member of the Chicano muralist group Los Four, Carlos Almaraz was among the few Chicano artists to achieve mainstream acclaim at the height of his career. Born in Mexico City in 1941, Almaraz moved with his family first to Chicago and then to Los Angeles while he was a child. Though he is most associated with LA, he lived in New York during the 1960s but struggled to find success in the city, finding much to be desired in minimalism, which reigned supreme at the time. Upon his return to the West Coast, he became involved with the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, creating artworks for the movement’s cause as well as providing sets for El Teatro Campesino, often called the cultural arm of the UFW.

In 1973 he cofounded Los Four with Frank Romero, Robert “Beto” de la Rocha, and Gilbert “Magu” Luján. One year later, Los Four became the first-ever Chicano artists to exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and one of the earliest Latinx artist groups to have a major exhibition at a mainstream museum.

As a painter, Almaraz is best known for his canvases that depict both real and imagined vistas of Los Angeles, primarily in vivid tableaux—fiery scenes of car crashes on LA’s twisting highways, fantastical views of Echo Park at various times of day, and otherworldly gatherings of mystical figures, among others. (Because of his somewhat closeted identity as a bisexual man, Almaraz’s depictions of Echo Park are typically seen as painterly documentation of an important cruising site for men who have sex with men.)

Almaraz died in 1989 at the age of 48 from AIDS-related causes. In 2017 LACMA mounted a major retrospective of his art, and he was the subject of a 2020 documentary, Carlos Almaraz: Playing With Fire, directed by his widow and fellow artist, Elsa Flores Almaraz, and actor Richard J. Montoya. —Maximilíano Durón

Celia Álvarez Muñoz

Conceptual artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz once told an interviewer that she lives by these words: Nothing is forever. A paean to living in the present, the motto also serves as an apt lens through which to consider Álvarez Muñoz’s expansive artistic oeuvre, which ranges from photography to works on paper and beyond, and often evokes a sense of impermanence. Born in 1937, Álvarez Muñoz came of age in the liminal borderlands of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico—a formative experience that makes its way into her work.

Álvarez Muñoz started making art in her 40s, when she began graduate studies in photography at the University of North Texas. Álvarez Muñoz’s five-decade artistic evolution was illuminated in “Breaking the Binding,” her 2023 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. A highlight of the show were monumental immersive installations like Fibra, in which Álvarez Munoz embellished clothing to draw attention to the fashion industry’s sexualization of women. —P.M.

Jackie Amézquita

Guatemalan artist Jackie Amézquita has been known to use her own body in her sculptures, photos, and paintings that incorporate natural materials like dirt. For a riveting piece shown in the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial, El suelo que nos alimenta (2023), Amézquita sourced dirt from the 144 distinct neighborhoods that make up Los Angeles County. Mixing each dirt sample with salt, masa, limestone, rainwater, and copper, Amézquita created 144 panels, hung on the wall in a grid, that evoked the twin themes of nourishment and displacement. —P.M.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio

A rising artist born and based in Los Angeles, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio has established himself as an important voice in the city’s art scene. In 2016 he began a series called “Caucho (Rubber)” in which he casts the trunks of various trees throughout L.A. in rubber and transforms them into art objects. Aparicio’s use of materials for this series is significant: He typically casts ficus trees, which are nonnative to the city and the target of a decades-long removal effort by the city, and the rubber he uses is created from the sap of Castilla elastica, a species native to El Salvador. In many ways, this series serves as a metaphor for the ways in which immigrants, particularly those from Latin America and the Caribbean, are treated in this country.

In other works the artist has looked at his family history as it relates to the civil war in El Salvador, waged throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. For his first major institutional show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he poured amber over various documents from the civil war and found detitrus from MacArthur Park (a hub for the Salvadorean community in L.A.) to mimic the shape of El Playon, a dumping ground for countless bodies, including that of his half-sister, during the war. Aparicio previously used amber for a work installed at the Hammer Museum and more recently for a sculpture at the 2024 Whitney Biennial that ultimately melted during the show’s run, revealing the documents once obscured inside. —M.D.

ASCO

Taking the Spanish word for “nausea” or “disgust” as its name, ASCO was active in the 1970s and ’80s in East Los Angeles. Its core members—Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro, Willie F. Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez—together staged political performances that aimed to call attention to issues facing the Chicano community, with a key focus on aesthetics. Between its founding in 1972 and its final happening in 1987, ASCO would bring other artists into its orbit, including Daniel Joseph Martinez, Diane Gamboa, Robert “Cyclona” Legorreta, Roberto Gil de Montes, and Mundo Meza, among others.

The group would often stage its performances on Whittier Boulevard, a main thoroughfare on LA’s Eastside. One of these was First Supper (After a Major Riot), from 1974. With cars driving by and the green highway sign for “Whittier Bl” above them, the group sat at a table in the street’s median strip, their faces in Día de los Muertos makeup, a blowup doll at their feet. The median had been the site, a year earlier, of a riot protesting redevelopment in that part of East LA. Earlier works, like Stations of the Cross (1971) and The Walking Mural (1972), saw them walking down Whittier in elaborate costumes and makeup as a way to comment on opposition to the Vietnam War, heightened police scrutiny and brutality against the Chicano community, and the censorship of Chicano murals after the antiwar Chicano Moratorium of 1970.

Works like Instant Mural (1974) called into question the permanence—and elevated stature—afforded to muralism, a popular mode of working at the time in the Chicano Art Movement. In that work, Valdez stood flush against a wall to which she has been taped. The group also created No Movie, shown in 1978. For that work, they created film stills for movies that did not exist (their work was independent of the now more famous Pictures Generation artists working in New York). Perhaps the group’s most famous performance is Spray Paint LACMA (1972), which was equally a work of activism and of formal achievement. In the photograph documenting it, we see Valdez standing over a railing outside the museum, below which we see tags for herrón and Gamboa sprayed in black and GRONKIE in red. The idea for the work, per Gamboa’s recounting, was a LACMA curator’s remark that Chicanos don’t make art; they join gangs. Though the graffiti was quickly whitewashed by the museum, ASCO proved them wrong—the work is among the most important of the era. The protest spurred real change: Los Four, another Chicano artist collective active in L.A., would receive an exhibition at LACMA two years later. ASCO would get its own LACMA retrospective in 2011. —M.D.

Judith F. Baca

The Chicana artist, activist, and educator Judith F. Baca was born in 1946 in Los Angeles. Renowned for her influential public art, especially murals that give voice to marginalized communities, she played a vital role in the Chicano Mural Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1974 Baca founded Los Angeles’s first mural program, which produced more than 400 works and employed thousands of local participants. It evolved into an arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which she cofounded in Venice, California.

Baca is best known for The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a monumental half-mile mural that traces California’s history with an inclusive lens along the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley. The process of creating this work between 1974 and 1984 exemplified the idea of the “community mural movement,” employing more than 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds, artists, oral historians, and scholars. In 2017 The Great Wall of Los Angeles was added to the National Registry of Historic Places, and in 2021, the Mellon Foundation gave SPARC a $5 million grant to expand The Great Wall’s imagery into the present.

Along with her artistic contributions, Baca has had a distinguished career as an educator at UCLA, where she is a distinguished professor emeritus in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Central American Culture. —Mauricio E. Ramírez

Firelei Báez

Drawing on colonial histories of power (including maps, botanical manuscripts, and architectural blueprints) as well as colorful elements of mythology and folklore, Firelei Báez’s multimedia works encompass painting, sculpture, and installation. Born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, in 1981, Báez produces works that parse the interrelated histories of Hispaniola and other sites of colonial violence. Often juxtaposing divergent elements that allude to these mixed histories, Báez’s layered works inspire awe and reward close looking. In some paintings, salient signifiers like Black hair and skin are overlaid with clouds of vibrant color and budding plant life, as in Untitled (Anacaona) and Untitled (Le Jeu du Monde), both from 2020; others, like How to slip out of your body quietly (2023), subtly evoke mythological icons like the ciguapa. In Báez’s works that feature human bodies, the figures are abstract and evasive, encouraging us to think about our own positioning in the world, effectively dissolving the mirage of ahistoricity.

In combining elements of surrealism, mythology, and colonialism, Báez challenges linear subjectivity and subverts authority. Her solo exhibition “Trust Memory Over History” is currently on view at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany. —A.S.

Luis Bermudez

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Luis Bermudez, the late sculptor and craftsman, specialized in crafting ceramics that resemble pre-Columbian artifacts, which he encountered during frequent visits to Mexico on family trips as a child. His “Myth, Place & Identity” ceramic series, exhibited as part of his posthumous entry at the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial, melded Mesoamerican forms with personal references related to his upbringing and extensive travels. Bermudez is notable for an experimental approach to mold- and glaze-making, which inventively pushed the medium forward. —P.M.

Louis Carlos Bernal

Often called the godfather of Chicano photography, Louis Carlos Bernal, born in Douglas, Arizona, in 1941, emerged as a leading practitioner of the medium in the 1970s. After receiving his MFA from Arizona State University, he moved to Tucson, where he embraced the identity of Chicano, as opposed to Mexican American. As he said in a 1984 interview, “Chicanismo allows us to accept our history but also gives us a new reality to deal with the present and future. To be a Chicano means to be involved in controlling your life. Chicanismo represents a new sense of pride, a new attitude and a new awareness.”

