Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

Artists, lawmakers, and the media continue to grapple with a category problem that inadequately defines Latine/a/o/x experience as well as the cultural contradictions encapsulated in an archive of visual practices that spans well over five decades. If we look closely at an intergenerational cross section of artists and their work, we can begin to compare multimedia narratives and geographical particulars, encouraging a meta-historical view.

The colonization of the Caribbean and Americas, together with its present-day vestiges, endures as a persistent theme for Latinx artists who seek to address the social and ecological catastrophes that constitute the contemporary condition.

This talk considers visual encounters unique to Latinx lifeways but that contest US American geopolitics and the uneven distributions of modern life. A corpus of Latinx art can be seen as a crossway of intersecting cultural and political attributes—intimacies in dislocation that inflect a dissenting perspective and overturn the casual or cursory cultural account.