In 1974 and again in 1979, Bernal received the Time-Life Yearbook Discovery Award, given each year to 50 emerging photographers. In 1979 he was one of five photographers—and the only Chicano in the cohort—who received a grant from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) to photograph everyday Chicano life throughout the Southwest; this led to the traveling exhibition “Espejo: Reflections of the Mexican American.” Though Bernal, who died in 1993 at 52, exhibited widely during his lifetime, including in major group exhibitions like “Ancient Roots/New Visions” (1977) and “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” (1990), he has never been the subject of a retrospective at a major museum. In 2024, Aperture published the first monograph of his work in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, which organized a survey of his work, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer.

In many of Bernal’s images, we see the beauty present in the Chicano community: a stylish couple on a date, an abuela in front of her elaborate altar decked out in flowers, a girl on the cusp of womanhood about to process into the mass for her quinceañera, generations of one family gathered for a baptism. In other images, we see community members agitating for change—on strike in the fields, for example. What stands out about Bernal’s photographs is the access to people’s homes that he had. We see Chicanos at home, at leisure, surrounded by their things and by photographs of loved ones, saints, Robert F. Kennedy. There’s an intimacy to these images. These images in many ways combatted the Latino stereotypes depicted in the mainstream media at the time: gang members, “illegal aliens,” people “not from here.” Bernal’s lens refuses those characterizations. These are a people living in community, celebrating life, at home, creating beauty. —M.D.

Chaz Bojórquez

Chaz Bojórquez is an American Chicano artist often regarded as one of the founders of modern graffiti art. He is credited with bringing the Chicano and Cholo graffiti style into the established art scene. Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Bojórquez grew up in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, where he was influenced by the rich Chicano culture and the vibrant mural art and graffiti scene that surrounded him.

He began creating graffiti in the 1970s under the name Chaz and became well known for his “Señor Suerte” skull, an iconic motif in both graffiti and tattoo cultures. His art reflects his Chicano heritage, blending elements of calligraphy, Indigenous art, and urban graffiti styles. Bojórquez’s art has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, notably the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Getty Research Institute, also in Los Angeles. Bojórquez has played a significant role in winning global recognition for graffiti as a legitimate art form. —M.E.R.

Nao Bustamante

A year ago, the Mexican American multidisciplinary artist Nao Bustamante was at death’s door, though not in the way you might think. As part of a performance piece, Bustamante created an art space, entitled Grave Gallery, within a 3-by-7-foot burial plot at a Los Angeles cultural landmark: the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. On opening day, wearing an exaggerated black getup and wielding a Victorian-era instrument called a “spirit trumpet” (used in seances of that time), Bustamante played the part of a mourner summoning a spirit back to the realm of the living. The display, by turns provocative and reflective, is a distillation of what makes Bustamante a force in the LA art scene: her surprising and moving performances that play with taboos humans have long held sacred—even death—and excavating the places where the veil is thin. —P.M.

Margarita Cabrera

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, it’s not uncommon for maquiladoras—factories run by US companies that make computer and car parts, among other goods—to employ local women on their production lines. Shipped all over the world, and just across the border, the products carry prices that obscure the low wages the people who assemble them earn. In her work, multidisciplinary artist Margarita Cabrera plumbs the tensions and injustices that attend globalization. An expert seamstress, the Monterrey-born, El Paso–based artist makes sculptures of objects like bicycles, cactus plants, and even Hummers out of cloth, leaving the threads untrimmed. Drawing from movements like Pop art, traditions of textile work, and the ongoing realities of factory labor, Cabrera imbues innocuous-seeming objects with meaning that’s deeply felt. —P.M.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Cuban multidisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s work often takes inspiration from her family’s history. Descended from Chinese ancestors, as well as Yoruban people enslaved on the island, Campos-Pons, a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, excavates the interlaced legacies of colonialism, expatriation, and consumerism that are passed down through generations. Her artworks often take the form of immersive environments; her 1998 installation History of a People Who Were Not Heroes: Spoken Softly with Mama, for example, features ironing boards standing on end printed with archival images of women in the artist’s family and a video projection of the artist herself folding a cloth. Arranged on the floor in front of the ironing boards are molded glass irons and trivets. The piece is a celebration of her forebears, even as it is a pointed response to the history of forced labor of Black women in nations like the one in which she grew up. —P.M.

Barbara Carrasco

Barbara Carrasco is a Chicana artist, muralist, and activist. Born in 1955 in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican American parents, she was raised in Los Angeles. Carrasco has been active in the Chicano art movement since the 1970s. She studied at UCLA for her BFA and received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Carrasco was among the early artists involved in César Chávez’s United Farm Workers (UFW) movement. Inspired by a speech she heard him deliver at UCLA when she was 19, she immediately volunteered to help. Valdez dedicated her artistic talents to the UFW for 15 years, driven by her deep belief in the cause and Chávez himself.

Carrasco is most recognized for her murals, which often address themes of identity, feminism, and social inequality. One of her most notable works is L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981), a mural that vividly depicts the history of Los Angeles from an often overlooked and marginalized viewpoint. Commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) in 1981 for the city’s bicentennial, the mural was never displayed. The CRA requested the removal of 14 controversial scenes, but Carrasco refused. After a dispute over ownership, the artist gained possession of the piece and placed the mural in storage. In September 2024, the mural finally found a permanent home at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. —M.E.R.

Yreina D. Cervántez

A third-generation Chicana born in 1952 in Garden City, Kansas, Yreina D. Cervántez works across painting, printmaking, and muralism. She became an activist during her high school years, founding a chapter of United Mexican American Students (later renamed MEChA) at Westminster High School in Orange County, California. In 1970 she attended the Chicano Moratorium, a demonstration in East L.A. against the high death toll among Chicanos during the Vietnam War; that year she also enrolled as an art student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In the late 1970s, Cervántez became an artist in residence at Self-Help Graphics, where she would produce numerous prints over the course of her career. In 1999 she curated an atelier of prints by 11 women artists including Barbara Carrasco, Yolanda López, and Delila Montoya. She has also been involved with Mujeres de Maiz (“women of the corn”), an organization promoting art and wellness founded by artists in 1997.

At the core of her practice is the centering of women’s lives and their experiences, as well as environmental justice and immigration. Her works, which are equally informed by Mesoamerican mythology and philosophy, Mexican art traditions, and Chicanx poetry, are often dense and layered, frequently multipaneled, and at times depict multiple scenes in one work. Among her most famous murals is La Ofrenda (1990), an offering of sorts to activist Dolores Huerta (a cofounder of the United Farm Workers) that centers the contributions of Chicanas to the Chicano Movement. Located on Toluca Street below the First Street Bridge in downtown Los Angeles, the mural shows Huerta at its center, with various objects—candles, calla lilies, incense—and images of the farm workers for whom she advocated swirling around her. At the right is a reproduction of a poem by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose concept of nepantla, or “in-between-ness,” is a central point of departure in Cervántez’s art, as seen in one of her most famous prints, Nepantla Triptych (1995–96).

Another mural, a collaboration with Alma Lopez, La Historia de Adentro/La Historia de Afuera (1995), was created to represent the diversity of Huntington Beach, which through its beach culture has often been depicted as a white enclave. After the work was defaced and had begun to deteriorate, the work was whitewashed in 2009, despite Cervántez’s and Lopez’s offer to conserve it. All that remains are ceramic tiles that they incorporated into the piece. —M.D.

william cordova

The multidisciplinary Peruvian artist william cordova’s work is transfixing in both scope and scale. It’s easy to get pulled into his immersive pieces that often combine traditional materials—acrylic, graphite, oil—with reclaimed objects like speakers, lamp shades, and, once, a police car emblazoned with graffiti. cordova’s inventive repurposing of such objects asks viewers to consider our culture of disposability, and the life those objects might otherwise have. —P.M.

Beatriz Cortez

Born in 1970 in El Salvador, Beatriz Cortez is a Salvadoran American sculptor who works primarily in metal. She immigrated to the U.S. at age 18 in 1989, fleeing the Salvadoran civil war. Cortez’s art explores the simultaneity of different temporalities, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war or migration. She frequently engages in speculation, invoking visions of otherworldly refuges such as space stations. Simultaneously, her work remains deeply material, emphasizing the interplay between industrial elements like steel and the natural environment. Her work challenges the traditional concept of monuments as static objects, instead honoring the immigrant experience and acknowledging the continuum of what has been and what may yet come. —M.E.R.

Vaginal Davis

Performance artist, musician, filmmaker, curator, and author Vaginal Davis makes irreverent, satirical work that rebels against a gay mainstream that is predominantly white, capitalist, and exclusionary. Throughout her career, Davis has worked in various media, pushing the limits of experimentation in various genres.

Davis, a Los Angeles native with Black Creole roots, came up in the queercore zine movement of 1980s Los Angeles, where she fronted punk bands the Afro Sisters and Cholita–The Female Menudo. In the late 1980s, she published Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine, a queer zine that the artist later turned into video format, producing two experimental films in which she interviewed trans sex workers about fashion and beauty. Around the same time, Davis ran a gallery in her L.A. apartment, HAG Gallery (1982–1989), which was also the title of her first major solo exhibition at Participant, Inc., in 2012. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Davis led two more bands, Pedro, Muriel, and Esther (PME) and Black Fag, directing a visual album in video format for PME titled The White to Be Angry (1999).

For the past 20 years, Davis has been based in Berlin, where she has developed cosmetics-and-tempera paintings, performances (Speaking from the Diaphragm, 2010), and sculptures. Her iconic, genre-bending work has paved the way for countless artists and has defined the radical queer punk movement in the United States, stylishly and subversively challenging respectability and our own biases, assumptions, and perversions. —A.S.

Einar and Jamex de la Torre

Since the 1980s, brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre have worked in tandem to develop their prowess in glass blowing, resin casting, and lenticular printing, to create idiosyncratic figurines and assemblages. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and having grown up in both Mexico and Dana Point, California, the brothers were deeply impacted by pop culture iconography on both sides of the border, those influences indelibly woven into their monumental sculptures. Spotlighting their work and now touring the US is “Collidoscope: de la Torre Retro-Perspective,” a collaboration between the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum. —P.M.

Ofelia Esparza

Crafting ofrendas, offerings placed on a home altar for the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, is in artist Ofelia Esparza’s blood. The Chicana folk artist, who hails from Los Angeles, is a sixth-generation altarista who works from a deep belief in the indigenous tradition of honoring the dead, and whose personal home altars—incorporating flowers, photographs, and fruits—later became wholly immersive assemblages. Esparza crafted one of the first public altars in the United States, at LA’s Self Help Graphics in the late 1970s; she undoubtedly helped usher in a wider popularity for Día de los Muertos throughout the US, setting the stage for more contemporary interpretations of the holiday. Education has long been a core part of Esparza’s practice, and over many decades she’s taught the intricacies of altar making to interested parties and students wherever they gather. That includes Pixar: She was a consultant for the animation studio’s 2017 film Coco. —P.M.

rafa esparza

For Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist rafa esparza, the humble adobe brick isn’t just a building material. In esparza’s hands, adobe also becomes, as he describes it, a deliberate way of “browning” white gallery walls. Working with adobe is a response to how he hasn’t always felt welcome, as either a visitor or a contributor to art institutions. “This has been the case not only physically, in terms of the whiteness of those spaces, but also in terms of the histories of art they uphold,” he once told Artforum. Through his paintings, installations, and performance art—including full-tilt parades through Downtown Los Angeles—esparza’s work evinces the complex ways in which class, labor, and race intersect. —P.M.

Christina Fernandez

Since the 1990s, Christina Fernandez has created an impactful body of photographic work. Among her most famous pieces is Maria’s Great Expedition (1995–96), which reenacts the journey of her great-grandmother, Maria, from Mexico between 1910 and 1952 through six photographs. Fernandez stands in for her ancestor in images ranging from a young woman doing laundry by hand in Colorado in 1919 to an older woman hunched over the stove in 1950 San Diego. The work is as much a timeline of one family’s immigration story as it is the tracking of photography’s evolution as a medium. Another major work is the series “Untitled Multiple Exposures” (1999), featuring haunting images of Fernandez superimposed onto photographs by iconic Mexican photographers, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Nacho López, Tina Modotti, and Gabriel Figueroa. Other series explore the sites of commercial labor in Southern California and domestic labor outside the home; among these are “Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D” (1996–2000) and “Lavanderia” (2002–03), depicting garment factories and laundromats, respectively.

In addition to her art practice, Fernandez has sought to teach and mentor the next generation of Latinx artists; she has been a professor at Cerritos College since 2001. Her 2022 survey, “Multiple Exposures,” at the California Museum of Photography at UCR Arts was accompanied by an exhibition, “Tierra Entre Medio,” which showed Fernandez’s work alongside that of three emerging photographers. —M.D.

Teresita Fernández

Miami-born artist Teresita Fernández’s work often takes the shape of immersive installations; through them, she explores the nexus of the personal and the political. Her artworks—sculptures incorporating gargantuan hunks of rock, and site-specific installations made entirely of graphite, among other materials—are not so much objects as they are “landscapes,” as the MacArthur Fellow describes them. To absorb these pieces as environments unto themselves is to lend them a different kind of weight. Consider a work like Fire (United States of the Americas) 3 (2017–19),” a map of the US that she created out of charcoal, surrounded by a ghostlike outline of Mexico. Seen as layered topography, the work reflects entire lineages, conflicts, traumas, and truths. —P.M.

Rupert García

While attending the San Francisco School for the Arts on the G.I. Bill in the late 1960s, Rupert García began to embrace the political and social environment around him and quickly incorporated that into his art. Among the historical figures he would depict in his screen prints were revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara, and artists who became symbols for the Chicano community like Frida Kahlo. In addition to creating portraits that would become his calling cards, García made works with specific political messages, like ¡Cesen Deportación! (1973), calling for the end to deportations of migrant farm workers; ¡Libertad Para Los Prisoneros Politicas! (1971), featuring Angela Davis and made after her 1970 arrest; and DDT (1969), advocating for the banning of the dangerous pesticide.

García, born in California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1941, embraced printmaking as a way to quickly create art with a message and rapidly disseminate it to the community, which also served as a strategy to circumvent traditional forms of mass media. There’s a simplicity to many of his works, which often use just a few pop-inflected colors and bold lines. ¡Cesen Deportación!, for example, features the titular words in yellow on a red background with black barbed wire, while DDT shows a young girl screaming in pain, likely after being exposed to the chemical, set against a baby-blue background.

“The Chicano movement was crucial because it introduced ideas about who should be in a picture and why and for what purpose,” García recently told the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Like many artists of his generation, García, who earned a master’s degree in art history, was also crucial in developing scholarship around Chicano art, writing several essays on artists as well as a book on Chicano muralists in California. —M.D.

Carmen Lomas Garza

The Mexican American artist and educator Carmen Lomas Garza is known for her paintings, papel picado (paper cutouts), and altars that celebrate Mexican American culture and everyday life. Born in Kingsville, Texas, in 1948, Garza produces work that reflects her experiences growing up in a close-knit Chicano community. At 13 she taught herself how to draw and learned about the basics of art by checking out books from the library.

Garza’s art is characterized by its vibrant colors; attention to detail; and focus on family, tradition, and everyday events in the lives of Mexican Americans. Garza has exhibited her work in numerous museums and galleries across the United States. As an author-illustrator, she has also written several children’s books that are notable for their bilingual text and vivid illustrations. Through her art, she seeks to preserve and honor the traditions and stories of Mexican American life, making her an influential figure in contemporary Chicano art. —M.E.R.

Maria Gaspar

Maria Gaspar’s interdisciplinary work explores the architectures of incarceration that impact community definitions of home and place. Incorporating the public as active participants in critical witnessing, Gaspar, born in 1980 in Chicago, invites the collective imagining of alternatives, channeling possibility and new life in the face of systemic violence.

Gaspar’s “96 Acres Project” (2012–16) included a series of public interventions surrounding Cook County Jail in Little Village, the predominantly Mexican neighborhood of Chicago where she grew up. For this project, the jail’s walls separating “inside” from “outside” were activated, as were the adjacent street and sidewalk. Community members pressure-washed poetic phrases onto concrete, projected digital animations made by incarcerated artists, hosted live radio broadcasts, and participated in performance workshops led by formerly incarcerated women. Many of Gaspar’s other works incorporate sound, text, and the jail’s architecture, including We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), 2023, and Anything But Silent (2020). Through these participatory interventions, Gaspar conjures expansive definitions of restorative justice for low-income communities of color that extend beyond the penal system. —A.S.

Jay Lynn Gomez

Much is said about Los Angeles’s verdant gardens. But that attention is seldom directed toward the people who do the tough labor of trimming palm trees and cleaning pools. In her work, painter Jay Lynn Gomez—born to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents in San Bernardino, California—excavates the oft-unheralded stories of people whose labor sustains the image of the city as a well-manicured paradise. Earlier this year, however, for an exhibition at P.P.O.W gallery in New York, Gomez turned her focus inward. In a series of sumptuous mixed-media and painted works, Gomez documented her ongoing transition while paying tribute to the transgender women of color who have come before her. —P.M.

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day is an artist, photographer, and educator whose work critically examines the history of racial violence, representation, and identity construction in the United States. Born in Santa Clara, California, in 1964, Gonzales-Day grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, raised by a white mother and Mexican American father who created a politically progressive environment at home. His work involves the intersection of photography, history, and social justice and often explores themes of visibility, identity, and the consequences of historical amnesia.

Gonzales-Day is best known for his “Erased Lynching” series, in which he digitally removed the victims from historical lynching photographs, leaving only the perpetrators and onlookers. This series confronts the erasure of Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and African American victims from historical narratives of lynching, particularly on the U.S. West Coast. By excluding the victim, Gonzales-Day prompts viewers to confront the significant implications of this violence and the societal frameworks that allowed it. He also reveals how lynching was a more pervasive practice, extending beyond the assumed boundaries of the U.S. South. Not just a practitioner but a scholar, Gonzales-Day backed up this project with research he conducted for his book Lynching in the West: 1850–1935. Gonzales-Day holds an MFA degree from the University of California, Irvine, and teaches at Scripps College in Claremont, California. —M.E.R.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Cuban-born artist Felix González-Torres told fellow artist Ross Bleckner in 1995 that he learned more at flea markets than he did in art school. In González-Torres’s estimation, flea markets contain multitudes of “hidden histories.” González-Torres, who died the following year, of AIDS-related complications, similarly injected histories into his multidisciplinary work. Those histories emerge particularly in his installations, which remain some of his most recognizable pieces. Contemporary institutions to this day may choose to sell, show, or lend González-Torres’s art, as New York Magazine notes, so long as they follow a set of guidelines the artist left behind. One such piece, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), directs curators to use “candies in variously colored wrappers, endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 175 lb.”—a poignant nod to the body weight of the late Ross Laycock, González-Torres’s lover. —P.M.

Muriel Hasbun

Muriel Hasbun is a Salvadoran American artist recognized for her work in photography and visual arts. Born in San Salvador in 1961 to a Salvadoran-Palestinian father and a French-Polish Jewish mother, she was forced to flee the country during the civil war. Hasbun’s diverse heritage and background profoundly influence her art as she explores themes of memory, identity, and cultural heritage. Using an intergenerational, transnational, and transcultural perspective, Hasbun creates contemporary narratives that foster dialogue, prompting new reflections on identity and place through the exploration of individual and collective memory. In addition to her artistic practice, she is a committed college-level educator, having served as chair of the photography department at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. —M.E.R.

Carmen Herrera

For much of Carmen Herrera’s life, her contributions to the field of hard-edge abstraction were underrecognized, if not fully discounted. It wasn’t until she was in her 90s—she lived to be 106 and died in 2022—that the mainstream art world began to take notice. (She had been heralded within the Latinx art community for decades prior, having received her first major institutional show at El Museo del Barrio in 1998).

Born in 1915 in Havana, Herrera trained in Cuba as well as Paris and New York, moving permanently to the latter in 1954. During her time in Paris, she interacted with some of the 20th century’s most important artists, like Piet Mondrian and Joaquín Torres García. And it was in Paris that she found her artistic voice. Working in a mode similar to that of her contemporaries in New York, Herrera would go on to produce paintings known for their sharp lines and attuned use of color: crisp white, emerald green, royal blue, bright red, lemon yellow, deep orange, and black. In some canvases these manifest as simple triangles, while in others they appear as more complex geometrical shapes that zig and zag. Some of Herrera’s white-and-black paintings have an Op Art inflection. She would ultimately bring these paintings into the third dimension, first by creating shaped canvases that would hug each other, with slivers of space in between, and later by creating full-on sculptures of these forms. As she once said, “I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line; its beauty is what keeps me painting.” ­—M.D.

Lucia Hierro

Dominican American artist Lucia Hierro’s work often depicts items sold at bodegas in New York City’s Latinx enclaves—bags of Cafe Bustelo, packets of plantain chips, bottles of mango juice—in what she’s called “funny, soft, irreverent photo paintings.” Although her murals, assemblages, and soft sculptures can exude cheekiness, Hierro’s work (which is in the collections of El Museo del Barrio and the Guggenheim, among other museums) is also deeply layered with weightier themes of labor, class, and consumerism. —P.M.

Luchita Hurtado

Venezuela-born painter Luchita Hurtado’s success was long in the making: The artist died in 2020 at the age of 99, and didn’t become an art star until the last five years of her life. After a cache of her paintings was discovered in 2015, there followed a traveling career retrospective, “I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn;” an appearance in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in L.A. biennial; and a buzzy Hauser and Wirth show. Hurtado’s complete oeuvre spans eight decades and includes surrealist landscapes, word puzzles, figurative work, and meditative abstractions. Throughout her life, Hurtado considered her art-making less a vocation than something critical to her everyday existence—she once described it almost as “a need, like brushing your teeth.” —P.M.

Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra makes comedic, satirical, and sexy artworks that grapple with queer desire, longing, and exotification. Born in El Paso–Juárez in 1979 and currently based in Oakland, California, Ibarra makes work that defies simplistic readings and art-historical siloing. Her multimedia sculptures, videos, and performances reckon with the satirization of self in a world that too effectively packages and consumes our identities for the sake of optics and institutional control.

Ibarra began performing under the moniker La Chica Boom in 2004 and later created video works like Untitled Fucking (2013) and her “Spictacle” series (I, II, and III, 2014–15), which combine sexual encounters and identity play in surprising ways. Ibarra’s sculptures are similarly irreverent and include strap-on harnesses with Tapatío hot sauce bottles (Tapatio Cock, 2004; Mexi Strap-On Harness, 2015), oversize steel nipple tassels (Se Viene, 2020; Red, 2022), and pierced silicone genitals in hardware clamps (Free to Those Who Deserve It, 2020–ongoing). Ibarra’s more recent works underscore the failures of institutional archives and the hypocrisies of “legitimacy.” For A Scarlot Mouth Dawns (2023), Ibarra photographed and contextualized the ephemera of sex work activist Carol Leigh, and in Ashes of Five Feminist of Color Texts (2020), the artist cremated seminal texts by authors including Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw to satirize how elite academics have co-opted the works to perform hollow actions of “wokeness.” —A.S.

Virginia Jaramillo

When the El Paso–born, Los Angeles–raised abstractionist Virginia Jaramillo moved to New York City in the mid-1960s, she struggled to find a foothold within the city’s art scene. “Being Mexican American and … a woman, at that time, was really difficult,” she once said. “There was no room at all in any galleries, let alone major galleries that were handling women’s abstract art.” But Jaramillo also realized that out of the public eye, she could truly experiment with her work. Several decades on, the world has finally caught up to Jaramillo’s talent—her first major career retrospective is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. —P.M.

Luis Jiménez

The late sculptor Luis Jiménez was surrounded by vivid color from an early age. Hailing from El Paso, Texas, Jiménez grew up around—and later worked at—his father’s electric sign shop. There, he saw how practices      such as welding and spray-painting could produce shimmering works of art. After studying art and architecture, Jiménez found his medium in fiberglass, from which he made massive polychrome figurative sculptures shown at such venues as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Often provocative, Jiménez’s works challenged the myths that linger in the American imagination. In particular he took aim at the historical whitewashing of cowboys, and honored traditions within Mexican American communities that have historically not been regarded as “legitimate” art, such as the intricate spray-paint jobs that make lowriders unique. —P.M.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

“Over 30 years ago, when ‘craft vs. art’ was the most divisive issue in the arts, I discovered and established my ‘authentic artistic voice,’ [and] refocused my artistic studies from the paintbrush and pigments to ‘needle and thread,’” Consuelo Jimenez Underwood writes in her artist statement. Her shift to textiles has made her one of the most important Latinx artists working today. In most sewing, thread is used to bring together two swaths of fabric while remaining invisible; in Jimenez Underwood’s hands, thread is visible, evidence of all the tears that need suturing.

Jimenez Underwood was born in 1949 in Sacramento, California, the daughter of an undocumented field worker of Huichol origin. In the 1990s, she started her “Caution” series, consisting of woven-cotton signs depicting a three-person family running. These were based on an “immigrant crossing” sign that had become ubiquitous along the 405 Freeway near San Diego; when Jimenez Underwood first saw that sign, she was appalled by its brazenness and wanted to create art that would memorialize the countless anonymous people who had died crossing the US‒Mexico border. In some of her pieces the image is repeated many times over; in others it is enlarged and placed at the center, as in the caution tape–colored Run, Jane, Run! (2004). In these works, the artist often incorporated safety pins and barbed wire to convey the perils of crossing the border. In a later series she took her focus on the border a step farther, creating large-scale installations that represent the border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, making it appear as a chasm in the earth.

Other works make this commentary more abstract. Broken: 13 Undocumented Birds (2021) consists of six vertical strips of black-ish woven fabric with red squares affixed to them. The red here represents the red-tailed Texas blackbird, which migrates between the United States and Mexico annually; some birds no doubt collide with the border wall. People are not the only victims of human-made borders, Jimenez Underwood is saying. —M.D.

Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara)

Lady Pink, born Sandra Fabara, is a graffiti and mural artist who has significantly impacted the New York City art scene. Born in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964, Fabara moved with her family to the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York, when she was seven. She took up graffiti in 1979 when she used it to cope with the emotional pain of her boyfriend moving to Puerto Rico; she expressed her feelings by tagging his name across New York City. This experience sparked her passion for graffiti, leading her to sneak into subway and train yards, where she painted “Lady Pink” in bold, colorful letters on subway cars.

Between 1979 and 1985, Lady Pink connected with various established graffiti crews, and her distinctive style stood out in the male-dominated spaces of the emerging graffiti art scene. She gained wider recognition when she starred in the independent 1982 film Wild Style. As the mainstream art world became more interested in graffiti, Lady Pink began showing her canvas work in galleries. With this transition, her artwork became more political, combining themes of fantasy and spirituality with South American and Indigenous iconography. Lady Pink also focuses on issues affecting women and those living in U.S. urban environments. —M.E.R.

Robert “Cyclona” Legorreta

A key figure of the Chicano Art Movement, Robert Legorreta, better known as “Cyclona,” was one of the earliest proponents of performance art from a distinctly Chicanx and queer point of view. He has described the persona of Cyclona as itself a “political art piece” that was meant to not just shock but make people think, especially within the relatively conservative Chicano community of the time. Legorreta started making performance art in 1966, and he often collaborated with fellow artists like Mundo Meza and the collective ASCO, in particular Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro.

Among his most famous performances is Chicano Wedding: The Wedding of Maria Theresa Conchita con Chin Gow (aka The Marriage of Maria Conchita Theresa and Chingón), which he staged on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles, in 1971. In the photographs of that performance of a same-sex marriage, we see Cyclona decked out in a white wedding dress (with a bushy beard and white face makeup). Later, Cyclona posed for a full photo shoot at the beach. There’s joy, fierceness, anger, and a fuck-you sensibility coursing through the images. Coming decades before gay marriage would be legalized in the United States, the performance isn’t so much a cry for change as a comment on the absurdity of the entire concept of marriage.

Legorreta adopted the name “Cyclona” as a tribute to what “wild women” were called during the zoot suit era of Los Angeles, as well as the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz. “For me, it represents an attack on society, because a cyclone will come in and cleanse the earth,” he told Hyperallergic in 2023. “It’s not a bad thing. People want to freak, but then they rebuild. They’re still living there. I see it as a cleanser of Earth and a cleanser of society, and a cleanser of ignorance, and something to confront it.” —M.D.

Yolanda M. López

Beginning in the 1970s, Yolanda M. López was among the many Chicana artists who sought to reclaim the iconography of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her images in this mode are among her most enduring. Long seen in Mexican culture as the epitome of womanhood and femininity, familial and religious sacrifice, and domesticity, the Virgen was liberated from these expectations in López’s work. For her Guadalupe Triptych (1978), López depicted three generations of Chicanas—her grandmother, her mother, and herself—as the Virgen, each dressed in pink. Her grandmother and mother are shown with elements of sewing; here they are the hard-laboring pillars of their family. López, on the other hand, wears sneakers as she runs toward the future, the beneficiary of the sacrifices of the generations of women who came before. The work was immediately divisive, and López received bomb threats after it was shown. 

López, born in 1942 in San Diego, also created works that were more explicitly political, often as screen prints. In 1969 she created Free Los Siete, showing the seven men who had been falsely accused of killing a police officer, as part of a coalition advocating for their release. The figures are shown behind a hanging American flag, whose stripes have become the bars that incarcerate them. In 1978 she directly responded to the immigration policies of the Carter administration with Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?, showing an Indigenous man crumpling proposed immigration plans that sought to limit amnesty for undocumented immigrants already living in the United States. López, who died in 2022, once said, “My audience is still other Chicanos and people like myself. Basically my work is geared to making Chicanos think; that’s all it’s intended to do.” —M.D.

Guadalupe Maravilla

Guadalupe Maravilla is an artist, choreographer, and healer whose multidisciplinary art practice integrates drawing, sculpture, sound, and ritual to explore themes of migration, trauma, and healing. Born in El Salvador in 1976, Maravilla was just eight years old when he became part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the U.S. border in the 1980s, fleeing the Salvadoran civil war that lasted 12 years, from 1980 to 1992.

His art is deeply rooted in his history as a migrant and strongly influenced by immigrant communities’ experiences and culture, especially within the Latinx diaspora. His intricate sculptures, immersive installations, and community-based healing performances are intensely autobiographical, examining how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, as seen through his own experience with cancer. Maravilla continues to challenge and expand the boundaries of art, using his platform to address social and cultural issues while offering pathways to healing and resilience. —M.E.R.

Marisol

It is sometimes said that Marisol, born María Sol Escobar, was for a time the most famous Pop artist, more famous than Warhol. And while that may be true, it distracts and detracts from the truly revolutionary way that Marisol interpreted the tenets of Pop art and applied them to her art-making. Born in Paris to a Venezuelan family in 1930, she traveled between New York and Caracas frequently after her family returned to Venezuela in 1935. She studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and took classes in Paris, then moved to New York permanently in 1950.

While initially drawn to painting in an Abstract Expressionist mode when she arrived in New York, she began making sculptures four years later after a fateful trip to Mexico, where she first encountered pre-Columbian sculpture. She would eventually settle on a singular mode of working, creating assemblages out of wood, bronze, and found objects that appear as coy and humorous portraits. Among her most iconic are Mi Mama y Yo (1968), showing a young Marisol standing on a park bench as she holds an umbrella over her mother; Women and Dog (1963–64), featuring two multifaced women; The Jazz Wall (1963), depicting five musicians riffing; and Love (1962), of an upside-down glass cola bottle that’s stuck in a person’s mouth. In 1968 she represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale and was one of only four women to be included in Documenta 4.

Marisol died in 2016 and bequeathed her entire estate to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which had been the first museum to acquire her art when it purchased The Generals (1961–62) in 1962 and Baby Girl (1963) in 1964 from her back-to-back solo shows at the Stable Gallery in New York. In addition to her archive, library, photographs and slides, and collection of other artists’ work, the museum received more than 100 sculptures and more than 150 works on paper, making it the largest repository of Marisol’s art. (The museum organized a traveling retrospective of her work that began in 2023 in Montreal and made stops Toledo and Buffalo, before concluding in Dallas in 2025.) Of her work, Marisol once said, “I started doing something funny so I would be happier—and it worked.” —M.D.

Hiram Maristany

Nuyorican photographer and activist Hiram Maristany was known as a crucial documentarian of East Harlem/El Barrio in New York, having photographed the neighborhood and its residents for more than 50 years. Born in 1945 to Puerto Rican parents, Maristany picked up a camera in his teens and eventually became one of the founding members of the Young Lords Party (and its official photographer, documenting important actions like the Garbage Offensive in 1969). In addition to his political activism, Maristany championed the arts, and he became co-director of El Museo del Barrio in 1970.

Maristany’s black-and-white photographs from the late 1960s through the ’70s reveal a lively, tight-knit community invested in care and joy despite pervasive issues of disinvestment, neglect, and redlining. His photographs challenged racist mainstream portrayals of the neighborhood and make up an archive of power in numbers, documenting faces of determination and resilience. Until his death in 2022, Maristany was known as the “People’s Photographer of El Barrio,” demonstrating the radical potency of self-representation through images in circulation, ultimately celebrating the strength and self-determination of his community. —A.S.

Carlos Martiel

Carlos Martiel was born in Havana in 1989 and lives and works in New York. At the core of his practice is his body, which he often subjects to durational performances that comment on the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the present-day realities of racism and migration. His works, whether seen in person or viewed via documentation, are difficult to watch though hard to look away from—and that is precisely Martiel’s point. In 2022 at the Steven Turner gallery in Los Angeles, Martiel appeared naked with a noose around his neck as he was held up by various people—many of them white—to prevent him from asphyxiating. The performance, Cuerpo, recalls the lynchings that were often public spectacles attended by large groups of white people as a form of entertainment. Here, those in attendance had to work to prevent Martiel’s death. For Condecoración Martiel, Carlos (2014), the artist underwent surgery to remove a 6-centimeter-circumference piece of skin, which was later placed by an art conservator into a gold medal that mimic a type of medal given by the Cuban government to select citizens. The area where the skin was removed was stitched together, with a tattoo commemorating what had been taken.

In one performance in his ongoing “Monument” series, Martiel stood nude on a plinth at El Museo del Barrio for several hours covered in blood drawn from people who had been marginalized; in another he had his hands restrained behind his back by police handcuffs in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. “This work proposes a temporary monument to bodies that have historically been and continue to be discriminated, oppressed, and excluded by Eurocentric and patriarchal hegemonic discourses,” Martiel has written about the piece. —M.D.

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Daniel Joseph Martinez’s contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial catapulted him to the center of the culture wars. The piece was on its face simple enough, words printed onto the museum’s metal admission pins. But what he chose to print was a provocation: a sentence, broken into five parts, that read, “I can’t. Imagine. Ever Wanting. To Be. White.” Thinking about that work, officially titled Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members), 25 years after its debut, Martinez likened it to “an atom bomb that went off in the museum,” as it caused an uproar among critics, government officials, and the public alike. In many ways, the work is a commentary on how language can fall apart and the absurdity of the construction of identity through language. But there is also its literal meaning: Martinez said he wanted to flip the logic of whiteness on its head. As he wondered aloud to ARTnews: “Why do you think that whiteness is the pinnacle of success?”

That Whitney Biennial piece is indebted to Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, which is central to many of Martinez’s projects and series. In 1997, with three other artists, he founded Deep River, an artist-run space in downtown Los Angeles that presented the work of many artists of color at a time when the city’s mainstream art venues didn’t. Martinez’s own brown body, which he would cut, scar, dismember, and disfigure, would be the focal point of later works, including photographs that re-created history paintings, convulsing animatronic sculptures, and images of zombielike figures.

Violence and how it manifests in society also serve as a departure point for Martinez in his practice. Divine Violence (2008) is a room-size installation consisting of 125 gold paintings bearing the names of 172 groups that have used violence to enact their politics. They include the KKK, the CIA, the KGB, the Black Panthers, and the Jewish Defense League. But his magnus opus in this regard is The House That America Built (2004), which looks at the biographies of two seemingly unrelated people, Martha Stewart and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. To Martinez they represent the ideological extremes that any ordinary American could pursue: terrorism or hyper-capitalism. The installation takes it form as a replica of the cabin that Kaczynski built in Montana, split in two and painted according to the seasonal palettes of Stewart’s interior paint collection. In Martinez’s work, no one is spared critique. —M.D.

Leslie Martinez

Born in 1985 in McAllen, Texas, and now based in Dallas, Leslie Martinez lived in New York for 15 years after moving there to attend Cooper Union. Around this time, Martinez read Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s iconic book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which has informed much of their thinking as an artist. “Reading her helped me understand. I’m not easy to categorize on many levels, in regard to gender queerness and culture. So she’s been hugely influential in my formation and understanding of what the border means to me,” Martinez told W magazine in 2023.

Martinez is best known for creating vast abstractions that swirl with thinned-out blues, yellows, pinks, and purples that gradually fade into dark grays and washy blacks. At the core of their practice is the goal of being zero-waste, with all of Martinez’s materials, like studio rags, scraps of canvas, and dried paint, incorporated into the final result. Their 2023 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, for which Martinez created three large-scale works, drew a connection between Martinez’s zero-waste approach and rasquachismo, the make-do sensibility present in the aesthetics of Chicanx art as coined by Tomás Ybarra-Fausto. And while they focus on creating abstract works, Martinez incorporates into their canvases concerns around contemporary issues like transphobia and the right-wing policies that have codified it into law across the country. Through abstraction, they are able to create spaces that exist beyond binaries and can be places of exploration, joy, and even confusion. “The absence of the easily categorizable can be a form of terror for some people. And for others—like myself—it can be a form of liberation and power to play with uncomfortable feelings of confusion,” they told W. —M.D.

Patrick Martinez

Patrick Martinez works with a range of materials, not limited to ceramic cake roses, tile, and window security bars sourced in and around Los Angeles, where he lives. He creates landscape and sheet cake paintings, and his work in neon is especially evocative of the Southern California enclaves that inspire it; bold and designed to be viewed from passing cars, it transforms the ubiquitous neon sign advertising goods and services into a platform for messages that are often politically potent. One such sign, shown in 2022 at Art Basel Miami Beach, visually nods to those displayed in the windows of palm readers and psychics while turning the symbolism on its head. It reads: “I don’t see an American dream. I see an American nightmare.” —P.M.

Yvette Mayorga

There’s something absolutely sumptuous about the maximalist artwork of Yvette Mayorga, a rising artist born in 1991 in Moline, Illinois, and based in Chicago. Adopting hues of pink as her primary palette, Mayorga builds up her paintings in thick impasto, which at times gives the effect of frosting on a cake. Her paintings look to art history, filtering Rococo portrait painter François Boucher, 17th-century vanitas paintings, porcelain vases, and more into depictions of contemporary Latinx life, with a 1990s nostalgia flair. In one, a young woman in elaborate French court dress relaxes in her bedroom, scrolling on her phone with a toy truck, horse calendar, and laptop nearby. Other works agglomerate iconography of Hello Kitty, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, chanclas (slippers), Tweety Bird, little green army men, McDonald’s fries, and sets of long acrylic nails. Mayorga has also scaled her tableaux into the third dimension, creating decked-out sculptures and a room-size installation for an exhibition at the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, titled Bedroom After 15th (2022). Each element in the installation, decorated with Rococo-inspired, Mayorga-designed wallpaper, is coated in pink, including a queen bed, backpack, handbag, painted French porcelain figures, a miniature carousel horse, a glitching laptop, and a Disney TV. At one point a Selena song plays. —M.D.

Michael Menchaca

Encompassing digital animation, screen printing, and multimedia video installation, Michael Menchaca’s works satirize the colonial impulses of contemporary corporate tech. Menchaca was born in 1985 in San Antonio, Texas. In their densely layered colorful works, they borrow from a range of cultural signifiers, including pre-Columbian codices, Big Tech logos, internet cats, emojis, and GIF memes. The artist uses these icons liberally and repeatedly in maximalist compositions, evoking the accumulation of browsing windows on a computer screen or the overwhelming density of digital advertising in everyday life.

In their series “Wild Wild Web3” (2021–present), Menchaca presents a scathing critique of Big Tech companies, correlating their “entrepreneurship” with the gold lust and greed of early colonial pioneers who decimated Indigenous communities and exploited natural resources. Through this comparative gesture, Menchaca highlights corporate tech’s predatory mining of data for the sake of capital and profit while infusing iconography specific to their own Xicano identity. Other series, “La Raza Cósmica 20XX” (2019) and “La Raza Cósmica 20X5” (2023–present), reference José Vasconcelos’s 20th-century theory on mestizaje while also pointing to the racial anxieties of early colonial Casta paintings. —A.S.

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948 to Ignacio Mendieta, a lawyer who had worked for the FBI during World War II, and Raquel Mendieta, a chemistry teacher. Her father initially supported Fidel Castro but broke with him in 1960. The following year, at age 12, Ana was sent with her sister to the United States as part of Operation Pedro Pan, a secret program that brought about 14,000 Cuban children to Miami. The sisters later moved between orphanages and foster homes in Florida and Iowa. The separation from her family and homeland profoundly influenced Mendieta’s art.

Mendieta is best known for her “Silueta Series,” a body of work that involves earth art, performance art, and photography. In this series, Mendieta used her body or its outline in various natural environments, often employing materials like blood, earth, fire, and water to create ephemeral works that explored themes of identity, displacement, feminism, and the connection between the body and nature. Her work is understood as a powerful commentary on the human condition, cultural identity, and the female experience. Despite her untimely death at the age of 36, Mendieta left behind an extensive body of work, much of which remained undiscovered until later years. Following her passing, her work gained widespread recognition, featuring in prominent exhibitions such as a 1987 survey at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and a traveling retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., in 2004. —M.E.R.

Amalia Mesa-Bains

Amalia Mesa-Bains is a distinguished Chicana artist, scholar, and cultural critic whose work has significantly contributed to contemporary art, mainly through its exploration of Mexican American and Chicano traditions. Born in 1943 in Santa Clara, California, Mesa-Bains is renowned for her mixed-media installations that often incorporate traditional Mexican religious and domestic objects, creating spaces that reflect the intersections of culture, identity, and spirituality. Mesa-Bains’s installations are deeply rooted in the concept of altarismo, a practice that involves creating altars as a form of remembrance and cultural expression. Her work often addresses themes such as memory, loss, cultural identity, and the role of women in Mexican and Chicano culture. Through her art, she seeks to honor and preserve her community’s cultural practices while engaging in broader dialogues about social justice and representation.

In addition to her artistic practice, Mesa-Bains is an influential educator and writer. She has contributed extensively to the discourse on Chicano art and has been a mentor to many younger artists within the Latinx community. In the 1990s, she introduced the concept of domesticana as a Chicana feminist response to the male-dominated cultural practice of rasquachismo. While rasquachismo embodies a spirit of defiance and creative resourcefulness, often associated with making the most out of limited materials, domesticana reinterprets this inventiveness through the lens of working-class women’s experiences. By focusing on domestic life, domesticana challenges traditional gender roles and highlights working-class women’s strength and resilience through inventive and often subversive expressions of femininity.

Mesa-Bains’s work has been exhibited in major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and she has received numerous awards for her contributions to the arts, including a MacArthur Fellowship; she is the first (and thus far the only) Chicana visual artist bestowed that honor. Mesa-Bains, who was the subject of a traveling retrospective in 2023, continues to be a vital figure in the art world, using her work to challenge and expand the boundaries of cultural representation in contemporary art. —M.E.R.

Joiri Minaya

Part of a younger cohort of artists, Joiri Minaya, born in 1990 in New York but raised in the Dominican Republic, has already established herself as a leading voice of her generation, particularly when it comes to video, installation, and performance. In one of her earliest video works, Siboney (2014), Minaya paints a wall to resemble a dark blue tropical print; at one point, she turns to face the camera and says, “I see the way you look at me, but I’m not here for you.” In her “Containers” series (2015–20), we see women wearing tropical-print body suits that also cover their faces as they recline in nature. Their bodies being on display in this way points to a central concern in Minaya’s practice, the objectification of Caribbean women and the colonization and continued exploitation of the Caribbean, both of which, she says, implicate the white male gaze.

Tropical prints, used as fabrics and wallpapers, recur throughout Minaya’s work as a comment on how this imagery has been used to instantly communicate notions of leisure in the West while hiding the insidious systems that have created the tourism industry in the Caribbean, where locals are commonly serving foreigners. Minaya followed the “Containers” series with “Divergences” (2020–22), in which the women shed their tropical print bodysuits, as a way to claim agency of these depictions of Caribbean women while also insisting on a continued form of opacity. —M.D.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz

As an artist, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, born in Brooklyn 1934, is best known for his contributions to the Destruction Art movement during the late 1950s and ’60s. Among his earliest pieces in this mode of working is Cowboys and Indians (1957), for which he cut 16mm film strips from various Western movies using a tomahawk, selected the resulting fragments at random, and compiled them into a film whose segments at times were reversed or upside down. Other, related works include his most famous series, “Archaeological Finds”(1961–65), which shows the remains of various destroyed objects like couches and mattresses, meant to be hung on the wall like paintings. The series’s title conveys the idea that Montañez Ortiz excavated the final forms of these objects from their original incarnations and that they represent the ruins of modern society.

Montañez Ortiz’s work became more performative as the years went on. He most famously would destroy a piano in front of an audience over the course of several years. The ruins of one such piano, Henny-Penny Piano Destruction Concert (1966–98), was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles after a final destructive performance in 1998.

In addition to his work as an artist, Montañez Ortiz was an activist as a member of the Art Workers Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group, which aimed to press mainstream museums, like MoMA, to exhibit the work of artists of color and women artists, as well as to take a clear stance against the Vietnam War. In 1969 Montañez Ortiz founded El Museo del Barrio with a coalition of Puerto Rican artists, activists, and educators, with the aim of teaching younger generations about Puerto Rican history and culture. The museum, located in the historic Puerto Rican enclave of East Harlem, would become a locus for the exhibition of Puerto Rican and later Latinx art, giving many artists their earliest shows when they were still marginalized by mainstream museums. El Museo honored Montañez Ortiz with a career retrospective in 2022. —M.D.

Delilah Montoya

Delilah Montoya is a Chicana artist who was born in 1955 in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, by an Anglo-American father and Latina mother. She is recognized for her deep exploration of Chicana identity and innovative approach to printmaking and photography. Montoya credits the political edge of her work to her upbringing, which exposed her to key social movements like the Brown Berets and the civil rights movement. The struggles of Mexican migrant workers were particularly influential to Montoya, who identified as a Chicana as a teenager.

Montoya’s most well-known work, La Guadalupana (1998), prominently features the religious icon of the Virgen de Guadalupe. At the heart of this installation is a striking black-and-white photograph depicting a shirtless, handcuffed man named Felix Martínez. With his back turned to the viewer, he displays a vivid tattoo of the Virgin. This symbol of the Virgin represents redemption and thus serves as a powerful critique of prisons and the treatment of Latinos by law enforcement. The image of the Virgin resonates not only within Chicano and Mexican American culture but also within a broader Latinx Catholic community.

Montoya adeptly integrates traditional photographic techniques with mixed media, composites, printmaking, and sculptural elements, continuously pushing boundaries and creating conceptually challenging pieces. Her mixed-media installations, frequently incorporating iconic religious symbols, demand active participation of viewers, tapping into their cultural, historical, and spiritual knowledge while engaging their senses. —M.E.R.

Ray Navarro

Ray Navarro, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 at 26, may best be remembered for dressing up as Jesus during the 1989 ACT UP demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, protesting the response of the Catholic Church, specifically that of New York City Cardinal John O’Connor, to the AIDS crisis. The appearance of the Simi Valley, California–born artist as Jesus is preserved in a video made for the ACT UP–affiliated artist collective DIVA TV, of which Navarro was a founding member. In addition to intoning about queer people wanting to go to heaven too, Navarro is humorous in the video, while also advocating for safer sex practices to stem the spread of HIV. At one point, he says, “Make sure your second coming is a safe one. Use condoms.”

Navarro’s final work and certainly his most poignant still embodies his wry sense of humor. In Equipped (1990), a triptych done in collaboration with Zoe Leonard and completed two weeks before his death, we see three black-and-white photographs of medical devices that Navarro was forced to use as his body deteriorated: a wheelchair (upside-down in the image), a folding walker (tossed on its side), and a cane (leaning against a wall, with its handle on the floor). Beneath each image is a caption printed on a placard: HOT BUTT, STUD WALK, and THIRD LEG, respectively. Even in communicating the pain he was experiencing in his final days, Navarro found levity in the situation. There can still be joy where there is suffering, he seems to tell us. —M.D.

Las Nietas de Nonó

Puerto Rico–based sisters mulowayi and mapenzi nonó are known as Las Nietas de Nonó. Their performance works scrutinize the systems of racist violence that affect Black people in Puerto Rico, including incarceration, displacement, and austerity policy. In dreamlike performances that evoke collective memories, ancestral knowledge, and kinship, Las Nietas de Nonó also incorporate movement, sound, and video to weave together fragments that make up a sensorial whole. In No More Tears (2021), they include correspondence with their own incarcerated cousins and attempt to fill gaps of knowledge caused by racial violence. In another performance, Ilustraciones de la Mecánica (2016), they examine the colonial legacies of medical violence that have been inflicted on Black women specifically.

More recently, the sisters have been working at the intersection of performance and activism, specifically through La Conde, a community-led design project in their neighborhood of San Antón in Carolina, Puerto Rico. La Conde attempts to revitalize abandoned school grounds that were closed due to fiscal austerity and governmental neglect. In their interdisciplinary practice, Las Nietas de Nonó celebrate social relationships of care and healing that facilitate genuine human connection and action. —A.S.

Eamon Ore-Giron

The geometry of Eamon Ore-Giron’s abstract paintings transcends the merely formal, to become a meditation on the history of these      forms across disparate cultures and practices. Recalling the work of artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, his paintings draw on patterns found in astral charts, Incan jewelry, and Russian Suprematism, among other sources. The artist’s own music or other sound design elements often accompany the artworks in galleries. Evoking both the infinite possibilities of self-propagating geometric forms and the constrictions inherent in them, Ore-Giron’s work also spurs viewers to reflect on how that dichotomy might be present in their lives. —P.M.

Pepón Osorio

Sculptor and installation artist Pepón Osorio was born in 1955 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1975 he relocated to the South Bronx in New York City, where he attended Lehman College, earning a degree in sociology. His work challenges the stereotypes and misconceptions that influence our perceptions of social institutions and human relationships. Osorio’s collaborative works emerge from his deep engagement with communities—whether residents of urban ethnic neighborhoods, social service workers, or children in foster care. His art tackles serious issues such as prison life, domestic violence, AIDS, and poverty.

Osorio is renowned for his intricate and dynamic recreations of indoor spaces, spanning from personal home settings like bedrooms and living rooms to communal areas such as barbershops and courtrooms. He creates these installations using found objects as well as items he customizes or makes himself. By exploring challenging themes like race and gender, death and survival, and alienation and belonging, Osorio encourages his audiences to rethink their assumptions and biases. —M.E.R.

Postcommodity

The interdisciplinary art collective Postcommodity includes Cristóbal Martínez (of Genizaro, Manito, and Xicano heritage) and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee). Their works encapsulate the politics of the borderland as well as the industrialization and militarization of the United States under capitalism. Informed by the artists’ Indigenous worldviews, Postcommodity’s videos, music, and sculptural installations challenge the imposed hegemonic assumptions about our environment that appear in the U.S. Southwest landscape.

The collective’s works include a monumental pyramid made of hazardous waste barrels (South by North Is Also North by South, 2021); a two-mile-long fence made of balloons along the U.S.-Mexico border (Repellent Fence, 2015); and a multichannel installation using surveillance video footage monitoring toxic dust clouds from the dried-up lake bed of Owens Valley, California (Going to Water, 2021). These works allude to environmental catastrophe and its intersections with xenophobia, architecture, and technology while also invoking protective ancestral knowledge systems like the colors of the Indigenous medicine wheel. Through minimalist installations of sculptures, video, and sound, Postcommodity examines the accelerated, complex constellations of violence enacted upon us in our contemporary world, encouraging critical thinking and heightened perception. —A.S.

Lee Quiñones

On Puerto Rican artist Lee Quiñones’s website, there’s a tab labeled Subways. The New York City MTA is where Quiñones cut his teeth as a graffiti artist in the 1970s and ’80s. Once derided as vandalism, the spray-painted art that Quiñones and his contemporaries created on the subway cars has since become the visual signifier of hip-hop culture, one of the most important pop phenomena of the last century. Quiñones, whose work has appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art and other institutions in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, is still pushing boundaries within the medium, mining the ways that graffiti art speaks to the most urgent issues of our time. —P.M.

Sandy Rodriguez

Central to Sandy Rodriguez’s practice is excavation of the histories, both distant and near, of the peoples who have called the Americas home and of the materials they have used to make their visual culture. One of these materials is amate paper, which has been made in Mexico since pre-Columbian times. Amate paper was central to the records and communications of the Aztecs, who considered it sacred and also used it in ritual; after colonization, its creation and use were outlawed. Onto this paper Rodriguez paints maps and drawings of flora with hand-processed pigments made from the earth, insects, and plants native to the Americas. “This makes my maps not simply a representation of the place but objects that serve as an active embodiment of their constituent parts,” she has said of her work.

Rodriguez’s approach to research is evident in a piece commissioned by the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in 2021 that was a part of a rehanging of its American art galleries. Titled YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles,the work presents a history-spanning map of Los Angeles from multiple points of view.

Her ongoing Codex Rodríguez–Mondragón, begun in 2017, synthesizes her approach to history in its various depictions of California, the Southwest, Mexico, and the borderlands. (Rodriguez herself was born near the US–Mexico border, in National City, California, in 1975.) The project draws inspiration from the 16th-century Florentine Codex, a 12-volume encyclopedia made by Fray Bernadino de Sahagun and Indigenous artists and writers whose names are now unknown. The makers of that codex sought to map out everything the Spanish conquistadors found when they arrived in the Americas: the local traditions and cosmologies of the Aztecs, the native plants and animals, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico (according to their version of events). In creating her own codex, Rodriguez aims to reclaim this violent documentation and present a new view of this land from her own perspective. —M.D.

Frank Romero

Chicano artist Frank Romero was born in 1941 in East Los Angeles and grew up in the culturally mixed, middle-class community of Boyle Heights. Bold, colorful, and energetic scenes of daily life in Los Angeles characterize Romero’s paintings, which feature iconic images like lowriders, palm trees, and freeways. Romero’s paintings mix elements of pop art with traditional Mexican and Chicano motifs to produce unique visual experiences. One of his most iconic paintings is Death of Rubén Salazar (1986), in which Romero interprets the death and legacy of a civil rights activist and writer for the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s. In the aftermath of a significant Chicano protest in East L.A. in 1970 against the Vietnam War, police fired tear-gas canisters into the Silver Dollar Bar and Café, where Salazar and two others were struck and killed. Romero pays homage to this event in a painting that encapsulates his unique style of using bright pastel colors with contrasting hues.

As a member of the influential art collective Los Four, alongside artists Carlos Almaraz, Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, and Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez Luján, Romero played a key role in bringing Chicano art into the mainstream and advocating for its recognition in major art institutions. The collective was crucial in establishing a distinct Chicano aesthetic and addressing issues of cultural representation and identity. —M.E.R.

Guadalupe Rosales

The Los Angeles–based artist Guadalupe Rosales has a robust and varied artistic practice encompassing sculpture, drawing, video, and sound; her works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions. Rosales is an archivist as well of an ever-evolving image bank that lives primarily on social media: Her project, “Map Pointz,” is named after the ingenious way that partygoers shared clandestine meeting spots for the raves and ditch parties that burgeoned in Latinx enclaves around Southern California in the early 1990s. Through documentation of the photos, flyers, zines, and other ephemera that were critical to sustaining these underground scenes, Rosales highlights how subcultures come together and, ultimately, how they are remembered. —P.M.

Shizu Saldamando

Shizu Saldamando is a portrait artist who grew up in San Francisco, and paints in oil on planks of wood. Working in a traditional medium, Saldamando immortalizes people who, historically, would likely never have sat for portraits, including Latinx punk rockers and friends en route to a David Bowie dance party. The Japanese Mexican artist also works in sculpture, ballpoint pen, and tattoo art. But it is her distinctive, hyperreal paintings of members of LA subcultures that led to a 2013 show at the Vincent Price Art Museum, and inclusion in group shows such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s seminal 2008 exhibition, “Phantom Sightings.” —P.M.

Zilia Sánchez

Born in Havana in 1926, Zilia Sánchez has lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, since the early 1970s. Beginning in the ’50s, while still living in Cuba, she began working with abstraction, focusing on different ways to abstract the line. She left Cuba in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro came to power, and spent a decade traveling extensively in Europe and living in New York. During that time she began developing a mode of working that would become her signature: Her shaped canvases undulate from the two-dimensional plane into the third, jutting toward the viewer. Others are formed by two canvases joined together with a crevasse at the work’s center. Painted in pastel tones or muted hues of blues, grays, pinks, blacks, and whites, Sánchez’s forms at times can resemble breasts, lips, or vaginas. They are sensual experiments with formalism.

In one memorable video work, from her series “Soy Isla: Compréndelo y retírate” (I Am an Island: Understand and Retreat”), Sánchez casts one of her shaped canvases into the crashing waves on a San Juan beach. Titled The Encounter—Offering or Return (2000), this performance is an offering to nature, giving her back a new, created form of beauty. As the surf batters the painting and pushes it back toward the sand, Sánchez’s offering becomes a humorously futile task. —M.D.

Teddy Sandoval

Though his work is still underappreciated, Teddy Sandoval was a locus of LA’s Chicanx queer art scene for some 25 years, until his death in 1995 from AIDS-related complications. Working across painting and drawing, sculpture, mail and Xerox art, and performance, Sandoval sought to create biting works that were as much social commentary on being queer and Chicano in LA at the time as they were riotously funning satires of the world that sought to marginalize him.

Born in 1949, Sandoval is best known for depictions of faceless, mustachioed men, which he began in the late 1970s; these portraits took on new resonance as the AIDS crisis heightened in the ’80s and ’90s, preserving the memory of the gay men of Sandoval’s generation who were slowly being erased. The collaborative aspects of his practice included a 1978 performance with Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro called La Historia de Frida Kahlo (with Sandoval dressed as Kahlo), mail correspondence with Ray Johnson, and contributing to Joey Terrill’s Homeboy Beautiful zine. His more playful works come in the form of his series of small ceramic penis-shaped chili peppers, and his Chili Chaps (1978), leather chaps adorned with ceramic chilis and collaged images like the racist stereotype of the “sleeping Mexican.” Working in a conceptual mode, Sandoval created the Butch Gardens School of Art, named after a queer bar in LA, which parodied the idea of having an art school or movement while also providing avenues for exhibition and collaboration for Sandoval and his cohort. —M.D.

Edra Soto

For more than a decade, Edra Soto has been making her “GRAFT” series of architectural constructions and installations, which draw from motifs that are commonplace in buildings and fences in Puerto Rico. These motifs have their own complex history, initially inspired by symbols used by Yoruba people who were forcibly brought to Puerto Rico—a history long masked as a way to erase the contributions of Black people to Puerto Rican visual culture. For Soto, born in Puerto Rico in 1971, the project also serves as a way for her to tell her own story of migration to Chicago in 1998. Their ubiquity caused her to start “thinking about the cultural value of these motifs,” she told ARTnews in 2023. Over the years, “GRAFT” has taken many forms, ranging from small wall-hung pieces to bus shelters in Chicago to towering installations in museum galleries; one piece was partially submerged in a water feature of the Chicago Botanic Garden. For an iteration at the Whitney Museum, Soto embedded viewfinders into the cutouts of her architectural structures; when viewers got up close, they would see various images culled from Soto’s photographic archives from her travel. (Her latest iteration is on view in New York’s Central Park through August 2025, as part of a commission for the Public Art Fund.)

Another major series by Soto is “Open 24 Hours,” begun in 2016. For this, she gathers empty liquor bottles that she finds in Chicago’s Garfield Park, near her home. She records the date and label of each one before removing the labels and washing the bottles. She then arranges them into still-life installations, which at times have been augmented by tables and chairs to serve as a gathering spot for the public. —M.D.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey

Through a performance practice that involves interpretations of sound through dance and gestural mark-making, Awilda Sterling-Duprey creates resonant works that experimentally weave between genres. Born in 1947 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the artist has had a decades-long engagement with performance, drawing, and painting that is lauded internationally.

In the late 1970s Sterling-Duprey pursued a master’s degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and studied experimental dance under the tutelage of Trisha Brown. She later returned to Puerto Rico and leaned into her embodied practice, creating works that leave a palpable trace of process, a material residue of memory and of longing. This effect is often generated through her use of color, but also through sensorial feeling and touch. To heighten this, the artist has made some works while blindfolded. Her most well-known, …blindfolded (…con los ojos vendados), was created for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. In this work, she responds to instrumental jazz by moving colorful oil sticks across black paper hung on two adjacent walls, marking the surface with longer strokes and dots that correlate her body to the music. Fragmentation is visible in the improvisational jazz that often acts as the score for Sterling-Duprey’s actions, and also in the nonrepresentational, gestural line work that appears in her drawings and paintings. —A.S.

Joey Terrill

Since the 1970s, Joey Terrill, born in 1955 in Los Angeles, has been making art that reflects the specific point of view of being both Chicano and queer. In making his paintings, Terrill has drawn his inspiration widely, from Pop art and popular culture to the work of El Teatro Campesino and ASCO to Ray Johnson and the mail art movement. Another influence is the work of Sister Corita Kent, who left an indelible impact on the art department of LA’s Immaculate Heart College, which Terrill attended in the ’70s. One of Terrill’s more well-known series is “Chicanos Invade New York” (1981): three panels depicting the artist—at the Guggenheim on the hunt for burritos, making tortillas, and learning about John Lennon’s assassination—during his months spent in the city in 1981. The series recently entered MoMA’s collection.

That trip to New York would mark a turning point in Terrill’s practice as the world, the art world in particular, was soon devastated by the AIDS crisis. During this period, Terrill hosted fabulous Halloween parties at his home for LA’s creative Chicano community. He documented these parties in photographs that he then adapted to paintings; as friends died, they became records of a community decimated. Among Terrill’s most iconic works from this period is Remembrance (1989), showing two young men holding bunches of birds of paradise on their way to a grave site. (Terrill is also a lifelong AIDS activist, having worked as the director of global advocacy and partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation for more than 20 years.)

In addition to his work in painting, Terrill created a two-issue zine called Homeboy Beautiful in the late 1980s. The publication poked fun at the machismo present in Chicano culture and how that both led to internalized homophobia and kept many gay men in the closet. Terrill also created the iconic “Maricón” and “Malfora” shirts for the 1976 Pride Parade in LA as a way to assert a Chicanx presence within the queer community. —M.D.

Patssi Valdez

Within Patssi Valdez’s domestic landscapes, floors appear to move in psychedelic swirls, like something out of Alice in Wonderland, and chairs look as if they might fly off at any moment, as though drawn by a different gravitational force. By design, nothing about her work is static; it’s vertiginous and, as she’s said in the past, meant “to evoke a feeling that people just left the room.” Having grown up in East Los Angeles, Valdez was the sole female member of the influential conceptual performance collective, ASCO. Within and outside the group, Valdez’s work has taken multiple forms, including set design, installation, performance, and photography, all of it rooted in her singularly avant-garde sensibility. —P.M.

Vincent Valdez

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1977, Vincent Valdez is celebrated for his large-scale, representational paintings that draw inspiration from the traditions of painting, muralism, and cinema. Among his most iconic works is Kill the Pachuco Bastard! (2000), which vividly depicts the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles—a five-day period of intense violence in which U.S. servicemen targeted Mexican American youth distinguished by their zoot suits.

Valdez continues to create monumental paintings and silkscreens, with works like “The Strangest Fruit” series (2013) and The City (2015–16) addressing universal sociopolitical struggles, including racial violence and urban decay. Valdez’s paintings are powerful depictions of American identity, confronting issues of injustice and inequity while instilling empathy and humanity in his subjects. —M.E.R.

Sarah Zapata

Sarah Zapata’s textile works don’t just hang passively on gallery walls: They twine around columns, are stitched into benches and, on occasion, even lie embroidered on the floor. The Peruvian American artist, who was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and now calls Brooklyn, New York, home, painstakingly weaves her pieces by hand, a process that lends them a meditative quality. Exhibited at the likes of Museo Mario Testino in Lima, Peru, they take from traditional arpilleras,the Chilean and Peruvian woven tapestries that tell stories and often serve as a call to arms. —P.M.